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Superbia

Spain became rich enough for suburbia very late, after the worst problems with premodern urban density had already been solved, and only shortly before planners around the world started to see urban density as desirable. But there are many countries that became rich after Spain and sprawled out. Apart from timing, Spain's cities benefited from sophisticated public and private planning efforts that helped them overcome many of the collective action problems that prevent dense building.
posted by chavenet on Jun 05, 2026 at 3:20 AM

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as a local govt. policy and planning nerd who's also woefully underinformed about cities outside the US, this was catnip for me. Thanks again, chavenet, and to any European MeFites who may share their thoughts about the article.
posted by martin q blank at 6:07 AM

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Thanks for the article. It's one of those articles where the mistakes about the things I know about are so grave that I question the points I don't know about, and also I am not at all a fan of the current deregulation agenda. People and communities need protection from greedy developers. Also Spain is maybe the European country worst hit by the short-term rental market, whether it caters to holidayers or so-called expats.

BUT, there are some good and relevant points. It's true that a lot of the quality of current Spanish planning stems from the fact that they "came late to the party" and essentially avoided some of the mistakes that were made elsewhere during the 1960s and -70s. It's also true that Spain has excellent professionals on every level of the work of planning.

I wonder if there is also climate and cultural aspect to this. Spain is very hot and dry during summer, and even if you have a car, there is nothing nice about driving from your home in a suburb to a mall to spend a traditional Spanish evening with a tapas crawl and a late dinner. People also still like to be able to go home during siesta, even though this is rarer today than just 30 years ago.
posted by mumimor at 6:45 AM

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I would love to hear about what the article got wrong. WIP has gotten housing policy stuff wrong before, and I would prefer not to be misinformed again.
posted by novalis_dt at 7:04 AM

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I think there's a strong cultural aspect here. Spaniards, most of them, really like living in cities. They like walking. The evening paseo is central to the culture. So is the plaza.

That said, there is a lot of exurban sprawl in some parts of the country. I lived in Galicia in a small town that was really just a lot of houses spread over the hills on both sides of the highway between Vigo and Portugal. It was entirely car-dependent for shopping and commuting, though I could at least walk to the local community center. This kind of sprawl seems to be more common in the northwest of the country; in the south, villages are more compact.

One glaring omission from the article is corruption: the Spanish state was almost wholly captured by real estate interests until the 2008 financial crisis, by which point the country had overbuilt so much there were entire empty suburbs around Madrid. The regulations the article bemoans are at least in part intended to rein in corruption. (This hasn't really been successful, from what I can tell.) Spain still has a housing surplus, or would if it weren't for the plague of short-term rentals gobbling up entire buildings.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 7:56 AM

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I was boggled by the bit about percent of land uses for roads. I'm imagining NYC with 1.35x as much road. That would be awful. Louder, more polluted, harder to walk around. Barcelona (when I visited fifteen years ago) was not awful -- it was lovely. I think they use some of their road for trash containerization, but probably less than 1% of it. Maybe nobody has a driveway, so they just use it for car storage? Still seems like a lot.

Also. 13 percent of Spain's economy is tourism, so complaining about short term rentals is an error.

Still, Spain doesn't have a housing surplus if prices are 6k EUR/m^2. (In case you're too American to convert, that's about $600/sq ft). That's a housing crisis. It's not quite NYC prices, but income-adjusted, NYC starts to look quite affordable.
posted by novalis_dt at 1:37 PM

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Also. 13 percent of Spain's economy is tourism, so complaining about short term rentals is an error.

This is such an ignorant statement I don't even know where to start.
posted by youthenrage at 2:02 PM

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Also. 13 percent of Spain's economy is tourism, so complaining about short term rentals is an error.

13.8% of the US economy is housing-related, so complaining about homelessness, shitty landlords, racial inequality, bush fires, typhoons, and noise pollution is an error.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 5:19 PM

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Spain has a housing crisis (in touristed cities) because a disgusting portion of housing stock is being used for short-term rentals instead of housing residents. Barcelona's government made the situation far worse by banning the construction of new hotels.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 6:57 PM

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Enh. Spain's a capitalist country designed to push money towards the rich. They just put a friendlier face on it than the US does.

