https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-3432
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ABSTRACT
This article examines how spatial planning systems have changed in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece in times of economic recession and austerity politics, in amid pressures of external actors, and local conditions and traditions. We analyse the round of reforms of spatial planning and territorial governance implemented by national governments under pressures by European institutions, as well as local responses to them. On the one hand, we highlight how European institutions have used the conditionalities attached to bailout packages and other instrument of pressure to frame what can be considered an implicit Southern European spatial planning policy developed by the European Union. On the other, we suggest that Southern European planning amid crisis and austerity should be understood, together, as field that problematizes the idea of Europeanization of planning; a space used as ‘prototype’ for new rounds of neoliberalization; and a political space that continuously develops through top-down/bottom-up dialectic conflicts.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for constructive critique and detailed suggestions, which helped us streamline and strengthen our arguments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Simone Tulumello http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-3432
Giancarlo Cotella http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8445-412X
Frank Othengrafen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6348-4485
Notes
1 The excessive dependence of the economy on the construction sector is visible in Greece as well, and this is also a characteristic of the Italian economy since the second half of the 1900.
2 In Greece, the residue of housing loans increased dramatically from 17 billion Euro in 2000 to 93.7 billion Euro in 2007 (Triantafyllopoulos and Kandyla Citation2010).
3 At the same time, however, some national governments and (especially centre-right) political parties may have exploited the crisis as an opportunity. According to Hopkin and Dubin (Citation2014), in Italy and Spain political parties have tried to strengthen their electoral position by delivering policies to favour their key constituents. Moury and Standring (Citation2017) suggest that in Portugal, while the bailout has limited the executive autonomy, it also made them stronger in relation to domestic actors, giving strong arguments to deliver reforms allegedly necessary to save the country. Indeed, in 2015, toward the end of the mandate during which the deepest austerity measures had been implemented, the former Portuguese Ministry of Health proudly claimed: ‘fomos para alem da Troika’, ‘we went beyond the Troika’ (troika is a term ironically used to refer to the three lenders International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank).
4 In some Spanish cities such as Madrid or Valencia this development has been going on for quite some time: as shown above, an entrepreneurial approach to spatial planning and missing regulations have been among the driving forces of the economic crisis.
5 It is important to remind that, also in this area, governments may have exploited the crisis to implement policies they wanted to implement in the first place, as this excerpt from an interview with a Portuguese Secretary of State suggests (Moury and Standring Citation2017, 10): ‘in urban renewal, the Memorandum includes a rapid eviction process that takes place out of the courts; this is strongly contested by lawyers and the judicial professions because they make money from the processes and the lengthy proceedings. It was included in the Memorandum to give it the force of an agreement with the Troika and so something that had to be done’. However, this aspect will not be analysed in more detail as it is not presenting our main research focus.
6 Terms pinpointing the memoranda of understanding signed by Portugal (2011) and Greece (2011, 2012 and 2015).
7 Accompanied by the New Juridical Regime of Territorial Management Instruments (Decree-Law 80/2015) and the New Regime of Classification, Reclassification and Qualification of Land (Regulatory Decree 15/2015).
8 Complemented by special regimes to ease the privatization of public real estate (Law 3986/2011) and strategic investments (Law 3894/2010, amended by Law 4146/2013).
9 Requests to privatize part of the rail system, abolish authorizations/licensing for the wholesale and retail sector, liberalize the rental market, simplify the rules for renovation, including by reducing safety requirements and granting landlords the possibility to terminate rent contracts (EC Citation2011b, 85–88).
10 Available at https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/01_mou_20150811_en1.pdf (accessed 30 November 2019).
11 In Italy, spatial planning is a competence shared with regional governments. Regions develop their own spatial planning laws within the frame of the national framework law
12 The law was dubbed Sblocca Italia, Unjam Italy.
13 Italian planning has historically been considered a restrain to economic growth in a country where real estate and construction were among the engines of economic growth since the post-Second World War boom (Scattoni and Falco Citation2011). With more emphasis since the 1980s, the affirmation of liberalist politics was mirrored by discourses about planning regulations as ‘big and small laces’ (lacci e lacciuoli) that allegedly tie economic development (cf. Salzano Citation1998 ).
14 In 1998, a decision by the Supreme Court reverted the attempts to harmonize planning and land use regulation at the national level (see Rullan Citation1999).
15 The case of the municipal masterplan of Madrid is quite telling. Approved in 1997, the plan has been declared null by the High Court of Justice of Madrid in 2003 because of the missing justification for the transformation of areas previously protected into developable ones. Further revisions of the plan, which kept the lands developable while trying to make the planning process more ‘flexible’ (Vitoria Citation2013, 239), have been declared null again in 2008, 2012 and 2015, while a new revision had been launched in 2014, but was abandoned because of the change of government in 2015. For a period of almost 20 years characterized by governmental continuity, Madrid has not had a municipal masterplan in force (see Hernández Citation2015).
16 Municipalities had 90 days to elaborate a proposal of reorganization. Due to absence of time, most municipalities presented no proposal and, with few exceptions (like Lisbon, which had launched the reform years before), new parishes were designed by a national working group and imposed by law.
17 Never formally released, the letter, signed by Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi and dated 5 August, was published by the press. Available at www.voltairenet.org/article171574.html (accessed 30 November 2019).
18 Which, in some cases, like Turin, ended up creating political and administrative impasse (see Caruso, Cotella, and Pede Citation2016).
19 As declared, for instance, in 2011, by then leader of the party José María Aznar (La Vanguardia Citation2011).
20 The reform was warmly welcomed by the OECD (Citation2013).
21 See the very different experiences of coalitions between left-wing, centre-left parties and Podemos in Spain (e.g. Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Valencia), and the cities won by the 5 Stars Movement (e.g. Rome and Turin) and the cities (e.g. Naples, Palermo and Messina) governed by independent left-wing platforms, in some cases loosely united with mainstream centre-left parties, in Italy.
22 See International Municipalist Summit ‘Fearless Cities’, held in Barcelona, on June 2017. http://fearlesscities.com/ (accessed 30 November 2019).
23 See, for instance, Barcelona municipality’s website that gather all information regarding housing (http://habitatge.barcelona/en) and the Urbact project ‘Intermediation service for people in the process of evictions and occupancies’ (http://urbact.eu/intermediation-service-people-process-evictions-and-occupancies) (accessed 30 November 2019).
24 We think of the conflicts between European institutions and the left-wing Greek government during the first months of its tenure (2015); and of the, indeed contradictory, attempts by the centre-left/left-wing coalition governing Portugal since late 2015 at reversing austerity (Jones Citation2017; Teles Citation2018).