Núria Benach

Urban challenges in Spain and Portugal

1. Introduction: urban problems and issues in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese cities Nuria Benach and Andres Walliser 2. Subversion of land-use plans and the housing bubble in Spain Eugenio L. Burriel 3. The process of residential sprawl in Spain: Is it really a problem? Arlinda Garcia-Coll 4. Catalysing governance in a paradoxical city: the Lisbon Strategic Charter and the uncertainties of political empowerment in the Portuguese capital city Joao Seixas 5. Area-based initiatives and urban dynamics. The case of the Porto city centre Jose A. Rio Fernandes 6. The five challenges of urban rehabilitation. The Catalan experience Oriol Nel*lo 7. Urban governance and regeneration policies in historic city centres: Madrid and Barcelona Ismael Blanco, Jordi Bonet and Andres Walliser 8. Epilogue Nuria Benach and Andres Walliser

Scripta Nova en 2015

Se realiza un balance de la marcha de Scripta Nova durante el ano 2015. Su creacion en 1997 se hizo como continuacion de Geo Critica. Cuadernos Criticos de Geografia Humana, publicada desde 1976 a 1994. Se destacan las novedades producidas en las diferentes secciones del portal Geocritica

Scripta Nova en 2014. Las revistas científicas y los currículos académicos

Un ano mas se realiza en este articulo un balance de la marcha de Scripta Nova durante el ano que finaliza y se alude a la evolucion de la revista desde su creacion en 1997, como continuacion de Geo Critica. Cuadernos Criticos de Geografia Humana, publicada desde 1976 a 1994. Se senalan las novedades incorporadas en las diferentes secciones del portal Geocritica y se pasa revista nuevamente a los problemas planteados por la evaluacion de las revistas cientificas.

Introduction to the special issue: urban problems and issues in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese cities

Not long ago, this journal published a special issue on the future of European Cities (Volume 1, issue 3, 2008). It described how the pessimism about the future of cities in the 1970s and 1980s shifted to a more optimistic state of mind in the 1990s and from there it examined some of the expected future trends for the twenty-first century. The ‘collective deprivation’ of the 1970s and 1980s as Hall (1981) put it was followed in the 1990s by a vision where the main aim of urban policies was not only to find new economic bases for those former industrialized cities but to adapt their very urban spaces to global changes and thus to turn cities themselves, no matter their size, into engines of regional economic growth. The collapse of the financial markets in the summer of 2007 froze the growth of urban dynamics of the previous 10 years, which were already beginning to show, on severe symptoms of exhaustion accompanied by a worrying emergence of social conflicts. That issue on the future of urban cities launched in 2008 seemed then to be more appropriate than ever. At the same time and focusing on Europe, its editorial drew the attention to urban trends in the European Union as stated in the 2007 State of European Cities Report. They were widely analysed there (Atkinson 2008), but it is interesting for the purposes of the current issue to note how Spanish and Portuguese dynamics were depicted in that report. Both Spain and Portugal belong to the Southern Europe Large Urban Zone (LUZ) together with Italy, Greece and Cyprus. Analysing the 1995–2000 trends, the report showed that Southern Europe cities grew strongly and said the following on Spain and Portugal: