**2. Materials and Methods**

Starting from the premise that urbanization is a relevant expression of the economic, cultural, social, and political characteristics of a society [12], the theoretical reflection that I present was made after consulting many empirical works on recent trends in Spanish urban development. To do this, I proceeded as follows: on the one hand, I selected the books and articles published in scientific journals that were referenced on the Google Scholar portal according to the following topics: economic crisis; financialization; gentrification; housing crisis; post-Fordist capitalism; property bubble; property repossession; Spanish cities; touristification; and pandemic. On the other hand, I reviewed the contributions to the Urban Geography Colloquia promoted by the Association of Spanish Geographers, choosing those that offered an overview, or case studies carried out from a critical perspective. To all of them I added a few articles published in magazines.

The time horizon was 2008 onwards because, although the study deals with the characteristics of the immediately preceding period, I considered that it was necessary to use only the interpretations that were published from that date because they offered a critical perspective in the light of the events that took place after the decline and recession of the global economy and, particularly, of the Spanish economy. Only a few conceptual reflections of notable importance escaped this dating.

Once the collection of these publications was made, a database was created in which the articles were classified according to their chronology and subjects of study, having subsequently chosen those I considered most appropriate for the purposes of this commentary paper. Finally, to all this I added a selection of economic, housing, and property registration indicators, as well as of judicial procedures, to elaborate the figures. To them I added two conceptual schemes of the factors conditioning the economic housing expansion and the economic housing crisis.

## **3. Results**

The conceptual approach to the most significant characteristics of Spanish cities in the post-Fordist capitalism era required consideration of three different stages: (i) the stage of economic expansion at the turn of the century, with the liberalization of mortgages and the land market; the securitization of loans and the expansion of credit; and the promotion of urban land and construction, as sources of funding for institutions; (ii) the stage of the economic crisis from 2008 onwards, with the loss of value of property, dissaving, reduction in income and capital and its consequent effects on dispossession; and (iii) the uncertain times we face for the future, with an incipient economic recovery, with processes of repossession, through the progressive elimination of toxic assets from the financial system and the appearance of new operators—investment funds that acquire, promote, and rehabilitate goods of an urban nature.

## *3.1. The Urban Configuration in Spain during the Economic Expansion at the Turn of the Century*

After the developmentalism of the 1960s, and a long period of diffusion of urban dynamics from the largest cities to the smallest agglomerations, after the crisis of 1973 and later, different economic situations have followed one another in Spain that today can be interpreted in the light of the new tensions of an incipient globalization. This was the prelude to the intense economic growth that we witnessed at the turn of the century; a period that was impossible to dissociate from real estate growth itself and that gave rise to unprecedented urban expansion of a disorderly nature, with a notable increase in artificial surfaces and indiscriminate land consumption. Furthermore, it remained a common trend in southern Europe, where over-urbanization based on hyper-compact and deregulated expansion, real estate speculation, and informal economy were general factors of the cities' growth [13,14].

The increase in artificial land in Spain can be recognized on the map in Figure 1, which represents its variation between 2000 and 2006, according to data from the European CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land Cover project. The GDP

Interannual Variation Rate (%) is also represented in the map, but there is not a clear positive correlation between these indicators by provinces, given that the artificial land's increase is also related to the investment in second houses, to foreign investment, and to a process of suburbanization that sometimes exceeds the provincial limits.

**Figure 1.** Variation of artificial land (2000–2006)% (source: Digital Atlas of Urban Areas [15]) and Interannual Variation Rate of the GDP (2000–2006)% (source: National Accounts of Spain: Main Aggregates (QNA). Spanish Institute of Statistics (INE) [16]). Author's elaboration.

Consequently, the city at this stage was forged as an image of a real estate bubble, as a result of the business expectations of landowners, developers, and builders and their collusion with the financial system and the political–administrative system, demonstrating what David Harvey [17] defended: that urbanization has been one of the means of absorbing surplus capital and labor throughout the history of capitalism, and that land is not a commodity in itself, but a fictitious form of capital, derived from expectations of future income.

It was the year 2000 when the housing sector began to evolve wildly. Prices were rising by 17% a year with very low inflation, which implied high growth in real terms. Until 2006, an average of 600,000 homes were started each year, a figure higher than that of Germany, Italy, and France combined, according to data from the current Ministry of Transport, Mobility, and the Urban Agenda (Ministerio de Transportes, Movilidad y Agenda Urbana) [18]. Cranes were common in the landscape, almost an element of national pride, in the words of a columnist from *El País* who referred to this situation [19]. However, this increase in housing construction was not accompanied by a reduction in its price; on the contrary, it did not respond to the demographic growth of cities and had disastrous consequences on the indebtedness of households in mortgage loans, a debt that increased by 738% between 1996 and 2007 [20].

This scenario was made possible by the fact that, since the mid-1980s, Spanish policy had been committed to the secondary accumulation circuit and to the financialization of the economy as the main mechanism for growth, taking advantage of the benefits of Spain's recent integration into the European Community (Figure 2).

**Figure 2.** Factors conditioning the economic housing expansion in Spain (1998–2008). Source: author's elaboration.
