The last fifteen years have witnessed the spectacular collapse of city and state economies that became too reliant on physical urbanization as their primary driver of economic growth. From the ghost estates of Ireland to the artificial oases of Dubai, to the gated suburban compounds of the American Sunbelt, to unoccupied housing in second- and third-tier Chinese cities, the increasing frequency of these large-scale, speculative expansions of settlement has emerged as a topic in demand of critical examination. In this context, perhaps no political body instrumentalized urbanization activities over this period to a greater effect—and consequence—than Spain. Thus, it is worth taking the time to consider the particular circumstances that motivated events on the Iberian Peninsula as they relate to both the question of “suburbia” and the contemporary activities of the urban design disciplines. (fig. 3.7.1)
Certainly, a great deal of very good, comprehensive work has been published on the implications of these speculative pursuits, primarily from the perspectives of economic policy, political governance, and social equity.1 However, a consideration of the motivations and consequences of these events from the viewpoint of urban design and planning is absent, and thus long overdue given the central, albeit little-acknowledged role these disciplines play in these urbanization activities.
For the purposes of such a discussion, I define speculative urbanization as the construction of new urban infrastructure or settlement for primarily political or economic purposes, rather than to meet real (as opposed to artificially projected) demographic or market demand. If we expand this definition further, we can include activities related to the legislative redesignation and reparcelization of land for the specific purpose of increasing its monetary value. The definition refers primarily to activities at the periphery of established urban areas, or in entirely exurban contexts with these pursuits most often operating at the scale of a district or territory.
Reflecting on this definition, one could argue that over the last two decades, city building (as in physical urbanization) has become the ultimate form of twenty-first-century industrial production, appealing to both politicians and investors alike in nearly every kind of politico-economic context, from the most liberal to the autocratically controlled. The significance of this pursuit is noteworthy in that the role of new urban settlement and infrastructure has fundamentally shifted away from a provision of basic urban services toward a projection of economic potential and political status. As a result, the promiscuous deployment of these speculative endeavors is increasingly producing moments of substantial social, environmental, and economic disruption.
Given this intensification and the consequences that have resulted, it is imperative that urban design and planning become far more cognizant of—and conversant in—the political and economic motivations driving this production. Without such a reorientation, it will become even more difficult for these disciplines to have any agency in the speculative urbanization processes that will be a primary source of much of their future work.
As mentioned above, no recent case is more indicative of this use of urbanization activities for politico-economic ambitions than the events in Spain that transpired between 1998 and 2012. During this period, the country experienced an unprecedented expansion of both its urbanized territory and its economy. From 2000 to 2005, Spain was transforming land at a rate of 187.3 acres (75.8 hectares) per day.2 The proportion of Spain’s economy tied directly to construction was nearly three times that of the United States during its contemporaneous real estate convulsion (about 13 percent versus 4.8 percent).3 Per capita GDP increased from roughly US$15,000 to nearly $35,000.4 And though other contemporaneous property booms emerged globally, none occurred with the same intensity or for as long as Spain’s.
Over the course of this period, Spain built enough new homes to house approximately sixteen million people, yet population growth was just over six million, mostly from immigration.5 And despite this profusion of housing, other urbanization activities were also pursued. In little more than a decade, Spain achieved one of the highest concentrations of transportation infrastructure per capita in the world, becoming the European leader in highway length, number of international airports, and length of highspeed rail lines. Museums, congress halls, parks, stadiums, cultural centers, markets, and libraries were initiated throughout the country as companions to the newly developed housing. Golf courses, amusement parks, beachfront resorts, and shopping malls rounded out the spatial products arrayed across Spain during this period. The effect, unsurprisingly, was the highest rate of rural to urban land conversion in the European Union.6 Or to put it another way, roughly one-third of all urbanized land in Spain was created between 1998 and 2008 alone.7 (fig. 3.7.2)
This urbanization was seen as endeavoring to prevent what former prime minister José María Aznar characterized as Spain’s “consignment to a corner of history.” This monumental effort was an attempt to elevate the country to the apex of global economic status through city building.8 The pursuit of urban growth was not limited to the major cities; it was the quest of municipalities large and small, from towns with two hundred residents to cities of two million.9 Urbanization had become an intoxicant, extraordinarily addictive—and worse yet—readily accessible.
