Urban Challenges in Spain and Portugal

Contemporary cities in the Iberian Peninsula have gone through a period of dramatic changes during the last decade. A period of upward economic indicators and massive urbanization was followed by a tremendous financial crash in 2007 that sank Spanish and Portuguese societies into a profound crisis. That period of massive urbanization has been explained by several factors: the availability of financial capital that was speculatively invested in real-estate, a rather sympathetic land use regulation, and the real or perceived social mobility by most social groups which included housing acquisition enabled by unusual credit facilities. In this book we aim to show several different aspects of this process both in Portugal and Spanish cities, problematizing the economic and social consequences of such a model of urban and economic growth and also presenting some policy and governance outcomes that took place along the last decade. This book was published as a special issue of Urban Research and Practice.