Urban Development in Spain: Pre-Industrial to Modern Era

Posted on Dec 10, 2024 in Geography

The Pre-Industrial City: The Old Town

Definition: The pre-industrial city is the oldest urbanized part of the city, from its origins to the beginning of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. It occupies a small area of great historical and artistic-cultural significance. Some, such as Toledo, Mérida, Segovia, Santiago de Compostela, Salamanca, Ávila, Córdoba, and Alcalá, are designated as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

Pre-Industrial Heritage

A) Common Features

Presence of walls with defensive, health (isolation from epidemics), and tax (to ensure the collection of taxes) functions.
Irregular layout: Characteristic of ancient cities and medieval Christian and Muslim cities. However, there are examples of radiocentric layouts from the High Middle Ages, cities that emerged along linear routes (Santiago de Compostela), and grid cities from Roman, medieval, and Baroque periods (Tarragona, Castellón, and Aranjuez).
Closed plot and single-family low-rise buildings with gardens and yards, alongside official buildings such as churches, mosques, town halls, and palaces.
Various land uses: Housing mixed with shops, workshops, and public buildings, with some specialization by district (different guilds).
Hierarchical social groups coexist: Occupation of space, with a center for political and religious elites, periphery for workers, and separate neighborhoods for minorities (Moorish quarters, Jewish quarters).

B) Characteristics of Each Period

Roman: Regular layout derived from the military camp, with two main axes, NS (Cardo) and EO (Decumano), and a central square or Forum with main buildings (Zaragoza, León, Mérida, Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia).
Middle Ages, Muslim: A walled core or Medina, where mosques, the souk (market), and residential neighborhoods were located. Suburbs or outskirts housed working-class neighborhoods that were eventually walled. Narrow, winding streets, with no clear path, sometimes ending in battlements. Houses had few windows and shutters (Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Murcia).
Middle Ages, Christian: A castle or church with walls, and a central square where the market was held. Varied layouts, as seen in the flat layouts. Notable buildings include churches, palaces, and city halls. Houses had a shop-commerce area at the front door, the master’s home, and an attic above for trainees.
Renaissance: New neighborhoods with a regular layout beyond the ancient gates, with a market square and town hall surrounded by uniform buildings, and new or “major” straight streets. Other buildings include monasteries and palaces.
Baroque and Enlightenment: Beautification of the city by creating major avenues and squares, gardens, tree-lined avenues, new homogeneous neighborhoods, religious and civic monuments, hospitals, hospices, administrative and cultural buildings, and improved infrastructure for supply and sanitation.

Transformations in the Industrial Age

In the Spotlight

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reform and renewal policies were implemented in the most valued areas, while the rest deteriorated. Streets were rectified and lined, and new ones were opened. Squares were also created, favored by the confiscation of church property with orchards and gardens. These major roads, inspired by the Paris model, were long and wide, dotted with stately buildings. Some were drawn from the historic quarter, like Madrid’s Gran Vía, while others linked the historical city with the bourgeois expansion or railway stations, as in Oviedo and León. Their buildings housed tertiary functions, becoming the main streets of the city with luxury shops, banks, corporate offices, casinos, theaters, and trendy cafes. In the 1960s, to increase the profitability of urban land, part of the Old Town was destroyed, opening new streets or changing its route.

The Plot

Initially, densification occurred in confiscated buildings, which were reused for other official duties, military locations, or cultural needs in the city center. Other buildings were replaced by collective housing, with a historicist style that mixed various styles (neoclassical, Gothic, Neo-Baroque, neo-Mudejar) with new materials such as iron, cement, and glass. Modern buildings became increasingly vertical, in tune with their surroundings, except for some cities where conservation policies prevented reforms, leading to the deterioration of the oldest areas and neglect by residents, as in Toledo, Salamanca, and Segovia.

Land Use

Renovated buildings were outsourced for tertiary activities that required access and architectural leadership and could capitalize on high land prices (banks, corporate offices, public institutions, shopping centers, hotels). This transformed the center into the commercial and business hub of the city, displacing residential uses and leading to saturation with people and traffic, as well as damage from pollution and noise.

Social Level

There was growing social segregation, with old, popular, low-income neighborhoods degrading while renewed areas attracted higher incomes.

