Urban growth, land-use planning, and political change: the case of the Costa Brava

Abstract

This article explores current issues of urban development on the Costa Brava -Spain's highly successful and environmentally sensitive tourist area. It reviews briefly the region's geography, and uses several zones and temporal periods to point out the main features of the area's unequal development patterns. It list current development issues, relates recent legal and political changes to the practice of urban land use planning and considers possibilities for improving planning practice. Throughout, the article explores the hypothesis that, in spite of the approval of the Land Use Planning Law and of important regulations -that integrate both substantive and procedural guarantees into the urban planning process- democratic planning has only had a mixed success so far. During the first years of democracy -and after 40 years of limited political life- effective participation has been dominated by a selected set of actors with membership of the bureaucratic and technocratic classes, while other sectors have not been able to organize for effective political involvement.