The consequences of the bust are in many ways as dramatic and wide-ranging as the dimensions of what was built. Over two million jobs were lost after the collapse of the economy, constituting roughly 10 percent of Spain’s labor force. As of 2010, roughly one in four unemployed Spaniards had come from construction-related industries. By 2012, the unemployment rate in Spain had reached 26 percent. For those under age thirty, this number was upward of 45 percent.10 During this period, Spain’s construction sector saw the largest bankruptcy in the county’s history when the property developer Martinsa-Fadesa announced it was more than €5 billion in debt.11
Many portrayals of these events have chosen to focus on the Land Law (Ley de Suelo) of 1998 or ill-conceived attempts to replicate the successes of the 1992 Olympics as the primary catalysts of the construction boom. Yet the story of this most recent Spanish miracle-cum-crisis is rooted in a much deeper, more complex set of politico-economic machinations of fundamental interest to urban design and planning: land, housing, and infrastructure. (fig. 3.7.3)
While surplus housing in Spain has been the focus of media headlines, the less deliberated but more consequential aspect to consider is the role land policy played in setting the stage for these events. The 1956 Law of Urban Planning and Land Use Management (Ley del Regimen del Suelo y Ordenación Urbana) established for the first time a classification system for Spanish land organized under three designations: developed land (suelo urbano); land not to be developed (suelo no urbanizable); and land suitable for development as part of a municipal expansion (suelo urbanizable).12 Under this law, urban planning responsibilities were placed in the hands of a town council or mayor and were considered compulsory.
A unique aspect of the legislation was that once a piece of land was designated as able to be urbanized, any assessment of its value from that point forward was based on what the land would be worth fully developed—not on its current state. The purpose of this was to provide a mechanism by which poor rural landowners could use their future land value as collateral to finance development and infrastructure that the state could not afford to provide. This mechanism, coupled with other aspects of the 1956 law, served to both slow urbanization and encourage rampant land speculation.
The 1956 law remained in place for nearly two decades until Franco’s death in 1975. Shortly thereafter, minor revisions were made to ensure that the benefits of development were shared not only among private landowners but also with municipalities, through a required 10 percent concession to the public administration on all development.13
Fifteen years later, the Amended Land Use and Assessment System Act (Ley de Reforma del Régimen del Suelo y Valoraciónes de 1990) was passed by the center-left PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) with the intention of undoing what it considered to be expansionist policies of a “preconstitutional” planning system reliant on the parameters of the 1956 law. This legislation attempted to limit the rights of private landowners by expanding planning and land-use administration responsibilities among the municipal, regional, and now national governments. The legislation also expanded the levy on development projects to 15 percent, while jettisoning the parameter of land value being based on its future state rather than its existing condition.14 Whether it was a consequenceof the subsequent economic downturn, or simply a failure of the legislation, a constitutional tribunal struck down roughly 80 percent of the 1990 law in 1997.15
With the state’s limited authority in mind, a new land law the following year reduced the three designations set out in the original 1956 law to simply “developable” or “not developable.” And rather than the not-developable land being thought of as residual—that which was left out of a municipal plan—the new law actively defined not-developable land only as territories having some significant intrinsic value or considered as a risk on which to build.16 Enacted by the center-right PP (Partido Popular), the 1998 law was based on a simple but often disputed economic principle: the overregulation of land artificially drives up the cost of housing by limiting the supply on which to build.17
Housing prices in Spain had been considered high relative to other economic indicators since the 1980s, but with the new legislation, the solution to this quandary for the PP became obvious.18 By opening up all unprotected land to development, an inelastic system would become more elastic, in turn lowering housing prices. It was no surprise when development in Spain took off, with more than 2,200 Spanish municipalities approving or revising their general plans between 1998 and 2006.19
Eventually, in 2001, another constitutional tribunal annulled significant portions of the 1998 law, reaffirming that all land-use designations must be established at the regional level. However, the immediate “successes” of the national legislation compelled nearly every autonomous community in Spain to pass regional variations of the law.20
As regional governments enacted their own versions of the 1998 law, the concessions required of private developers became a primary source of revenue for many town councils during the boom. Municipalities would acquire their allotted levy and quickly sell this duty back to the developer in order to fund other municipal endeavors. This inherent conflict of interest was exacerbated by the fact that the regional savings banks (caja de ahorros) that provided many of the loans required for approval of these developments remained under the direction of the same municipal authorities responsible for planning approval.21 What resulted was a delirious cycle of development proposals, municipal approvals, and easy credit lubricating this radical transformation of Spanish land. (fig. 3.7.4)
Another effect of the 1998 law was the relegation of legally binding municipal plans to little more than pictorials of urban possibilities. Land-use regulations became effortlessly modifiable. Using various administrative mechanisms that allowed municipalities to approve future projects in exchange for public works in the present, the system of checks and balances within planning regulation in Spain was frequently superseded or ignored.22 This ease of modification led to poor coordination within and across individual autonomous communities, producing huge redundancies throughout the country.23
Sardonically referred to as a policy of “urbanize everything” (“todo urbanizable”), the Land Law of 1998 has been widely cited as the primary root of Spain’s recent boom and bust. However, despite more than three decades of continuous political instrumentalization of land policy, this real estate convulsion cannot be fully explained by a single source, even one as fundamentally transformative as the 1998 law and its subsequent regional variants.
