Speculative spaces

Although the example of the assignment is located in Madrid (ESP), almost in every Spanish city can you find this kind of areas where massive housing developments were projected before the crisis. The Spanish urbanization projects are always based in strength legislation that I will try to explain briefly hereafter.

56 // The first Land Law was published in 1956 and its aim was the construction of dwellings to face up the housing problem created by the massive immigration from the rural areas to the cities. To facilitate the construction of apartments, the soil was classified in three types: urban, developable and non-developable). First of all, urban and developable areas were limited and second, all the REST of the soil was non-developable. The following Laws maintained the main structure of the first Law.

98 // However, in 1998, the principle of the classification of the soil was radically changed to make possible the economical growth of the country based in construction. Due to this law, urban and non-developable areas were limited and second, all the REST of the soil was developable. So with this little gramatical change, almost all the soil of Spain was developable and the developers take advantage of it. In few time, a lot of housing developments were projected and approved and Spain created an economy based in house production. For whom?

In the beginning a lot of people started to buy houses as an inversion but with the crisis the house prices drop down and buying a house was not more rentable. Therefore a lot of urbanization developments were stopped, but the damage was done. We destroyed millions of hectares of natural land to construct dwellings and nowadays we have more than 3 million unoccupied homes. Half-finished developments still dot the landscape.

I consider it a spatial injustice, because there are hundreds of kilometres of streets unused and dwellings in the middle of nowhere. People that buy houses in this developments haven't got minimum services and they have to use private cars to move everywhere. It is like living in the middle of the dessert but in a planned urbanized area.