Territory and urbanization in Spain: the challenge of territorial management and local sustainability

Source:  ciudadsostenible.eu

The analysis of land use is crucial for decision-making, especially at a time like the present with numerous challenges, of which there are many.

In Spain, the review of land occupation in the period 1990-2018 shows us an x-ray of the social and environmental transformations that have taken place: a strong process of artificialisation with the highest rate of change of use in Europe; the increase in irrigation and intensive conversions between crops and vineyards, orchards, olive groves and permanent crops; and the importance of the creation and management of forests as the main drivers of landscape change.

Rethinking the culture of heritage, nature, territory and the city means understanding the social and natural complexity that affects each part of the territory and making it available to current and future society.

One of the main needs is the improvement of territorial management, which requires first of all a better inter-administrative coordination, beyond the thematic aspects, as well as the public availability of the best information on the territory for the information of public authorities and citizens. This will enable better decision-making, observation and control of territorial processes, and this spatial dimension is even more strategic than the social and economic dimension, because it provides the conditions necessary to achieve social cohesion and economic development in the first instance.

If we want to make a commitment to local sustainability, it is necessary to promote the improvement of the quality of life in cities, especially through intervention in the existing city.

It is necessary to understand the countryside and the territory as a space for innovation, not as the negative of the urban, understanding that technologies and advances do not always come from the urban and that this space does not expect urbanisation to reduce its own value to something residual, as they are a "reserve of the diverse and qualitative" (Roch, 1998: 91) in an increasingly homogeneous world. It is important to promote as a line of action an integrated and public territorial management, which can be used as an engine of economic, social and environmental change and allow its protection and activation.

It is a question of strengthening Spain's natural capital through its protection, conservation and monitoring, supported by taxation that allows the provision of these ecosystem services to be maintained. This strategy can only be carried out by improving the living conditions of the rural population so that it results in a virtuous circle of social, economic, environmental and cultural sustainability.

The generation of sources of sustainable employment in rural areas, together with the improvement of digitalisation that allows the population to settle, can increase the connection of the territories and take advantage of the synergies that a greater technological connection with the natural environment entails. New trends in teleworking can complement the process if the conditions for improving the quality of life are met, and always without undermining the protection of the rural environment so that it does not lose the natural values that are its guarantor of a better future.

Commitment to the nearby and productive city

At the territorial and urban level, the local scale is the appropriate one for its transformation, as it is here that projects, civil society, ecological systems intersect and the non-capitalist economic and productive environment develops (Roch, 1998: 93).

In order to promote proximity and the reduction of cycles and vectors of global environmental change such as climate change, a commitment should be made to the proximity city, known as the '15-minute city', which allows essential urban social functions to be satisfied in physical and temporal proximity, reducing mobility and stress, and should be complemented by an increase in productive activity, in a return to the relocation of economic activity (reshoring) to certain thresholds that allow a certain degree of local autonomy. This will help reduce external dependence and mobility, and increase stable and quality employment. The city, which has never been post-industrial although it may have been defined as such, must cease to be almost exclusively a centre of accumulation and consumption in order to integrate productive activity, which has repercussions on the closing of cycles in the urban metabolism.

If we want to make a commitment to local sustainability, it is necessary to promote the improvement of the quality of life in cities, especially through intervention in the existing city, public space and the network of public facilities in order to improve the welfare state. This return to local sustainability also requires spatial proximity for uses and activities and the promotion of productive activity, which will go hand in hand with the reduction of induced mobility.

This strategy must go hand in hand with curbing uncontrolled urban sprawl through planning at different scales. Preserving and promoting the diversity of the territory will allow for more possibilities for development at a time of uncertainty in which the precautionary principle and objectives that are in the general interest must take precedence. Likewise, the dissemination of good practices in the field of urban and territorial sustainability should be encouraged, along with fiscal and economic incentives for their implementation in order to be able to write another territorial future in Spain, in which economic growth does not depend on the loss of territorial values, but quite the opposite. The future is designed and Spain has great territorial potential, which, with good planning and cooperation, can give us the best possible future.

Recommendations

Taxation to protect, conserve and use the potential of Spain's valuable natural capital in its territory. This will allow the maintenance of the ecosystem services it provides and will serve to finance the investments necessary to improve the living conditions of the population in rural areas, which will help in the face of the demographic challenge of a large part of Spain's territory.

Encourage, through regulatory change, loans and subsidies for projects and strategies to improve the quality of life in cities towards planning models of a nearby and productive city, together with a halt to uncontrolled urban sprawl so that all efforts result in the transformation and improvement of the existing city.