The common impression of what happened in Spain is that there was a housing bubble. And while true, that fact on its own does not make Spain an exceptional case to consider. For one, there were other contemporaneous bubbles that appeared in Europe and globally over the same period.24 And Spain itself has seen at least two other housing-related bubbles in the last half-century.25 So while the focus of design and planning discourse has been on the surplus housing produced between 1998 and 2008, there is more to this story in the context of the increasing political and economic role that urbanization is being asked to play globally.
It is worth recounting a few of the metrics related to what occurred. At the height of Spain’s recent boom, the country was building more housing units per year than Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined, despite having only 20 percent of the total population of those three countries.26 The number of new housing starts annually nearly tripled between 1996 and 2006.27 Yet despite the massive volume of housing constructed, at the end of the boom, it was roughly twice as expensive to buy a home in Spain than at the beginning, relative to inflation.28 By the end of 2010, there were more than 1 million unsold homes on the market in Spain. By 2012, this number was closer to 2 million.29 And in reality, it could have been as high as 3.6 million if all the homes that had been approved at the time of the collapse were actually built.30 (fig. 3.7.5)
In 1950 more than half of Spain’s population was renters.31 By 2012, upward of 80 percent of homes in the country were owner-occupied. Some have suggested that this high rate of homeownership is cultural and that the traditional role of housing in Spain is similar to other southern European countries. But as the demographers Anna Cabré and Juan Antonio Módenes argue, “High homeownership rates in Spain are not the result of tradition, [rather] they are the product of the rapid social and economic changes that took place during the second half of the twentieth century.”32
Spain’s 1959 National Stabilization Plan, catalyst of the original “Spanish miracle” or desarrollismo, drove much of this rapid change. The Franco regime—in consultation with the International Monetary Fund and Opus Dei—made homeowner-ship a top priority of its newly liberalized economic policies. Notionally, the purpose of these regulations was to stave off the growth of communism by privileging homeownership over renters, whom it considered proletarian. Legislation enacted as part of this plan created a legal basis (and incentive) to develop multi-family housing structures in urban areas that could be sold unit by unit, something that up to that point was impossible under Spanish law.33
As Spain’s economy shifted away from agriculture toward industry, hundreds of thousands of new residential units were built between 1960 and 1973 at the periphery of established cities like Madrid and Bilbao. This new housing was often located near newly developed industrial estates that had the potential to offer employment to these migrants.34 Since innovations in housing had been greatly repressed over the preceding decades, the bulk of these new units were poorly planned, poorly designed, and poorly constructed. Nonetheless, this new housing was rapidly filled, and the cultural shift from renting to ownership was set in motion.
Following the death of Franco, Spain’s 1978 constitution revised national tax policy to further promote homeownership by allowing individuals to deduct from their tax burden the interest paid on their mortgages, as well as their mortgage principal up to a maximum of 15 percent. These provisions applied both to primary residences and to second homes, ostensibly encouraging the purchase of multiple dwellings as part of a family’s long-term savings strategy.35
By the early 1990s, roughly 55 percent of the housing stock in Spain had been built between 1959 and 1974, meaning that more than half of all dwellings in the country were of questionable physical integrity.36 This deficiency was interpreted as indicative of an urgent need to construct new housing throughout Spain and, in particular, in major cities where the bulk of housing from this prior boom period was located.
