Planes híbridos: ¿Reforma o reciclaje?

RESUMEN: En este trabajo analizamos las innovaciones de una nueva generación de planes que, más allá de la diversidad de los ámbito de aplicación, conjugan un alcance híbrido. Con este fin estudiamos un elenco de casos europeos, en particular españoles, que ilustran las diversas aportaciones metodológicas y de aplicación del planeamiento supramunicipal. Pretendemos demostrar que la ordenación del territorio y el urbanismo deben considerarse como una actividad técnica integrada, más allá de las escalas de actuación. El contenido híbrido de los planes facilita la definición de nuevos modelos estructurales y de organización administrativa para la gestión de las políticas territoriales. ABSTRACT: Since the beginning of the first decade of s.XXI, there is a significant innovation in urbanism, based on the practice of urban and regional planning as an integrated technical activity. However, rather than the articulation of multiple levels of intervention, new generation of plans emphasise, on the one hand, diverse methodologies and, on the other hand, the forms of intervention and management. From the point of view of physical planning, the tendency is to avoid a rigorously formalized or general scheme, which have to be applied to different administrative domains layered in the same territory. While from the policy making approach, the tendency is to uphold the clear boundary of planning levels, warning of possible overlapping competencies and conflicts that may arise between the local, the regional or the national administrations. The aim of this paper is to identify and highlight the methodological and management contributions of a new generation of plans that combine a hybrid scope, beyond the diversity of the administrative levels. Our argument is based on the instrumental approach of planning, particularly in the analysis of technical inputs that does not necessarily involve any institutional improvement. As is well known, both dimensions of planning evolve independently. Therefore, in this article we focus on the planning resources, rather than the social forces, interests and ideologies that represent them. To this end, we analyse several european cases, mostly from Spain, which prove, independently and intentionally, the conceptual innovation of planning in practice. We provide thus, rather than an exhaustive compendium of the wide variety of planning experiences, a possible agenda for the design of future instruments. As a result of the analysis, first, we verify that both regional planning and urbanism define an integrated technical activity where physical boundaries between the two levels tend to fade, although they refer to specific content. Second, we show that the new generation of plans addresses a hybrid instrumental scope: local/regional, operative/strategic, technocratic/sociocratic. Moreover, in Europe, the prominence of the regional level as preferred scale for spatial planning facilitates the definition of new structural and organizational models for the management of territorial policies. This is one of the reasons that explain why the national or regional government is the responsible for driving supra-local planning guidelines, but also land use regulations. The joint implementation of both instruments allows the contents of the plans to have a greater or smaller complexity depending on the purpose of its formulation and the subsequent improvement experienced during the drafting process. In short, we aim to demonstrate that the hybrid scope of the recent generation of supra-local plans enables the implementation of spatial planning and urbanism as an integrated technical activity.