Plan in crisis. The transforamtion of urban planning in relation to crisis. The metropolitan region of Madrid, 1985-2007

Abstract

The transformation of urban planning is analysed in the last quarter of the twentieth century in and the first years of the twenty first century in Spain, through its relationship with the successive crises, officially recognized by their economic component. The study of the issue makes it possible to establish three stages of that relationship: the austere urban planning under the influence of crisis of fordist forms of production, the way out of the crisis through the imposition of an urban model based on growth, and the entry into a real estate and financialization crisis by adopting an unsustainable model. By way of example, it is used the case of Metropolitan Region of Madrid, because it is considered paradigmatic, since the region has played a leading role as a laboratory for new forms of governance and planning, while there are specific circumstances, as a new impulse to centralism, that has empowered some politics. As a result, this case is an example of unsustainability of the adopted urban model.