Many large cities are, in fact, metropolitan areas or regions that share problems and difficulties, but do not have the appropriate government instruments to confront them.
The headline statement may seem childish. Any city has clear boundaries. And, likewise, any city has a local government that exercises its functions and manages its powers in the corresponding area. But, in Spain there are many cities that have spread throughout the territory until they have become true regions or urban agglomerations. And, in those cases, there is no relationship between the real city (that continuous urban fabric) and institutional policy. Government bodies continue to adhere to the administrative limits of the 19th century and thus the capacities to address new problems that arise and evolve at different levels are not at all adequate.
In practice we are talking about a process of urban regionalization that, thanks also to digitalization, has greatly expanded the possibilities of interconnectivity and efficiency. It was thought that after the pandemic and with accelerated digitalization, mobility would be restricted, thanks to the growing presence of work onlinebut the truth is that mobility has increased, since people can, in fact, connect from anywhere. At the same time, the pressing problems generated by the lack of affordable housing are driving many people to leave the center of cities to move to the periphery, whether or not it is in the same city, where they can find more meters for less money, although this forces them to multiply their trips.
Between 2001 and 2023, urban areas in Spain have increased their population by 20%. Not in all of Spain the situation presents itself with the same characteristics. There are some cities whose territory is extraordinarily large. Among others, municipalities such as Cáceres, Badajoz, Córdoba or Albacete exceed 1,000 km² and Zaragoza is close to it. Only this last city and Córdoba stand out for their high population. At the other extreme would be very densely populated cities in extremely small territories. Cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Las Palmas or Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which do not exceed 150 km², host a population that in all cases exceeds 400,000 inhabitants. And in between, cities like Madrid, with 600 km² and more than three million inhabitants. As is well known, we have a large concentration of the population in a very small territory. More and more people are on the Mediterranean side, in the archipelagos and in the large urban area of Madrid, with branches to Toledo, Aranjuez and Guadalajara. 70% of the country’s population lives in 9% of Spanish municipalities.
What we want to highlight in this article is the tremendous disconnection between urban problems and government capabilities. In Spain there is no institutional definition of what metropolitan areas are. Some attempts at definition have been made, using the connection between housing and work and other elements, by the Ministry of Housing and Agenda. Many large cities are, in fact, metropolitan areas or regions that share problems and difficulties, but do not have the appropriate government instruments to address them. The urban area of Madrid has 52 municipalities with more than 6 million inhabitants in 2,800 km². The one that surrounds Barcelona brings together more than 5 million inhabitants with 165 municipalities involved in 3,200 km². Valencia incorporates into this continuous urban fabric, 45 municipalities in which 1.6 million people live in just 600 km². And so we could continue with Seville, Málaga, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Oviedo-Gijón, Alicante-Elche, etc.
The Autonomous Communities have the powers to organize this issue, attributing government capacities and competencies and resources to those conglomerates that share problems and that barely manage to coordinate on some issues. The exception is the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (limited to 36 municipalities and covering only 600 km²), recovered in 2010, after its dissolution by Jordi Pujol in 1985 in his peculiar duel with Pasqual Maragall. A similar fate befell the Consell Metropolità de l’Horta de Valencia, which was dissolved in 1999, but in this case its recovery has not occurred. There are also entities with less institutionalization that promote coordination policies in some places, such as Bilbao. And in others we find coordination agencies for very specific topics such as water, waste management or transportation networks, but without coordination between them. But, the truth is that regional institutions have generally been reluctant to recognize the existence of these large urban areas and grant them government capabilities. In the case of single-provincial communities, such as Madrid, Asturias or Murcia, we could think that the autonomous government de facto exercises that function, but evidently the sensitivity to the local is not the same.
The needs to have powerful urban policies with strategic capacity are increasingly evident. We only need to remember the issue of housing, but also the issue of connectivity, local food, reindustrialization policy, the challenges posed by the climate emergency, demographic change and the need to address better care for the elderly. and care policy, waste management or transport networks. It is not about eliminating municipalities or reducing the decision-making capacity of regional governments, but about politically and economically encouraging all avenues of institutional coordination between municipalities. The large service companies (water, energy, construction, transportation…) that do not see their work limited by administrative limits from another century, in fact “govern” more than the institutions. New forms of metropolitan governance are needed that, without losing the advantages of proximity that each municipality can use in relation to its neighbors, allow, at the same time, to have leadership and management capabilities. continuum urban that exceeds administrative limits. Thus balancing from the public sphere the capacity for articulation and pressure of the commercial sphere.
#city #governs
