Yesterday Sant Josep City Council began the process of drafting a General Urban Development Plan (PGOU) with a first working group meeting in which the broad outlines of the work to be tackled in the coming months were set out. “Our municipality has endured à la carte urban planning during the dark times when the right wing governed, but we want to change this and take this opportunity to turn it into an example of sustainable development, with a focus on caring for our people and heritage and respect for the land,” the mayor, Ángel Luis Guerrero, said in a statement.
The mayor explained in the statement that this first meeting served to “set the objective” to be achieved: “To break free from the urban planning mess that has characterised Sant Josep in recent decades and bring sanity and order to growth. “We will focus on the citizens and their needs, with the common interest above all else,” he added.
Guerrero noted “the agreement with these objectives among the drafting team”, which agrees with the government team that “this process should be as open and participatory as possible”. The UTE first has the task of delivering the municipality’s town planning assessment within a period of six months but, according to the statement, “from the very beginning this will be open to the public for suggestions and proposals through opportunities for participation.
The mayor, who personally heads up the Department of Urban Planning, pointed out that the current climate emergency also requires the new PGOU to ensure “sustainability and social justice” and impose restrictions on growth due to “water scarcity and the fragility of the land, because growth is not infinite”. In addition, it should be a document for the “long term”, whose regulations are valid for the coming decades. In this regard, the statement adds that current planning regulations (the Subsidiary Rules of 1987) that “are so hard to change” (there have been several failed attempts in recent terms of office), are 35 years old.
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