Planning for Growth: Contradictions in the Framework of Economic and Urban Development from the “Spanish Miracle” (1959-1973)

Abstract

In the postwar period, the strong economic growth in Western countries coincided with the configuration of their modern urban planning systems. This article aims at exploring to what extent the targets of the economic planning that was broadly adopted in this growth period conditioned the performance of urban planning tools by analyzing the case of Spain. During the so-called “Spanish miracle” that started in the early 1960s and lasted until the mid-1970s, there were notable contradictions between economic and spatial planning policies and between the performance of the national and the municipal governments. It is concluded that the lack of an integrated approach to regional and urban planning policies at national level combined to the gap with the actual local planning framework, illustrated through the example of three cities, can help to understand the patterns of urban growth in a context of an expanding economy.