If you visit moneyed cities like Marbella on the Costa del Sol, there's plenty of what I call US-style "shock and awechitecture": several-story-high shiny upscale buildings, long curved bowling-alley type avenues that seem designed to overwhelm the driver and pedestrian, and so forth.

Cities like Granada or Málaga, with a "casco histórico" to preserve, have suffered far less from inhuman-scale planning. But in those cities you'll find a housing crisis driven by short-term rentals and condo / home prices that suit a wealthy migrant's pocketbook much better than, say, the budget of a local barista or hair stylist, or even a physician. In Granada, much seems planned to cater to the tourists, not the locals. The homeless shelters do not lack for clients, many of whom are impoverished women over 40 with no family to support them.

I lived just outside Granada for almost four years, and I left Spain last year, mostly for reasons other than dollars. While I was still there, it was my fervent hope that "expats" (ugh) from the US and UK would not find my town, simply because they'd drive up the rents. The lack of local people who spoke English in the town probably kept those types at bay. (Yep, I'm a USian myself, but what makes me different from the majority of US migrants to Spain is that I'm a solo retired older woman on a tight budget, and my Spanish language skills are workable.)
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 11:35 PM

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I would love to hear about what the article got wrong.

Sorry, I was quite busy yesterday, but here is a part that made me flinch:

In continental Europe, robust legal structures enabling condominium ownership, where residents own a flat but share ownership of the underlying building, emerged only in the mid-twentieth century. Before then, flats were overwhelmingly rented. During the First World War, most European countries implemented rent controls, which lasted until the late twentieth century. In France and Germany, these largely destroyed the viability of 'build to let', as building owners could no longer recoup the cost of their investment. Given the weakness or absence of legal structures for multiple ownership of buildings, this meant the private sector had no easy way to build flats.

As a result, homebuilding either switched over to single-family housing or was taken over by the state. The densely massed blocks favored by the private build-to-let sector, which seek maximum rental income per square meter, were replaced immediately with small owner-occupier houses, or with whatever housing typologies government officials happened to favor. By 1930, Paris had extensive suburbs of downmarket single-family owner-occupier houses, while Berlin had acquired its famous Siedlungen, modernist social housing estates built by the municipal government at low to medium densities.

Almost everything in this section is just wrong. Either wrong in the sense that it is not true, or wrong in the sense that reality is far more complex and even rich in possibilities. Just one thing -- there are more countries in continental Europe than France and Germany, Germany consists of 16 states with different rules and regulations for housing, and somewhere en route the author seems to have misunderstood the facts. Every European has its own traditions and things that work in Vienna can't work in Bruxelles, although both cities have a lot of relatively affordable rental housing.

Condominium-types go way back in many cities in Europe, but they were not very popular before the 1980s which is a very long story, and not a good one, if you want affordable housing for everyone.

And I don't even know what this is in a European context: The densely massed blocks favored by the private build-to-let sector, which seek maximum rental income per square meter. I guess he means a block like the one I live in, which is of a type that is still quite normal many places in Europe, also as new build. But the way he describes it, it is a typology that depended on an unregulated market back in the day, and that has literally never been true, though of course regulations are very different today from in 1900.

It's wrong in the details too. I would never describe Paris as a city with extensive suburbs of downmarket single-family owner-occupier houses -- they exist, but at a far more moderate level than in the English-speaking countries. And the German Siedlungen have (had) many different organizations, from municipal social housing over company towns to housing associations and private landlords and they have changed ownership over time, depending on the state. Obviously, the incorporation of the Eastern States led to some huge structural changes.
posted by mumimor at 7:33 AM

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This is such an ignorant statement I don't even know where to start.

Where's the ignorance? Spain's tourism industry does seem to be about 13% of their GDP, afaict.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:56 PM

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