As early as 1997—before the passing of the 1998 Land Law—significant urban expansions were beginning in major metropolitan areas. But following the enactment of the 1998 law, these expansions began to proliferate in secondary municipalities throughout the country. The Catalan politician and geographer Oriol Nel·lo has described this as Spain’s third stage of “metropolitanization,” noting that by 2002 even the smallest rural villages were greatly expanding their urban footprint, despite not having seen population increases for the better part of a century.37 This widespread pursuit of urban expansions in even the most illogical of places was indicative of an increasing belief in Spain that urbanization was the ultimate recipe for economic prosperity.38 (fig. 3.7.6)
Spain’s dramatically changing demographics fueled this perception of housing demand. Between 1998 and 2009, the country gained 2.67 million new residents from the European Union, two million immigrants from Latin America, and roughly one million immigrants from Africa.39 Adding to this demographic pressure was the coming of age of Spain’s baby boomers, born in the mid- to late 1970s shortly after the death of Franco. The demand created by these populations was aggravated by the dearth of rental properties available, as a result of the many laws put in place in the 1960s.
Further exacerbating the situation were the tax laws of the 1980s that implicitly encouraged the ownership of second and third homes as investment vehicles. The result was that about seven million middle-class Spanish households (35 percent of all home owners) owned two homes or more at the height of the bubble. This demand for second homes was not limited to residents of the country but also driven by foreign nationals who invested upward of €7 billion per year in property assets during the boom.40
What this suggests is that, in many ways, the paradox between the demand for second homes as investments and the need for affordable housing for immigrants and young workers is the real story of the most recent Spanish housing bubble. In this sense, the housing boom in Spain between 1998 and 2008 was not just the product of liberalized land policies, greedy developers, corrupt politicians, or naive investors. Rather, it was a consequence of a much longer shift in the cultural role of housing in Spain as an instrument of economic production.
Even beyond considerations of land and housing, the massive expansion of urban infrastructure seen throughout Spain leading up to and throughout the real estate boom should be understood as perhaps the most critical catalyst to what occurred. As recently as the early 1980s, Spain was an economic backwater characterized by poor infrastructure, limited competitiveness, and an economy dominated by tourism. Decades of isolation under Franco had left the country unequipped, while rapid population growth in metropolitan areas between 1960 and 1980 exacerbated deficiencies in intercity and urban infrastructures.41 As a result, the country’s economy remained reliant on poorly maintained rural roads and a rail system inefficiently centered on Madrid.
It was not until the mid-1980s that Spain saw the first significant state expansion of the highway system since the eighteenth century.42 This renewed investment in national infrastructure was motivated not just by rising demand for intercity mobility connections and a growing economy but, more important, by an exceptional moment in Spain’s history—the country’s admission into the European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner of the European Union, in 1986.43 Membership in the EEC had a number of implications, but joining the EEC meant one very important thing for the urban form of Spain—access to massive amounts of capital via European Structural and Cohesion Funds.
Sebastián Royo, professor of government at Suffolk University, argues that the European Union benefits those who are best prepared to take advantage of the rights of membership.44 Simply saying that Spain benefited from this program would be a gross understatement. Since the 1988 reform, the country has been one of the chief beneficiaries of the EU budget, receiving annually, on average, more than one-quarter of the total funds distributed between 1989 and 2006.45 In fact, Spain has been the largest single beneficiary of this program in absolute terms, accepting a total of €186 billion in structural and cohesion funding.46
Roughly 20 percent of the monies received each year from 1994 through 2006 were used for infrastructure projects intended to improve economic productivity through advances in efficiency and access.47 These investments included highways, bridges, conventional rail, high-speed rail, train stations, airports, seaports, desalination plants, sewage plants, and renewable energy facilities. Former Museum of Modern Art curator Terence Riley, in his opening essay of the catalog for the 2006 exhibition On-Site: New Architecture in Spain, described Spain’s activities as “the most extensive building and rebuilding of…civil infrastructure since the Romans unified the Iberian Peninsula.”48 So, while the massive amount of housing built in Spain between 1998 and 2008 has received the majority of attention, in reality, the scale of infrastructural investment that underpinned this development should be understood as no less dramatic or consequential. (fig. 3.7.7)
For example, by 2011, Spain had more miles of roadway per capita than any other European country; the length of its system quintupled from just over 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) in 1993 to more than 10,070 miles (16,200 kilometers) in 2011.49 Highway expansion projects were initiated regionally and nationally, with roughly four out of every ten kilometers constructed in Spain between 1986 and 2007 financed by EU funds.50 Metro systems in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia, and Seville were also expanded. Madrid saw the most dramatic change, nearly tripling in total length between 1990 and 2012 from 70 miles (111 kilometers) to 183 miles (293 kilometers), and adding more than 150 new stations.
