486046904_f86668fe9bI read the following in The World:

The City Council and the Community of Madrid have found a non-commercial outlet for the more than 11,000 square meters of the Puerta de Toledo Market in the Centro district. After more than a decade in which the Community has unsuccessfully tried to make the space profitable, both administrations have agreed to cede the market to the Carlos III University. The institution, which has campuses in Colmenarejo, Getafe and Leganés, will thus have its first university center within the city in the next 50 years.

(…)

What was the Central Fish Market is a municipally owned facility that the City Council ceded to the Community in 1988. Since then, the history of the now shopping center, which has about 150 stores (most of them closed), has always been linked to failure. It has been a center for antiques, leisure, shops, offices, a gourmet market, fashion… And there has always been a lack of customers.

(…)

The regional government acknowledges that it is looking for “an exit as quickly as possible” for the shopping center and that “the most beneficial thing for all is to give the market a dotional use”.

Interesting. The first thing that comes to my mind is that, with all the edges that the negotiation process may have, the impact on the merchants that currently occupy the premises and the incidents that the shopping center has had in all these years, details that I do not know Sounds like an interesting case. Almost two years ago, the blog began to collect news about the decline of the large shopping centers in the United States (The health of shopping centers : what will remain after the crisis?), one more aspect that shows that the things that have been happening in the United States during the crisis have been repeated here in many aspects, only in greater depth. In this specific case, it is a fairly central shopping center but, even so, I continue to predict that many large shopping centers in Spain will continue to have a hard time, especially those that have ridden on the back of last-minute speculation. I just want to remember what I already said in that post:

The AECC itself (Spanish Association of Shopping Centers), in information that does not I know if it will be very up-to-date, he states regarding the possibility that some projects for the creation of new shopping centers will fail:

“In Spain there are close to 200 Shopping Center projects at the moment, of which some will not see the light of day, others will take years to complete and some 70 or 80 are likely to be inaugurated within the next three years.”

A country full of zombie houses , but also of other empty or abandoned buildings and equipment is the landscape that remains after the great party of these years. It is time to talk about large-scale rehabilitation and at all levels, about rescuing infrastructureand tomes from the old model, about recycling and reusing the city that has already been built . Because, apparently, according to the news -I emphasize- “the most beneficial thing for everyone is to give the market an endowment use”. In other words, if you want, converting certain spaces into public facilities is not that difficult either. Even if it is through transitory formulas, can. This one today is just one case and I am convinced that we will see more retrofits. There is no other. And that it is also to convert a consumption space into a university center makes it better news.

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Imagefrom Beatrice Murch on Flickr under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license