**3. Lleida and Manresa: Territorial Context and Dynamics of Population Growth and Housing**

Manresa is a municipality with an area of 41.66 km<sup>2</sup> and a population of 77,714 [34]. It is the capital of the *comarca* (local district) of El Bages in the province of Barcelona. It stands on a plain located within the central depression of Catalonia, and its urban development has been shaped by the rivers Llobregat and Cardener and by the surrounding uplands. The economy of Manresa and its urban area is based on historic industrialisation, and the city currently houses the largest concentration of specialised services and amenities in central Catalonia. The urban area around Manresa delimited by the *Ministerio de Transportes, Movilidad y Agenda Urbana* MITMA [35] is relatively small (Figure 2). Manresa had a population of 104,947 in 2019, with a surface area of 96.9 km2. Its metropolitan area includes four municipalities: Manresa (77,714 inhabitants in 2019), San Joan de Vilatorrada (10,936), Sant Fruitós de Bages (8703), and Santpedor (7554). As shown in Table 1, over the last decade, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada—which practically forms a conurbation with Manresa—Santpedor, and Sant Fruitós de Bages have all grown more than the municipality of Manresa itself.

The case of the urban area of Manresa is of interest for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is one of the areas in Catalonia with the longest histories of urban planning at the supramunicipal scale. The *Pla Director Urbanístic del Bagès* (PDU El Bages, 2006) is a supramunicipal urban plan that covers a total of 27 different municipalities around Manresa. It has been used to guide and coordinate local planning in response to notable transformative dynamics and to find solutions to the problems faced by this area, as well as those related to the infrastructure and open spaces located within this territory. The proposals and instructions contained in the PDU of El Bages were later included in the corresponding Regional Plan, the *Pla Territorial Parcial de les Comarques Centrals* (PTPCC) of 2008, and were developed through the *Pla Territorial General de Catalunya* (PTGC). It is interesting to study Manresa because it has passed three Master Plans since 1979, and thus allows us to analyse the evolution of different generations of this kind of plan [37].

**Figure 2.** Urban areas and municipalities of Lleida and Manresa. Own elaboration based on *Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya* [36].

Lleida, on the other hand, has a surface area of 212.30 km2 and a population of 138,956 [34]. It is the service capital of an extensive area, with a notable degree of specialisation in the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors, and is located on the Lleida plain in western Catalonia. The urban area of Lleida, which is notably larger than that of Manresa, has an area of 426.3 km<sup>2</sup> and includes eight municipalities with a total population of 169,620 (2019), 81.9% of which lives in the central municipality of Lleida (Figure 2). According to the MITMA Atlas [35], the other municipalities in this area are: Albatàrrec (2221), Alcarràs (9514), Alcoletge (3420), Alpicat (6255), Artesa de Lleida (1504), Rosselló (3145), and Torrefarrera (4605 in 2019). As in the case of Manresa, the relative growth of the population, housing, and urbanised land in the neighbouring municipalities has been noticeably greater than in the central city. In fact, some have already become conurbations in their own right, as in the case of Alpicat and Torreferrera.

The municipality of Lleida, as well as its urban area in general, enjoys excellent connectivity via high-capacity transport infrastructure. In contrast, it has less experience than Manresa in supramunicipal and regional planning. The *Pla Territorial Parcial de les Terres de Lleida* was passed in 2004 and, to a certain extent, has since conditioned the growth of the municipalities in its immediate vicinity by promoting the city of Lleida as the main pole in the territory. As in the case of Manresa, the municipality has had three General Urban Plans since the restauration of democracy [38].

**Table 1.** The dynamics of population growth and housing in the municipalities and urban areas of Manresa and Lleida [39].


The two areas experienced moderate growth in population and housing in the 1980s and 1990s, with annual growth rates of less than 0.5%. They then experienced more important growth during the first decade of the 21st century, mainly due to immigration. This growth was, as can be seen from Table 1, particularly notable in Lleida and its urban area.

Another similarity between the two areas is the higher relative growth experienced by the other municipalities in these areas. This growth was particularly related to processes of suburbanisation and peri-urbanisation, whose dynamics were very closely related to those of residential migration from their respective central cities. This explains the extraordinary growth in population and housing in municipalities such as Alcarràs, Torrefarrera, Alcoletge, and Albatàrrec within the urban area of Lleida and the more modest growth of Santpedor and Sant Fruitós del Bages in that of Manresa. In fact, the dynamics of the markets for property and land, as well as their consequences, have been supramunicipal in both areas since the 1980s.

Despite all this, and despite the existence of regional planning in Catalonia, the urban planning and land policies carried out have tended to reflect municipal interests and logics. The forecasts for growth and land-use development (and housing) policies in these smaller municipalities have been oversized and have competed with each other. Furthermore, although Catalonia was one of the first Spanish autonomous communities to legislate for regional planning, this territorial regulation arrived quite late (the *Pla Territorial General de Catalunya*, *Ley 1/1995* of the *Generalitat de Catalunya* was not developed until the first decade of the 21st century) and could not slow down a series of already notable processes of urban growth and urban sprawl.
