Instrument in property in Lleida (1979-1989)

Abstract

The article analyses the property cycle in a medium-sized Catalan city: Lleida (120.000 inhabitants), during the eighties.
The characteristics of the cycle and the spatial impact of the activity are related to urban politics at different levels (from local to national) and to the role of developers, who become highly influential urban agents.

Planning measures and the investment of public capital in urban sites, which is more common at times of crisis, also define the areas of future investment of private capital and the general characteristics of the newly created urban landscape. The interventions of estate agents respond basically to the behaviour of demand and urban policy. Both factors influence the rhythm of the property cycle, the location and type of intervention of the promotor.
The property crisis of the mid-seventies and the type of demand which provoked the latest «boom» of the late eighties (more solvent, and therefore quality-demanding) are, together with the high prices of sites, the major reasons for the concentration of the promotion-market in the most professional sector. These were the main agents in housing construction in the late eighties, in the face of almost non-existent public investment.