**1. Introduction**

On 13 July 1986, an article entitled "El niño 5.000 millones será pobre" ("The 5000 million child will be poor") was published in the *El País* newspaper [1], an article that I cut out and photocopied, using the teaching resources of the time, to discuss in class. It said that the baby who officially came into this world on 7 July of that year could be Chinese or Indian and that it was possible that he or she would be born in a village, but it was also likely that he or she would end up leaving the countryside to join those marginalized crowds that settled in the outskirts of the big cities.

Twenty years later, Mike Davis in his book *Planet of Slums* [2] stated that in 2006 a young man would flee his village in West Java to go to the bright lights of Jakarta and that a Peruvian farmer would migrate with his impoverished family from his hometown to one of the countless "pueblos jóvenes" in Lima. These were metaphors for the unstoppable process of the urbanization of the Earth, which, according to Kate D. Derickson, has phagocytized the city and the countryside and involves the complete urbanization of society [3,4]. Thus, although cities only occupy 2% of the planet's surface, they concentrate more than half the world's population, consume 75% of the energy, and produce 80% of the GDP.

This socio-spatial transformation has taken place in the last 30 to 40 years of our history because of an economic, political, and cultural logic that has determined the global expansion of the productive forces and the subsequent annihilation of space by time and of time by space. As we all know, this is a phase of late and post-industrial capitalism that has generated greater urban complexity and has been at the center of innumerable analyses, due to the increase in the quality and quantity of interactions between cities and of the internal relations that take place in the urban fabric itself.

The city has thus responded to globalization, an ambiguous and contradictory process that, while promoting interconnections and convergences, shortens distances and opens up meetings between peoples and social groups, accentuates distances and inequalities. Despite the differences among the various cities on Earth, the qualities inherent in the urban

**Citation:** Domínguez-Mujica, J. The Urban Mirror of the Socioeconomic Transformations in Spain. *Urban Sci.* **2021**, *5*, 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/ urbansci5010013

Received: 17 December 2020 Accepted: 21 January 2021 Published: 25 January 2021

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fabric, at the pace of globalization, are the result of the interaction of two forces. On the one hand, there is the concentration of capital, labor, and culture in the city, and, on the other hand, the radical transformation of its economic base, through the passage from a Keynesian and Fordist system of mass production and consumption to a post-Fordist system of flexible, information-intensive industrialization associated with the vertical disintegration of the production process. This has led to a progressive relocation of some of the industries and the consequent tertiarization of the urban economies, with services now accounting for more than three-quarters or four-fifths of their employment.

The unprecedented concentration of power, wealth, and knowledge, typical of the city at this stage, also brings with it unprecedented social exclusion. Metropolises, technopolises, and globalized regions exchange economic information, technological and human capital resources, and, at the same time, disconnected territories are weakened and dependent, if not excluded from the process of economic development. As a result, vulnerable spaces are consolidated in the city itself, those in which there is increasing risk, more precarious employment, greater insecurity, and a scarce capacity for decision-making, with dynamics of residual characteristics. Parallel to these processes, in the words of Nogué and Romero [5], urban society is configured by an enormous number of groups, differentiated by their interests; social, ethnic, economic, political, sexual, identity, and generational components; lifestyles; access to resources, power, well-being, time, etc., because the city is consolidated as a powerful machine of differentiation and separation, of marginalization and exclusion.

This context is validated by the opinions of such well-known authors as Thomas Piketty [6], Amartya Sen [7], José Antonio Ocampo [8] and the United Nations *Human Development Report* [9], when they pointed out that inequality among nations has been reduced during the third globalization, but inequality has generated within a vulnerable citizen's state of mind "persistent inequalities." These inequalities of income and wealth that define an urban landscape of unbalanced development through increased social polarization and residential segregation do not disappear. Thus, the late-capitalist metropolises, or what some have defined as the dual city, are evolving at a simultaneous pace with the tendencies of capitalism towards equalization and differentiation, and towards devaluation and revaluation, according to the late geographer Neil Smith [10].

In this scenario, the processes of transformation become difficult to comprehend, and it becomes complicated to put forward a discourse on the immediate future. Many authors agree that, in the coming years, incessant urban growth will be accompanied by greater diversity, accentuating complexity, with diffuse, concentrated, and mixed models of urbanization that face the challenge of sustainability. Therefore, before our eyes the urban reality shows that we are its discontinuous and conflictive agents, and times are accelerating at the pace of information and communication technologies, which makes it difficult to understand new situations. As Secchi pointed out [11], in times of transition we are not able to use simple words to speak about the city.

Against this backdrop, a specialist in population geography faces the boldness, rather than the challenge, of interpreting some of the most significant trends in Spanish urban development at this stage of post-Fordist capitalism, trying to differentiate the elements of economic expansion at the turn of the century, those of the economic crisis and of the times of uncertainty with which we look to the future. Consequently, the next sections will identify the economic, housing, and political factors conditioning this evolution because the aim of this paper is to offer a reflection on the transformations of Spanish cities in the light of the evolution of post-Fordist capitalism, characterized by the concatenated processes of accumulation, dispossession, and repossession. With this objective, a methodology based on an in-depth bibliographical review and a selection of different economic and housing indexes was used, providing a comprehensive interpretation of the recent Spanish urban evolution.
