In the current housing crisis, it seems to me that there is an unsympathetic component of urbanism and architecture that no one dares to confront but that permeates everything; it filters into all urban conversations and debates, and it is very frightening. The feared speculation.Speculation is not good for anyone, ask the developers. Having to buy land at exorbitant prices, never knowing if the selling price is adequate or if you are being ripped off, having multiple abandoned plots of land in cities waiting for years to pass and demand to increase to sell them for triple what they cost is what most damages citizens' trust in urban planning. Hearing about demographic growth and the paralysis of protected housing construction is unsettling and makes any personal housing decision even more irrational. Laws have been getting thicker, but it does not seem that there is now more control and public mechanisms to deal with speculation.In 1933, the First Congress of Architects in the Catalan Language was held, organized by the Association of Architects of Catalonia, with the presence of 129 architects from Valencia to Mallorca, delegates from the Corps of Municipal Architects of Spain, the GATCPAC, and the Association of Architecture Students. The Congress had an important political component, the objective of which was to establish the foundations of the laws that would regulate urban planning and housing in republican Catalonia. Francesc Macià did not attend, but he sent Joan Casanovas, and the inaugural session was held at the Palau de la Generalitat.What seems remarkable about that initiative is that, beyond their individual offices and the difficulty of generating particular commissions, the hundred architects were able to agree on a synthetic text with concrete proposals for a new urban planning law, social policy for working-class neighborhoods and containment of speculation in the neighborhoods, in addition to proposing changes in the teaching of architecture and betting on school architecture.
Regarding urban planning policy, they concluded that every project should establish the execution period, depending on the growth of the city, town, or village. This precept, even today, is not met in most urban plans from the 1990s and 2000s, and no one loses their building rights even if decades have passed, because planning does not expire. They also said the following: “All city councils in Catalonia must find within Catalan legislation the necessary means so that they can develop a social land policy that tends to favor housing and avoid land speculation.” These “necessary means,” which meant municipal financing so that a public land and housing heritage could be created and maintained, have never appeared, and, in fact, the state land law of 1956, during the Franco regime, acknowledges in its preamble that the lack of foresight regarding the formation of land reserves had led Spanish cities to rampant speculation. Regarding social policy, in relation to working-class neighborhoods and land speculation in cities, as early as the 1930s, professional consensus called for public initiative and leadership to address housing needs. They wrote that the Generalitat should ensure "that a program of affordable housing is established for all those who live on a daily wage or salary" and that it should provide "support for any individual or collective initiative aimed at improving housing, both urban and rural, as long as it has a social purpose and does not directly or indirectly pursue the speculation of land or rents." The Casa Bloc is the result of these ideas, as are the hundreds of social housing units for factory workers, funded by the industries themselves, that Martorell, Bohigas, and Mackay built in the 1980s. The last proposal I want to highlight would be controversial today, but it makes perfect sense: “Any entity or individual carrying out a development will have to set the sale prices of buildable land and the conditions under which they will carry out the sale and rentals; conditions that will have to be approved by the bodies that the Generalitat will create in due course”. In 1936, the most forward-thinking architects of GATCPAC were purged: Torres Clavé died on the front, a victim of Italian fascist aviation, Sert went into exile and founded the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Fàbregas moved to Cuba, Rodríguez Arias to Chile, and Bonet Castellana to Argentina. Ricard Giralt i Casadesús, a defender of public land acquisition and of cutting off the speculative cycle in the transition from agricultural to urban land, was forced to abandon his position as municipal architect of Girona and Figueres. And with his disappearance and the consolidation of Francoism, the forcefulness and clarity of his proposals were erased from the map. Current land and urban planning laws are more numerous, more extensive, and more complicated, but they do not address these fundamental issues.
