“We needed someone to capture the current situation in a study and we hope that it will help administrations read it in depth, reach the same conclusions and start looking for solutions.” This is the call of Xavier Vilajoana, president of the Association of Promoters and Builders of Catalonia (APCE), in light of the conclusions of the Master's Thesis (TFM) "Successes and challenges in the urban management of sectors of delimited developable land in Catalonia" .
The thesis has been prepared by Santiago Elías Esparza, a student awarded a scholarship by the APCE within the framework of the collaboration agreement that the entity maintains with the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB-UPC) and its main objective is to carry out an analysis and identify what factors the success of urban management depends on and what are the main barriers encountered by the different professional groups that operate in this execution.
The study reveals that urban management in Catalonia is clearly influenced by a variety of factors, including socioeconomic, political and territorial planning aspects, although one of the most determining is the "time" factor.
Thus, the author considers that the excessive execution time, added to the low capacity for renewal of the general planning, generates a vicious circle that causes more barriers and slower management.
Elías, author of the thesis, considers that possible improvements in the Catalan and Spanish urban planning system should be aimed at ensuring that the general plans review and delimit new sectors of developable land, with a joint vision of urban planning and management, with the aim of identify opportunities where, both in terms of ownership and environmental and territorial conditions, they are more suitable and successful, and, therefore, are managed more agilely. This would provide a solid basis for the formulation of more effective policies and strategies in the planning and management of new urbanizable sectors.
According to Elías, “the majority of soils have either been stagnant at some point in their management or have not even been promoted. Therefore, to analyze the situation in the Catalan territory, I have undertaken three different analyses, a quantitative analysis based on data from the Urban Planning Map of Catalonia (MUC), a survey of real estate developers and a qualitative analysis based on 14 in-depth interviews with professionals in the sector.”
Among all the conclusions drawn throughout the preparation of the work, the author highlights "the time factor, since it is decisive and has to do with the progressive concentration of property."
Regarding the barriers of urban management, Santiago Elías has highlighted that “some building parameters are being established, such as the reservation of parking spaces for homes or the obligation to allocate residential ground floors for commercial use, which are very rigid and are discouraging for these investments to end up being developed.”
Finally, the author of the thesis highlights the issue of time and adds that “if it takes a long time to develop a sector that has been planned for a long time, the needs change, at a social, urban planning, environmental level, etc., and therefore, when it should be developed, it has already expired, which is why we should try to shorten the maturation times as much as possible.”
From the APCE, its president, Xavier Vilajoana, reiterates that "urban planning is the raw material of our activity and today what we have is from the last century, it is very inflexible, and has become outdated. More and more are being carried out studies on household needs and the conclusions reached are worrying, since much less is produced than the real needs that exist," he concludes.
For the director of the ETSAB, Félix Solaguren-Beascoa, “thanks to the collaboration of the APCE with the ETSAB and thanks to work like this, we can respond to the problems that are detected from the promoter-construction sector and provide reflections from an academic, rigorous point of view and following the scientific method.” For Solaguren-Beascoa, "administrations are interested in urban planning and housing problems, and they have realized that from universities we have people who can provide answers and offer alternatives to these problems."
