Spain’s investment in urbanization can be traced back to three political events: the Land Law of 1998, the introduction of the euro in 2002 (with its corresponding reduction in interest rates), and the liberalization of labor constraints that same year (Government of Spain, Head of State 1998; Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs 2002). The result was nearly 20% of Spain’s economy being tied to construction-related industries—nearly four times the proportion seen in the United States and the UK, whose economies both experienced contemporaneous real estate bubbles (Government of Spain, Ministry of Development 2011). Although held up in the mid-2000s as a global exemplar of both economic and architectural innovation, Spain’s urban growth policy led directly to the precipitous state of the country’s current economy (Ouroussoff 2006; Riley 2006; Thomas 2012).
Given such a context, a particular interest of the work of the Penn studio was how landscape and/or ecological considerations could be leveraged to either retrofit this incomplete urban ground for future, unexpected uses (see Figure 3.5) or how designers could use the situation that emerged in Spain between 1998 and the present asthe basis for developing fresh, new strategies for settlement and land occupation. The premise of the studio was therefore quite simple: Conventional approaches to urbanization are increasingly producing incomplete or abandoned settlements that have enormous social, environmental, and economic consequences. How might we use what occurred in Spain as a platform for developing new priorities and logics of urbanization that challenge these singular, monofunctional, totalizing conventions?