Urban Disaster: Spanish Cities Before and After the Real Estate Boom
Nación Rotonda is an online interactive catalog visually documenting Spanish urban disasters of recent decades. Each tab of the project compares two aerial photographs of a town taken before and after the real estate boom.
Photographic-flyovers have taken place across Spain since 1957, but not all of the resulting photography and information is readily available. National and local programmes maintain their own aerial photography, covering different places at different times, publishing (or not) the photos using different formats. The result is a mixed bag of partial databases which together do not cover the whole territory or even every year. Searching for photos for our project has on more than one occasion ended in a dead end, usually in the form of administrative silence.
The size of our project has also been a challenge. Spain covers more than 500,000 km², and though there are ‘only’ 8,000 municipalities, many of them contain hamlets, villages and other neighbourhoods, meaning there are really 152,207 population units across the country (INE 2012). We systematically combed some areas like the coast and the crowns of big cities, but to complete the project we’ve relied on existing resources in our network, such as the collective 6000km.org or the suggestions that our readers send through our website, Facebook or Twitter.
The question we asked ourselves when launching the project was: What constitutes an ‘urban disaster’? Massive urbanization without a single house built there seems like no benefit to anyone – except when it sold the land. A highway that goes nowhere is also a clear failure. But other examples are less black and white. But does that matter? Are we documenting disaster or is this a competition? It is a debate we frequently have.
Whilst documenting this project, we found 50 examples in Spanish provinces which show that no area has been saved from the property development bubble. However, and as we suspected, the impact has not been the same everywhere.
The font size indicates the number of entries per province
The growth of Spanish regions in recent decades has been shaped by a variety of factors: The size of the population before the boom, the location of production sites or their suitability as a tourist destination and second home developments, and regional legislation that essentially encouraged the process. These factors combined has resulted in growth occurring mainly on the Mediterranean coast and in Madrid and its adjoining provinces.
So what sort of trends are we seeing in Spain’s urban disaster?
In urban and regional planning, generic solutions should not be used. However, the Spanish geography patterns we’ve documented show many common trends applied regardless of planning, climate, topography, social fabric or pre-existing urban fabric.
The first dominate planning type is streets of several traffic lanes in each direction, with roundabouts and large setbacks forming a dispersed city that favours car use over public transport.
A second generic typology is communities of single-family second homes, which typically tend to be gated communities.
Xaló, Alicante
It’s quite typical for gated community developments to be located around a golf course. Though there are examples to this ‘pre-bubble’, this is a relatively new trend. Indeed, the number of golf courses in Spain has doubled in just ten years, concentrated in regions that have many hours of sunshine a year, but with questionable water supply.
El Caracolero, Murcia
Apart from the application of generic planning models, we’ve also found common features in developments that we believe constitute malpractice. The newly-urbanized areas in many Spanish regions often meet the boundaries of existing farms. However, the approach to the area’s planning is so different that there is a significant break between the new developments and the existing city it is expanding upon. This results in a lack of connection between old and new.
By not following existing urban models, there is a lack of scale and proportion in the expansion of many Spanish regions. This can be attributed, at least in part, to incorrect growth forecasts. The challenge for cities in Spain is how to come back from this urban disaster.
