The disappearance of public paths in Spain and its impact on landscape justice

ABSTRACT

The public paths network in Spain constitutes state property in the public domain which is endangered by disappearance or misappropriation. This exploratory article asks how this situation has an impact on the right to the landscape. We provide an overview of the situation of public paths in Spain, as well as examples from six case studies, which reveals that much conflict stems from changes in their use and the practices related to them. Public pathways play a key role in the perception of the territory, and their disappearance entails landscape injustices which we need to distinguish from landscapes of injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Drove ways
• public domain
• landscape justice
• heritage
• rural development

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Landscape Research Group under the 50th Anniversary Research Fund.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Landscape Research Group [50th Anniversary Research Fund].

Notes on contributors

Miguel Torres García

Miguel Torres García is an architect, planner and researcher in the field of urban studies and cultural heritage. He received his DPhil from the University of Manchester in 2015. Prior to that, he studied for an MSc degree in Spatial Planning at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden, and architecture at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. His research interests range from the history of architecture and urban spaces to lefebvrean and practice theories, with a particular focus on different frameworks for the analysis of space and place. He has accumulated professional experience in the fields of building design, international aid, and urban and territorial planning. He joined the Spanish consultancy Territoria SLU between March 2015 and December 2019, where he became further acquainted with landscape research and planning.

Michela Ghislanzoni

Michela Ghislanzoni is an architect with twenty years of professional experience. In 2011 she founded Territoria SLU (http://territoria.es), a consultancy for the research, characterization, and planning of landscapes and public open spaces; the protection, planning and enhancement of historical heritage; landscape impact assessment, and the development of tourism products with a territorial focus. He has published her writings on landscape, hiking, historical heritage and landscape impact assessment, and she belongs to networks of experts on spatial planning and landscape and renewable energies. She is an activist in defence of public paths and a member of the Plataforma Ibérica por los Caminos Públicos. She has recently organised the course ‘Public paths as an environmental resource. Knowing, defending, recovering and enhancing’, for the official Andalusian Environmental Training Programme.

Manuel Trujillo Carmona

Manuel Trujillo Carmona is a technician at the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), a sociology research centre dependent on the Spanish state, where he has been responsible for its statistics department since 1997. His main lines of work are the design of surveys and the analysis of small-scale data. In this field, he has been responsible for the design of more than a hundred surveys, as well as other data collection procedures. He is also the coordinator of the Plataforma Ibérica por los Caminos Públicos. This is an umbrella organisation that brings together twenty-nine associations from all over Spain, and has organised thirteen conferences attended by the leading experts on public pathways in the social, legal and administrative fields. Manuel has given more than thirty talks on the circumstances of the closure of public roads and its social consequences.