The need for a Land Use Pact . The Canary Islands

Abstract

The Canary Islands the paper tells of how, in the second 1991 period, the planning team of the Governing Council agreed to the putting out of a State of Opinion document as to land, planning and the environment which expressed: a) An awareness of the gravity of these questions as within the archipielago. b) The feeling that neither state nor autonomic regional planning, nor local planning as such were up to meeting the demands made upon them to administer the land available. c) An evident alarm at the grave deterioration that the landscape was suffering, a thing itself disturbing in an island group of no more than 2.000 km2, but doubtly so, in the paper's opinion, if it is borne in mind that the greater part of the economic activity of this area tunas upon tourism, an industry for which the environment and landscape are prime and scarce necessities, and d) a sense of territorial inbalance caused by the existence of two metropolitan areas in the governing islands (Las Palmas-Teide and Santa Cruz-La Laguna), these being seen as drawing the general population into these islands and cities. The paper then relates that the seriousness of the land problem, coupled with an impossibility of solving this by conventional administrative modes, led to the drawing up of a Land Use Pact this being neither more nor less than an attempt from within to awaken society to a more lively sense of the worth of the land itself and a common understanding as to matters environmental, this in the face of mere economic progress and utterly liberal criteria as to the siting of business or the privatization of what the land available could offer.