It is not the first time that I am going to comment on it, but the landscape that we have left in the territory over the years continues to draw attention beyond the Pyrenees. In The waste of infrastructure in Spain, in the foreign media we have already highlighted some examples of reports in different countries that covered halfway between indignation and surprise the waste ininfrastructuresin our country. It is not for less. The case of the airports, for example, is one of the great classics. They say that the model of urban development to cement base will no longer return. Who knows. The municipal legislature has only just begun.
Equally unheard of is the problem of vacant houses and large urban developments that are today ghost cities. Faced with the drop in domestic demand, the government is struggling to find buyers abroad; Today it seems that Beatriz Contador is trying to endorse this liability to potential Russian buyers. A few weeks ago they also tried to attract the British market, an attempt that was met with a curious and who knows if malicious boycott campaign by some media such as The Telegraph, which raised doubts about the stability of the property system in Spain, appealing to the defenselessness suffered by many British homeowners in the area and which their property is threatened by the Coastal Law:
Telegraph Expat is launching a campaign in support of the hundreds of thousands of British and other expats who have fallen victim to urban corruption and the confused state of property law in Spain.
A housing stock difficult to quantify, but very easy to visualize. Taking a walk through the outskirts of many cities is the best statistical operation that can be done. Or, if not, a walk through Google Earth is also useful, as Business Insider has done at Amazing Satellite Images Of Spanish Ghost Towns — Abandoned Since The Housing Crash. These are only a few examples, because I am sure that each reader could add at least two or three cases that they know of from their closest territory. Jesús Encinar did it a few weeks ago with the case of Ávila, but we could continue with the corridor of La Sagra, that great space for urban development that a few years ago was sold as the most explosive development in all of Europe, as if it were going to bring something good.
“We must recover the neighborhoods ghost”, was highlighted in an interview with the new dean of COAM. Surely. But it will take something more. A war economy -if we get tragic- to think about the urbanism of the crisis. The urban planning legislation and, above all, the social and institutional awareness about what urban planning means, are designed to grow, an urban planning that can only be expansive. And this no longer touches. It touches on an enormous process of urban reconversion, an urban agenda of the small and cheap, an adaptive urbanism that allows us, not only not to grow, but to find formulas to take advantage of all this liability.