*2.2. Speculative and Expansionist Urban Planning Associated with the Property Boom (1992–2007)*

During the second period, between 1992 and 2007, there were notable changes in Spanish urban planning. On the one hand, these were associated with the new socioeconomic and financial context; on the other, they owed much to the widespread application of neoliberal policies [4,17].

The most important legal changes that occurred during this period were the result of the deregulation of the mortgage and land markets as a consequence of the amended Land Use and Assessment System Act: Law 6/1998 [18]. This soon became popularly known as the "law that allowed everything to be developed", as it effectively allowed any land that was not expressly protected to be potentially available for urban development.

Instead of regulating urban growth, urban planning used all its available resources to encourage and exacerbate urban production. The city and its surrounding territory were converted into both the subject and object of accumulation through the classification of large swathes of municipal terrain as *Suelo Urbanizable* and continual modifications to the previously approved planning regulations [3,19].

Furthermore, the traditional regulatory role of urban planning was relegated to a secondary position, while pride of place was afforded to strategic planning and the development of large-scale urban projects. This expressly implied renouncing the definition of a specific model for both the city and its territory [20,21].

In Catalonia, a second generation of Master Plans was drawn up under the new Urban Planning Law—2/2002 [22,23]. These Master Plans, which were mainly passed in the 1990s, did not result in any great changes in either the approach to urban planning or the nature of its documents, but heralded the introduction of several new visions, amongst which we can highlight the following:


What has come to be called the urbanising tsunami, or the prodigious decade of Spanish urbanism (1997–2008), was publicly encouraged by urban planning legislation, management, and fiscal and economic policy, and was dependent on sources of local finance [27,28]. The causes and consequences of this unique form of urban and property expansion have already been examined in numerous other works [3,4,27–30], amongst others). The only reflexion that we would like to add here is the following paradox: The greatest urbanisation process, and the most speculative one in Spanish urban history, coincided with the moment of the greatest urbanistic and territorial regulation.

The legacy of this period was one of Master Plans with provisions for unconstrained growth, poorly integrated and over-scaled urban projects, and—above all—great urban voids with land that had been prepared for urban development and construction but was not consolidated. This was a pattern that was repeated and spread across the length and breadth of the country. Indeed, it is one that still persists today, particularly in large areas of the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, where many landscapes reflect the bursting of the property bubble, whose consequences have lasted until today.