In addition to these terrestrial networks, the 1990s and early 2000s saw the construction of seven new airports and the expansion and renovation of numerous others across Spain. This represents an investment of over €16 billion by Spain’s state airport authority, based primarily on projections that total passenger numbers would nearly double from 165 million to 311 million by 2020.51 Spain now has fifty international airports, 2.5 times as many as in Germany, a country with twice the population. Predictably, not all these airports are sustainable. As of 2012, no fewer than twelve of these facilities qualify as “ghost airports” in economic terms because of low annual passenger numbers.52
The real star of Spain’s infrastructural expansion, however, has been high-speed rail (HSR). Following the early 1990s recession and the economic recovery during the later part of the decade, the government declared its intention in 2000 to connect forty-seven of the country’s fifty provincial capitals to Madrid in less than four hours via a vast new hub-and-spoke HSR system.53 The result—though incomplete—is the second-longest HSR network in the world after China, currently measuring over 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers). Like the highway expansion, the construction of high-speed rail in Spain has relied heavily on the EU, with roughly €38 out of every €100 spent coming from structural or cohesion funds.54
The importance of these metrics—beyond their sheer scale—is an understanding that without this massive investment in urban infrastructures, the housing boom in Spain would have been substantially less delirious, if it had occurred at all. These new lines of mobility became conduits along which real estate investment accumulated, fomenting the rapid, often unnecessary expansion of urbanized lands throughout Spain. The redundancy, lack of coordination, overscaled structures, and general hubris of this building period catalyzed the construction and real estate industries in Spain to such an extent that they displaced tourism as the dominant sector of the country’s economy. (fig. 3.7.8)
Yet despite the events of the last half-decade, Spain is still seen as evidence of the true potential of the European Union as a politico-economic idea. Its utilization of EU funds produced strong increases in competitive economic metrics such as rate of growth and foreign direct investment.55 The country is able to actively export its substantial construction expertise to other developing contexts. However, Spain has also been accused of using these infrastructural expansions for near-term “nation-building” purposes, rather than in support of longer-term economic growth and productivity.56 Of course, Spain was neither the first nor will it be the last polity to employ such a model.
Spain’s response to its urbanization-induced crisis is as telling as the factors that led to it. Exacerbating the difficulty of absorbing the two-million-plus homes lying vacant was that by 2012, local governments throughout the country began to promote the building of even more housing. The city of Madrid announced in April of that year—as the country was struggling to avoid a bailout by the European Central Bank—that it would restart the tender process for twenty-two thousand new homes southeast of the city, despite the fact that an immediately adjacent area was less than 50 percent occupied.57 Further complicating the absorption process was that many of the immigrants projected to occupy these new residences had simply packed up and left Spain for opportunities elsewhere.58 (fig. 3.7.9)
Despite growing social unrest and financial uncertainty, it was not only suspended building activities that were being resumed. Entirely new urban developments were being initiated as well, doubling down on the belief in urbanization-driven economic growth. In September 2011, Madrid announced its third consecutive bid for the Summer Olympics.59 September 2012 saw the community of Madrid and the region of Catalonia engaged in the pursuit of an even larger urbanization initiative: a $30 billion casino development proposed by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.
The project, “EuroVegas,” was to include twelve hotel towers, six casinos, three golf courses, an arena, an international tennis center, a shopping mall, a convention center, leisure facilities, an outdoor amphitheater, a theme park, and “ample” areas of natural preserve and public open space. There were also demands for a new or an expanded airport adjacent to the development to serve the project’s anticipated international clientele.60 With little self-awareness, the “EuroVegas” project was being pitched as a massive new urban development district comprising many of the same spatial products already lying vacant or abandoned throughout Spain.
