Fernández García, Cora
Fernández García, Cora
Fernández García, Cora
2. SOME DATES:
1.- The rural environment in Spain covers 90% of the territory and in the place
where only 20% of the Spanish population resides.
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:
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.
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.