Modelos de crecimiento urbano: estrategias de planificación y sostenibilidad en Cantabria

Abstract

*** ENG: The urban sprawl phenomenon, which has been widely studied for American cities, is now also transforming the land use pattern of Spanish cities. Highway construction, together with an increase in the motorization rate and a new lifestyle based on consumption, has favoured a dispersed growth surrounding most traditional compact cities, which in turn is proving not to be very sustainable. The rise of some problems related to sprawl have led to several arguments in favour of and against the compact city. More recently, polycentric systems based on decentralised concentration have been suggested as structures which may be able to reduce the disadvantages of both an excess of dispersion or concentration. This paper has two main objectives: on the one hand, to dissect, from a theoretical point of view, the current problems associated with the configuration of urban systems; and on the other hand, to analyse a particular case study in order to propose planning strategies to optimize the use of urban land. The first step is to analyse, separately, the pros and cons associated with areas in which, due to the hybrid nature of real case, there is the dominance of a dispersed, compact, or polycentric structure. Once the descriptive and interactive framework has been established, the next step is to implement one of these models into a real case. In this paper, a section is dedicated to studying the case of the Autonomous Region of Cantabria (Spain), which is currently developing its own Spatial Planning Programme. The implementation consists of a comparative analysis of the urban hierarchy of Cantabria comparing data of selected services (for the hinterland beyond the municipal area) and the number of work centres with service and retail dependency relationships between municipalities. The comparison between these two groups of variables (real capacity versus real functions) has been carried out using the Nelson index. The results provide a selection of nodes and relationships that should be encouraged in order to achieve improved spatial balance, so as to break the progressive trend of population and activity concentration. The next step to choose the appropriate spatial pattern objectives to be implemented by planning strategies in order to achieve improved spatial sustainability. This objective obviously depends on the type of area (central and well-developed, peripheral, and so forth), on the dimension and scale of the study area, and also on some local particularities. A final section deals with some suggestions for strengthening a choice of settlements and relationships in order to improve the urban system of Cantabria. These measures, which take into account the current regional situation, are based on the integration of transport, land use and spatial planning policies, and which indicate the requirement of further co-operation not only between different public administrations but also between these and the social and economic agents, and the need for clearly defined mid- and longterm strategies.