2019

URBAN RURAL ANALYSIS IN SPAIN

SOCIOLOGIE

CORA FERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA

ERASMUS
 1. INTRODUCTION:

Depopulation is a demographic and territorial phenomenon, consisting of the

decrease in the number of inhabitants of a territory or nucleus in relation to a
period previous. The fall in absolute terms of the number of inhabitants can be
the result of a negative vegetative growth, from a negative migratory balance or
both simultaneously. Therefore, the causes that explain it can be complex and
demand deep analysis to be able to make an adequate diagnosis.
Economic factors play a crucial role in these processes of Depopulation.

2. SOME DATES:

RURAL DENSITY IN SPAIN

1.- The rural environment in Spain covers 90% of the territory and in the place
where only 20% of the Spanish population resides.

2.- Demographic evolution. The municipalities <5000 hab. They have a

population loss - 0.31%. By Asturian / Galician communities (-11%) Castilla y
León (-9%) Extremadura (-9%).

3.- Population density. The data say that Spanish rural areas have a population
density of 19.79 inhabitants / km2 in comparison with state means 92
inhabitants / km2. Rural dispersion greatly limits their possibilities for economic
development. The most depopulated communities in this sense are Aragón and
Castilla y León with 10 and 11 hab / km2.
 3. START OF THE DEPOPULATION:

Although most of those cells or municipal units never had high densities yes
that they were communities that maintained a certain balance demographic and
social, so that its traditional economy was sustainable.
Since the mid-nineteenth century this situation begins to change as a
consequence of the beginning of the industrialization process in Spain. But the
absolute demographic decline would take place during the second half of the
century XX. During the 1950-75 phase, when economic growth reached rates
spectacular from all points of view.
 4. CONSEQUENCES:

As a result of the abandonment of rural areas by such important contingents of

people located at reproductive ages, especially women, the rural reached a
degree of aging much higher than the already usually high characteristic of
developed countries. The situation has acquired dyes particularly extremes in
some autonomous communities such as Castilla-León and Aragón, close to
great poles of growth of the Spanish economy, with extensive traditional
agricultura and low starting population densities

5. INEXISTENCE OF SPECIFIC POLICIES:

This gap, that regional policy in Spain has not existed as such during the last
forty years has had consequences on the group of subjects usually included in
its agenda, in particular, in our case, local development, depopulation and the
demographic problems, which have experienced legislation and public
investments of unsystematic and dislocated form. One of the causes has been
that both the central government and the autonomic, the regional has been
identified with the regional financing, reducing its significance and its reformist
potential, since it is only a part of the same, very relevant but incomplete. In
this, financial capacity is key to Articulate measures autonomously, adequately,
but guide the political discusión more towards the how much that towards the
how. In addition, its contents are not elaborated within the conceptual
framework of growth and development theories, but in relation to the
expenditure functions that a territory has to face to solve "market failures" 9 of
regional spatial nature, with a very delimited microeconomic approach.

Autonomous Communities, despite holding exclusively the territorial

management competence, crucial to address these problems of internal
imbalances and a lesser development of some spaces, have been limited
fundamentally to the more technical functions -urbanism, housing, transport-
and their aspects of day-to-day management, without integrating them into
strategic plans with other measures of greater draft It is not surprising that in
this generalized dynamic of institutional apathy regional level, only specific
plans against depopulation have been developed by the of two communities,
Aragón and Castilla y León.
 6. CONCLUSIONS:

the categorization of rural spaces and urban spaces depends exclusively of

arbitrary delimitations, based on the size of the municipalities, or in the weight of
the agrarian active population. The rural and the urban only have a specific
weight when the high capital gains come into play, in urban planning, they are
derived from the tracing or retracing of the lines of delimitation of urban land or
apt to urbanize. One of the engines of new mode of information production is
precisely the production itself and reproduction of the city, and hence the great
conflicts that take place in around the physical border between the rural and the
urban.

We live in a global city, in which the gaps fulfill exclusively the same
function that, in terms of microurbanism, fulfilled the parks and green
areas in the industrial city. And Rural Sociology is, as far as advanced
societies are concerned, an ideology, at best the cases a utopia.