Problems and Changes in the Post-Industrial Age

Integrated rehabilitation policies were implemented for the old town, including morphological, functional, and social aspects:

Path: Unsuitable for modern traffic of people and cars, causing congestion and loss of squares and public spaces. Solutions included pedestrianizing streets, widening plazas, and landscaping.
Building: Deterioration and contrasts between neighborhoods, with low-income areas alongside new or rehabilitated homes for high-income individuals. Historic buildings were adapted for new public and private uses (convents converted into museums, markets, shopping centers).
Land Uses: Traditional trade and craft uses were lost in the most degraded neighborhoods and replaced by immigrant activities (wholesalers, exotic restaurants, dollar stores, or bazaars), while renovated areas specialized in tertiary use. Efforts were made to promote new uses, recovering traditional trade, cultural use, tourism, etc., as bases for marketing or promotion policies.
Socially Urban: In old towns, attempts were made to alleviate social polarization by installing middle classes.

The Industrial City: Expansion and Neighborhoods

Definition of Expansion

The expansion of the pre-industrial city occurred after the demolition of the walls due to growth caused by industrial development in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which attracted a large rural population during the rural exodus. Medium-sized and small cities were less affected. There are three types of expansions: the bourgeois expansion, industrial and worker neighborhoods in the suburbs, and the garden city.

A) Bourgeois Expansion

The Widening at Source: The old walls lost their defensive function and were demolished, replaced by walks and boulevards that separated the old spaces from the new ones. This new space was ordered, following a regular, hygienic layout, endowed with sewerage, water supply, paved green areas, and economic benefits due to houses, shops, transport, etc.
It Starts With: Grid streets, wide and straight, large blocks, open on one or two sides, and landscaped with a low-density plot, open and low-rise buildings, mansions, and villas with gardens or mid-rise buildings in a historicist style, largely for bourgeois residential use due to its high price. Initially, many workers settled in basements, ground floors, lofts, and townhouses in hidden courtyards near industrial sites, hidden behind walls to escape municipal control, in homes of 10 to 40 m².
Examples of Expansions: Barcelona, 1859 Plan of Ildefonso Cerdá, and Madrid, 1860 Plan of Carlos María de Castro.

Transformations of the Expansion

Urban transport was introduced to improve accessibility (rail, car).
The plot thickened when blocks were closed with new buildings, and many gardens were also built.
Buildings were verticalized with penthouses, replacing single-family homes with apartment blocks in the 1960s during the Baby Boom.
Land use was mixed, combining residential with tertiary (shops, offices) that spread from the historical center’s main streets.
Currently, aged areas have been upgraded due to good accessibility, attracting specialized tertiary activities.

B) Industrial and Worker Neighborhoods in the Suburbs

Industrial areas and slums for the proletariat, created in the nineteenth century, offered a great contrast to bourgeois neighborhoods.

It is a peripheral area adjacent to major roads and highways or near railway stations, forming the so-called “station areas,” which attracted services (halts, workshops, warehouses, depots, central markets, abattoirs, etc.). These areas also devalued the “hidden neighborhoods” with industries.
At Home: The layout was uncontrolled, with private plots of rural land closed by their owners. The plot was dense, with low-quality buildings and individual houses or flats. Land use was mixed, with residential areas alongside industries, workshops, and warehouses. Infrastructure was absent, leading to foci of infection, poor health, and social discontent.
Today: These areas have been incorporated into the city as urban growth has given them a central position. Industrial areas have been affected by the industrial crisis. The best areas have been occupied by tertiary uses (shopping centers, recreational university campuses) or affluent residential populations. The worst areas are like solar or abandoned buildings that could be rehabilitated in the future. The best places in working-class neighborhoods have been reused for tertiary use and have appreciated. The least appreciated areas have been abandoned as marginal, with accentuated deterioration.

C) Landscaped Neighborhoods

Definition: These appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a product of the diffusion of naturalistic ideas advocating an approach to nature, and hygienist ideas that valued the positive effects of the sun and fresh air on health. This resulted in an approach from the countryside to the city in the form of the garden city and the Linear City.
Garden City: Developed by the British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, it resulted in neighborhoods of single-family homes with gardens, designed in principle for the proletariat, as the bourgeoisie lived in the center or urban expansion. The Cheap Housing Act of 1911 (inspired by the gardens of English colonies and workers in urban utopian socialism) helped, as its inception sought to eliminate poor housing in the suburbs, allowing municipalities to expropriate land for working-class neighborhoods with affordable homes. The houses were detached, monotonous, with confined space and small gardens. Due to low profitability, private companies soon targeted the middle class, resulting in higher-quality garden neighborhoods.
La Ciudad Lineal: Created by Arturo Soria, it consisted of a large, 40-meter-wide street lined with blocks of single-family homes with gardens. Basic services (sewers, water, electricity) and transportation (streetcars) were located in the center. It aimed to end social segregation by including housing for different social classes and prices, but only workers settled there. It was intended to go around the outskirts of Madrid, but only a section in the northeast was built. It is currently heavily modified, as it has appreciated, and many houses have been replaced by office buildings, shopping centers, and apartment blocks.

