The historical background to drawing up of the Land Use and Town and Country Planning Act of 12 may 1956

Abstract

The paper states that the variform legislation as to things urbanistic that had come down to it from the 19th century called for a decisive impulse once the Spanish Civil War was over to make possible not only the reconstructing of those cities then destroyed but also to bring together the techniques of public intervention and spur private initiative both within the scope of the planning leadership and control of the new State. Through a necessary administrative reform and by means of the technical experiments to the Plan for Madrid of the immediate post war period (1944), the intense period of generation of the new Act is here said to have got under way. The physical planning and administrating of both cities and their extension [ensanches] along with the city seen as a whole were to be encompassed and this process it was hoped to mobilize landowners as part and parcel of the process. The Land Use Act of 1956 is felt to have been paragon amongst those of other European nations at this period facing the problems of reconstruction after the Second World War despite some of its more singular administrative figures such as that to its central notion of reparcelación [reallocation of volumes, cost-benefits and uses by zones] not to be met anywhere else. The setting up of the Ministry of Housing to meet the vast task of building publicly subsidized homes and taxed with national urbanistic planning removed these activities from the sphere of the Ministries of State Security and the Home Office, the latter controlling local government. The author maintains that the unusual excellence, solidity and technical competence of this first urbanistic Act of the modern period goes a long way towards explaining why its founding principles have lasted through to the present day all but unchanged despite three partial reforms of the Act and its 40 years on the books.