Town Extension Plans in Galicia

Abstract

The paper sees the urban initiatives undertaken in La Coruña and Vigo carried out under the auspices of the then Extension Legislation as falling short of what could be properly called planned undertakings and being little wore than lay-out schemes that ignored any land administering object or the need for the same. It is admitted however that in the first case the plan did use some realistic criteria when fixing the scope of the project, in its absorbing of buildings already standing within its new blocks, in its bearing in mind of the suggestions forwarded in the Reform and Extension Plan drawn up for the city in 1.874 by the engineers baron and Yanez and in the «good sense» the whole could draw upon from the city architect Juan de Ciorraga who fathered it and then carried it through. In the case of the Vigo plan, the only planning as such would be the taking in of part of one drawn up in 1837 by the engineer Augustin de Marcoartu for docks and a new district, this in itself inspired by the Bilbao Puerto de la Luz and Ferrol Magdalena District projects or similar ones for Santander. For the author, even this cannot be considered as coming within the terms of Planned City Extension thinking but rather owes its all to the previous military school of thinking. The author thus sees Galicia as offering little of note within the Planned City Extension Movement and that little as being no more than the re-hashing of earlier projects answer legislative calls rather than any thorough-going thinking out and through of genuine projects. Planned Extension in other centres of population in Galicia such as Santiago, Orense or Pontevedra was undertaken in the light of the 1924 Act and thus is to be understood as being inspired by growth and overspill requirements although, even here, there is still a debt to the major groundwork of the early years of the century with its search for an allembracing vision of the urban fact.