Potential sites were vetted. Tax breaks were offered. More new infrastructure was promised. And after roughly six months of negotiations, incentives, and backroom dealing, the Madrid dormitory town of Alcorcón was selected in February 2013 as the site of this next bit of urban panacea. Catalan officials, disappointed but not to be outdone, pivoted to a new project called BCN World to compete with the Madrid initiative. The 2,041-acre (826 hectare), $6.2 billion project was to include six theme parks, six hotels, multiple casinos, restaurants, theaters, and offices overlooking the Mediterranean coast in the town of Tarragona, 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Barcelona.61
The implications are astonishing. Roughly two and a half years after the near collapse of the Spanish economy because of an unhealthy addiction to urbanization activities, Spain’s two largest cities were in pursuit of three of the largest speculative building projects in the country’s history, despite having thousands of acres of incompletely urbanized land in the country’s hinterlands and unfinished projects throughout its urban cores. By December 2013, the “EuroVegas” project had been canceled because of an inability to resolve the developer’s demands with broader EU laws.62 The Barcelona project remains in development. And as of December 2014, Wang Jianlin, one of China’s richest men, was proposing yet another entertainment megaproject for the Madrid periphery, looking to leverage the capital’s seemingly insatiable appetite for new urban development.63
This response should be of little surprise to the keen observer of contemporary urbanization trends. The continued pursuit of these speculative initiatives is indicative of an increasingly common belief that mega-building projects offer the most expedient solutions to a polity’s entrenched social and economic challenges. Even as severe urbanization-induced economic and social crises befell those places mentioned in the opening of this essay, numerous other polities have continued their speculative pursuits, showing limited inclination toward inflection or correction.
Dubai, like Spain, has doubled down on continued urbanization activities despite the International Monetary Fund having warned the Emirate of the emergence of yet another potential asset bubble as property prices increased more than 20 percent from 2012 to 2013. Nonetheless, Dubai has continued to pursue new megaprojects like the Mohammed Bin Rashid City and the 2020 World Expo, a trade convention-cum-world’s fair.64
Panama has chosen to emulate urbanization-driven economic growth models pursued elsewhere, looking to become, in the words of its president, the “Dubai of the Pacific.”65 Private development of high-end multiunit housing, and government spending on infrastructure has driven much of this economic expansion, with the country averaging over 8 percent annual GDP growth between 2006 and 2013, a rate closer to emerging Asian economies than its own Latin American neighbors.66
Turkey, like Panama, continues to rely on urbanization activities as a primary instrument in its economic modernization.67 Government policies have included the reestablishment and empowerment of Turkey’s housing development authority; an expansion of laws permitting foreign ownership of Turkish land; an “Urban Transformation” law intended replace poorly built neighborhoods throughout Istanbul; and the promotion of multibillion-dollar mega-infrastructure projects.68
And of course there is China, where the instrumentalization of urbanization activities for economic and political purposes has led to widespread accusations of corruption and wasteful development.69 Municipal governments in China, as in Spain, have depended heavily on revenue from the sale of newly valuable rural lands. These locations, recently designated for urbanization, are being used as collateral against new debt to fund major infrastructure and cultural construction projects, as well as to provide operating revenue for a polity.70 The result is that many second- and third-tier Chinese cities are growing faster than their populations, in turn depleting resources, denuding the environment, and displacing rural populations that stand in the way of this transformation.71
Yet perhaps the most telling response to the recent urbanization induced financial crisis has been seen in Africa, where, shortly after the downturn, numerous proposals for speculative settlement began appearing in contexts as varied as Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Tanzania, to name just a few.72 Population and economic growth projections for the continent, in combination with the shoddy state of its older cities, are said to be the motivation behind these initiatives. Yet these so-called African new towns are heavily reliant on exogenous models of urbanization-driven economic growth employed in places like China and the Middle East.73
What does this increasing proliferation of speculative urbanization have to do with suburbia? In short: everything. What is commonly categorized as “suburban” is nothing more than the inevitable horizontal expansion of settlement driven by a global capitalist economy. Postwar American housing policy and the US interstate system were deployed with similar intentions more than half a century ago, if over a much longer time threshold. The contemporary model is simply accelerated, intensified, and more urban, in that low-density formats of housing are being replaced with moderate to high-density configurations, and vehicular highways are being swapped for high-speed rail. The particular format of these contemporary expansions of settlement and infrastructure, then, is immaterial to our discussion here. The growth of the phenomenon is what must be engaged. (fig. 3.7.10)
Despite the widespread claims of rupture that followed our most recent economic crisis, the examples above clearly demonstrate that the macroeconomic theories and mechanisms that motivated that particular moment in history remain firmly entrenched and minimally affected. In turn, design and planning must understand that the speculative expansions of settlement that were so central to that moment will continue in perpetuity, or at least as long as capitalism remains the dominant global economic system. As such, urbanization activities undertaken from these speculative motivations demand a new set of design and planning responses—responses that acknowledge the political and economic motivations behind these initiatives, but more critically, responses that anticipate the implicit volatility and wastefulness of these pursuits.