The Periphery and Recent Urban Transformations

After the Civil War, construction slowed, but from the 1960s, Spanish cities grew due to the Baby Boom, the rural exodus, and tourism development. This created enormous suburbs along transport routes, eventually joining with neighboring municipalities to form urban agglomerations. Currently, growth is slower but continues to spread through space due to the dispersion of population and economic activity. This raises the sprawling city, manifested in the formation of peri-urban areas or urban production units with imprecise boundaries (spaces of rural-urban transition in the periphery where rural uses such as agriculture are mixed with urban and industrial uses, residential areas, and other services such as transportation). On the periphery are residential areas, industrial areas, and areas of equipment.

A) Residential Neighborhoods on the Periphery

Slum Areas: Illegal construction on rural land without organization, self-built houses with waste materials, and without basic services such as water, electricity, or sanitation. Its peak was during the rural exodus in the 1950s. Efforts are made to eradicate them by relocating residents to social housing, but the problem has increased with immigration today.
Official Promotion Housing Neighborhoods: Booming in the 1940s-1960s, these are subsidized housing or official aid with a limited sale price or rent. They are open-weave, monotonous neighborhoods with poor-quality houses that have aged prematurely, creating problems with equipment and services. Currently, they are being rehabilitated privately.
Privately Developed Neighborhoods: From the 1960s, with open frames or tower blocks with ample space between houses for gardens and parks. Buildings of great height proliferated, with a confusing layout of streets but more monotonous geometric buildings, known as “beehive” neighborhoods.
Closed Block Neighborhoods: From the 1980s-1990s, attempts were made to recover the human dimension with lower height, density frames, and the presence of collective areas, private courtyards (pools, gardens, playgrounds), or public spaces.
Areas of Detached Houses: On the outskirts from the 1980s due to the desire for nature and the use of cars, with open frames, exempt individual buildings or townhouses, and residential use.

B) Equipment and Industrial Areas

These areas are located close to major access roads to the city, seeking proximity to urban areas with cheap and abundant land. Industrial areas include industrial parks from the 1950s-1960s that have been rehabilitated to house new businesses. New business and technology parks also appear in areas of high environmental quality, as well as craft or industrial estates attached to companies with limited resources. Equipment areas are the result of decentralization to the periphery and include shopping centers, college towns or campuses, hospitals or health cities, and cemeteries.

Urban Agglomerations

Urban agglomerations are formed by the connection of villages due to growth, and they form several models:

Metropolitan Area

A large urban area surrounding a major city and encompassing several communes with socio-economic relations.

a) Features

They are chaired by a principal or central city whose economic activity is projected outside the metropolitan area.
Socio-economic relations are established between the central city and the core area, with the former offering jobs and services and the latter providing workers and secondary activities that require abundant and cheaper soil than in the city.
The transport and communication network is essential to ensure these relations.
Socially, the nuclei have an urban lifestyle with young people and social variety depending on economic level.
The spatial structure defines two models: concentric crowns around the central core and radial sectors starting from the center to the periphery along communication lines. In Madrid, the two models overlap.

b) Origin and Evolution of Spanish Metropolitan Areas

In the industrial stage, during the first third of the twentieth century, Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao grew, integrating nearby rural communities. Between 1960-1975, this occurred in other cities. Economic activity grew, attracting more people from rural areas.
In the post-industrial stage, between 1975 and the mid-1990s, a crisis caused by stagnant or declining demographics, a decline in birth rates, and immigration affected the central city. Population and economic activity spread to cheaper areas in municipalities within the metropolitan area, rural areas, or even nearby areas. Municipalities diversified their population with the arrival of middle classes from the center, improved facilities and standard of living, although specializing in certain sectors (traditional activities, residential property, suburban bedroom communities, etc.).
Since the mid-1990s, metropolitan areas have recovered their growth due to lower foreign immigration in the central city. Population and activities continue to spread to larger spaces and dynamic activities while retaining control over the metropolitan area.

Other Urban Areas

Conurbations: Agglomerations formed from the parallel growth of two or more cities that join while maintaining their independence, due to tourism (Málaga-Marbella), economic specialization (Alicante-Elche-Santa Pola), or city-port connection (Pontevedra-Marín).
Urban Region: A discontinuous agglomeration formed by scattered cities or an “urban nebula” dense enough to extend urban characteristics, created by the parallel growth of cities of different sizes and functions (Central Asturias).
Megalopolis: An agglomeration of a large area consisting of several supraregional urban elements (metropolitan area, conurbation, urban region, etc.) with different functions, which grow to form a discontinuous area without major fractures (Mediterranean Axis from France to Cartagena).