Land-use planning and urban form in Catalonia. The case of Girona region (1979-2006)

Spain’s entry into the European Union (EU) in 1986 marked the beginning of a new growth cycle based on the tertiary sector and real estate. This stimulated the so-called «housing bubble», one of the most distinctive aspects of the Spanish urban model in the context of globalisation. Its causes were specialisation in residential tourism, the reduction in the number of persons per household and the middle-class attitude to housing as an investment. Despite successive increases in prices, demand was sustained thanks to easily acquired mortgages. Planning policy also facilitated this irresponsible dynamic. On the one hand, local authorities competed to increase the supply of land and attract potential investors. In addition, regional administrations, including that in Catalonia, failed to implement regional land planning instruments. The inevitable result, given the potential earnings from development projects, was a huge expansion in the urbanised area and a lack of co-ordinated planning. Thus, urban sprawl —the phenomenon of dispersion, reduction in density and separation of uses in the advanced capitalist city— was an expression of particular factors related to planning and the economic and social structure. Various international authors have also shown that the newly global urban form has displayed new morphological categories, portraying both the changing location patterns of economic activities and residence in the postindustrial city as well as traces of post-modern culture. This paper is a summarisation of a doctoral thesis aimed at analysing the urbanisation process in the Girona region between 1979 (the year of incorporation of the democratic councils) and 2006, the year immediately prior to the recession. This area, located northeast of Barcelona, offers a significant illustration of the transformations that have affected Catalonia and the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The study focused on the analysis of zone development plans, the documents that regulate zoning under the local development framework in each new area of developable land. The interpretation of the results was based on two Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles N.o 65 2014, págs. 427-431