To understand the urgency of such a shift, one need only consider the myriad unintended consequences associated with these models of urbanization-induced economic growth. Artificially inflated land values, potentially massive capital waste, increased public and private debt, severe social disenfranchisement, environmental degradation, and potential political unrest are but a few. And while the incidence and severity of these consequences vary, we can presume that the increasing instrumentalization of urbanization as a primary driver of economic growth will result in a corresponding proliferation of these unintended outcomes. Thus, the ethical, social, economic, and environmental challenges that emerge from speculative urbanization practices present the biggest obstacle to and greatest motivation for retooling the practical and theoretical focus of contemporary urban design and planning.
Notably, the concern with these speculative activities is less a matter of the projects being pursued than it is of the social, environmental, political, and fiscal consequences that result. To be sure, this risk is inherent in all large-scale expansions of settlement, speculative or otherwise. However, it becomes intensified as the scale of these expansions increases or as the frequency with which they occur accelerates.
Such circumstances suggest a revised approach to contemporary expansions of settlement, and the need to elaborate and deploy dynamic operating systems for urbanization that guide, but do not rigidly control, the implementation and occupation of these pursuits. This approach would shift the disciplinary products of this work away from solely defining the preferred outcome of proposals for new settlement plans, toward the anticipation of the myriad externalities and states of incompletion that may emerge over time. Such an attitude embraces the risk associated with these speculative pursuits as an attribute worth leveraging in the creation of new value centers and manifold contingencies, rather than something needing to be designed away.
While this may seem like a radical proposition, such a reorientation in no way precludes any of the myriad motivations that currently drive these speculative activities. Rather, it looks to harness these demands—defining new destinations for labor and capital, elevating land values, expanding tax revenue, creating the perception and image of growth, providing competitively distinct urban form, ensuring the capacity to accommodate population expansion, and more—all in the pursuit of approaches to the expansion of settlements that productively function in some capacity, even when they are interrupted or fail.
Such a reorientation relates specifically to what could be characterized as the “urban design” scale of practice. However, despite a retooled planning and design approach, the preceding legislative and financing processes that drive this urbanization remain unad-dressed. And in truth, until these motivating protocols and procedures are modified, planning and design’s influence on speculative urbanization processes will remain measured at best.
Such a paradox poses an existential question for the disciplines involved in this work. On the one hand, despite adjustments to the means and methods employed, such a retooling does not change the fact that the work of these disciplines is more often than not rendered an instrument of capital and politics. On the other hand, we might optimistically infer that this instrumentalization suggests the possibility of an inherent, untapped agency in the work of planning and design. The challenge lies in enabling the logics and intelligence of a retooled approach to the physical articulation and deployment of speculative settlement to infiltrate the political and economic structures at the root of these endeavors. Achieving this is obviously easier said than done.
Whether this casts the urban designer in the role of negotiator, mediator, entrepreneur, manager, strategist, or tactician cannot be said with any degree of certainty. Perhaps it is all these things at different moments. What we can say with certainty is that the current disciplinary engagement by urban design and planning with the phenomenon of speculative urbanization is ominously inadequate, particularly given the seeming inevitability of its incidence and the increasing intensity of its consequence.
This essay is adapted from Christopher Marcinkoski, The City That Never Was (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015).
2 Oriol Nel·lo, “Herencias territoriales, exploraciones geográficas y designios politicos,” in Ruinas modernas: Una topografía del lucro, ed. Julia Schulz-Dornburg (Barcelona: Ambit serveis editorials, 2012), 25.
3 Yan Sun, Pritha Mitra, and Alejandro Simone, “The Driving Force behind the Boom and Bust in Construction in Europe,” IMF Working Paper, European Department, August 2013, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp13181.pdf.
4 See “GDP Per Capita (Current US$),” World Bank, accessed April 15, 2014, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?page=1.
5 Eugenio L. Burriel, “Subversion of Land-Use Plans and the Housing Bubble in Spain,” Urban Research and Practice 4, no. 3 (2011): 232–37.
6 Celia Barbero-Sierra, Maria J. Marques, and Manuel Ruíz-Pérez, “The Case of Urban Sprawl in Spain as an Active and Irreversible Driving Force for Desertification,” Journal of Arid Environments 90 (2013): 101.
