Towards a planning culture in a peripheral region: the implementation of the Spanish Urban Agenda in Castile and León Region (Spain)

Abstract

This work relates the challenges tied to the experience of elaborating a provincial-scale, place-based and integrated strategic planning for and in small towns located in the Spanish region of Castile and León (CyL). This provincial strategic planning regards the elaboration of the so-called Action Plans (AP) according to the Spanish Urban Agenda (SUA) enacted by the national government in 2019. The work demonstrates how to adapt the predominately city-centric approach of the specific methodology proposed by the SUA in rural territories with dispersed urban fabrics and demographic decline like CyL. With 2,385,223 inhabitants (5.03% of Spain), 94,226 km² (18.6% of Spain) and an average density of 25.21 inhabitants/km², the administrative structure of the region consists of 9 provinces and 2,248 municipalities, with 5,929 inhabited centres. Only 16 municipalities have more than 20,000 inhabitants, while 1,799 have fewer than 500 inhabitants. What we argue is that the SUA lacks a proper rural component that can enable the establishment of a proper basis from which developing resilient planning strategies that create more liveable small towns in rural environments, which is one of the CyL’s main features and pillars. To do so, this proposal scrutinises the only two Action Plans (AP) approved by the provincial entities of Palencia and Segovia, respectively the 2022 Palencia Rural Agenda (PRA) and the 2021 Segovia Sustainable Rural Agenda (SSRA). By highlighting their strategies for resilient small towns, this work demonstrates that PRA and SSRA implementation strongly depends on severely limited financial and technical resources, but both AP hold (unexpected) institutional capacities that can help to create a place-based planning culture to face today’s polycrisis. Such aspects can represent strategic springboards for a broader implementation in the other seven provinces of CyL, with a certain degree of replicability in similar Spanish regions (e.g., Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura).