Other denominations
Description
The territory of the municipalities (both open spaces and built-up spaces and densely built-up urban areas) are ordered by the Pla d'Ordenació Urbanística Municipal (which could be translated as the Municipal Urban Development Plan) which establishes the uses of the land, the conditions of buildability and also the allocations of public spaces and facilities by agreement of the competent administrations. In other words, this Development Plan is the reference that determines what and how the city and the territory will be built, allocating uses for the necessary general functioning of the territory (housing, protected natural spaces, streets and roads, commercial areas, cultural or sports facilities, etc.) and, most especially, the Development Plan determines the future transformation that the city and the territory will have to undergo.
In this sense, defending the Municipal Urban Development Plan involves a technical process as well as citizen participation. These professionals are mainly essential in local administrations, although not exclusively, because they ensure compliance with the prescriptions of the Plan from the point of view of the administration. Thus, urban planning provides information on acts relating to the knowledge of the conditions of buildability of a property (number of floors allowed, depth, separation of the boundaries of a plot, etc.), the types of permitted use (housing, residential, commercial, industrial, sanitary, etc.) and the possible assignments to general or local systems (roads, green areas, facilities, forest parks, etc.), and, where appropriate, the systems of action (expropriation, reparcelling) to arrive at the planned development.
These professionals are integrated in the Town Planning Service, whose mission is the efficient exercise of municipal and local competences in town planning matters in order to define and develop strategies and actions that favour the continuous improvement of the urban habitat, economic, competitiveness, social and territorial cohesion, and sustainability by applying the General Plan. Thus, the basic functions of these professionals are:
Urban planning: to ensure the application of the Plan's prescriptions, preventing actions from being carried out outside of planning and setting in motion the relevant administrative processes to deploy the contents of the Plan. As well as the preparation and approval of the figures that develop the Municipal Urban Development Plan (partial plans, urban improvement plans, special plans, urban development projects, etc.).
Urban development management: this comprises the set of practices that establish the technical-legal form of executing urban development plans. Its objective is to determine and specify the work of those who will participate in the process: public administrations, owners, developers and promoters. There are two systems of urban development action: the redistribution system (by basic compensation, by compensation by agreement, by cooperation, by priority urbanisation sectors), and the expropriation system.
Urban planning licences: to grant permits, authorisations and ensure the legally established procedures that ensure that the process of change and transformation of public and private space in the municipal area is in accordance with the provision of the Plan (building permits, activities, subdivisions...)
The protection of urban planning legality: to ensure that actions undertaken in the field of urban development management, both public and private initiative, are in accordance with the general laws that determine the administrative process and also in the field of urban development law.
In short, the transformation, preservation and creation of new urban spaces is a complex process because it brings together the rights of individuals (property, burdens and benefits of ownership) and of the commons (valuation, equitable, distribution of the costs of urban transformation, burdens and benefits) on the basis of what is established by the regulations.
Tasks
© Barcelona Activa 2023
Centre per al desenvolupament professional Porta22
Barcelona Treball (Porta22)
Llacuna, 156-162, 08018 Barcelona
bcn.cat/treball
Monday to Friday from 9 to 18 h