The Regulation of Growth in Spanish Mediterranean Coastal Areas

Abstract

The paper sees the urban and territorial measures that Spanish administrations, at all levels, have
been adopting in keeping with Spanish urban planning legislation as having been in the main aimed
at assuming, organising, fostering and in some few cases, halting urban growth. However, since the
turn of the twenty-fi rst century and coinciding with the highest land consumption peaks ever
experienced in Spain, the country’s Mediterranean regions have begun to implement measures to
limit any further urban growth. To a greater or lesser degree and depending on the circumstances
in each case, these new measures are here felt to affect municipal possibilities for classifying land
for development, a thing hitherto virtually unlimited. Till then and exception made for expressly
protected areas, local governments were free to classify any land that they deemed and thought fi t
to be up for building grabs with hardly any limitations set upon their will to do so, were in fact fully
empowered to declare all the land they wished to fi t for building as the denomination “construction
available” land, contrary to that of “urban land”, was and in some communities still is a freely
optional municipal decision. The paper indicates how some Mediterranean regions have now put
certain limits on such discretionary powers.