7 Juan Romero, Fernando Jiménez, and Manuel Villoria, “(Un)sustainable Territories: Causes of the Speculative Bubble in Spain (1996–2010) and Its Territorial, Environmental, and Sociopolitical Consequences,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 30 (2012): 473.
8 Quoted in Borja Bergareche, “The Pain in Spain,” World Policy Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 55.
9 Nuria Benach and Andres Walliser, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Urban Problems and Issues in Contemporary Spanish and Portuguese Cities,” Urban Research and Practice 4, no. 3 (2011): 230.
10 “Employment and Unemployment (Labour Force Survey),” Eurostat, accessed May 10, 2014, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs/overview.
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14 Jesús M. González Pérez, “Urban Planning System in Contemporary Spain,” European Planning Studies 15, no. 1 (2007): 33–35; and Burriel, “Subversion of Land-Use Plans,” 238.
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20 Burriel, “Subversion of Land-Use Plans,” 239.
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22 Burriel, “Subversion of Land-Use Plans,” 242–45.
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25 These previous housing bubbles occurred between 1969 and 1974 and 1986 and 1992. See González Pérez, “Real Estate and Economic Crisis.”
26 Barbero-Sierra, Marques, and Ruíz-Pérez, “Case of Urban Sprawl,” 100.
27 Ministerio de Vivienda / Ministerio de Fomento, accessed March 25, 2014, http://www.fomento.gob.es/MFOM/LANG_CASTELLANO/DIRECCIONES_GENERALES/ARQ_VIVIENDA/.
28 González Pérez, “Real Estate and Economic Crisis,” 1582.
29 Sharon Smyth, Neil Callanan, and Dara Doyle, “Spain Real Estate ‘Madness’ Continues despite Burst Housing Bubble,” Bloomberg News, May 2, 2012, accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-01/madness-in-spain-lingers-as-ireland-chases-recovery-mortgages.html.
30 Guillermo Abril, “Living Alone,” El Pais in English, January 31, 2011, accessed October 10, 2015, http://elpais.com/elpais/2011/01/31/inenglish/1296454843_850210.html.
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33 Ibid., 234.
34 González Pérez, “Real Estate and Economic Crisis,” 1574.
35 Cabré and Módenes, “Homeownership and Social Inequality,” 235–36.
36 Julie Pollard, “Political Framing in National Housing Systems: Lessons from Real Estate Developers in France and Spain,” in The Politics of Housing Booms and Busts, ed. Herman M. Schwartz and Leonard Seabrooke (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 176.
37 Oriol Nel·lo, “La tercera fase del proceso de metropolitanización en España,” in Los procesos urbanos postfordistas, ed. A. Artigues et al. (Palma de Mallorca: Universitat de les Illes Balears and Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, 2007), 19–32.
38 Benach and Walliser, “Introduction,” 230.
39 See Isidro López and Emmanuel Rodríguez, “The Spanish Model,” New Left Review 69 (May–June 2011): 20; and Guillermo de la Dehesa, La primera gran crisis financiera del siglo XXI: Orígenes, detonante, efectos, respuestas y remedies (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2009), 443–44.
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46 Economist, “The Morning After.”
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49 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Factbook 2014: Economic, Environmental, and Social Statistics (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2014).
50 Royo, “Lessons from the Integration of Spain and Portugal,” 693.
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54 Royo, “Lessons from the Integration of Spain and Portugal,” 693.
55 Ibid., 691.
56 Bel, “Infrastructure and Nation Building,” 688.
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58 Suzanne Daley and Raphael Minder, “Newly Built Ghost Towns Haunt Banks in Spain,” New York Times, December 17, 2010, accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/world/europe/18spain.html?pagewanted=all&module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar.
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70 Kam Wing Chan, “Fundamentals of China’s Urbanization and Policy,” in “Urbanization in China: Processes and Policies,” special issue, China Review 10, no. 1 (2010): 66–68.
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72 Vanessa Watson, “African Urban Fantasies: Dreams or Nightmares?,” Environment and Urbanization 26, no. 215 (2014): 229.
73 Jane Lumumba, “Why Africa Should Be Wary of Its ‘New Cities,’” Informal City Dialogues, Rockefeller Foundation, May 2, 2013, accessed October 10, 2015, http://nextcity.org/informalcity/entry/why-africa-should-be-wary-of-its-new-cities.
