Miguel Ángel Mejías Vera

By Miguel Ángel Mejías Vera

The urbanization processes in the island of Tenerife in the last 50 years have left a very fragmented landscape. Due to the growing and constant process of construction-infrastructures-construction, the abiotic and biotic space is being reduced but still more the productive space of the primary sector. The reaction to the threat, especially the “natural” space—abiotic and biotic—was protection. The result is that half of the island has some protection figure, but the other half does not. To this “unprotected” half, I call the risk island and concentrate the stress or tension, because it is where economic activities and habitat are developed and combined. For its management, in spite of existing an island territorial planning, it is the municipalities that have the competences in urban planning, always under the norms of superior administrative rank. Therefore, there are 31 different models, one per municipality. We have to focus on the corridor island understood as the unsealed soil. This is the area where we should intervene, redesigning the new spaces, to connect organically and in balance the two islands.

Part of the book: Urban Agglomeration

By Miguel Ángel Mejías Vera and Víctor Manuel Romeo Jiménez

The urban agglomeration of the south of Tenerife is characterized by its accelerated and explosive conformation since the tourist boom of the 80s of the last century. This speed has caused radical landscape changes that have had environmental, economic, social, and spatial repercussions. We try to extract those landscape patterns that characterize this urban model but also to analyze and quantify the landscape degradation of the urban-rural transition zones existing between the tourist and non-tourist nuclei. Through the cartographic and graphic method, typical of spatial thinking and regional geographical analysis, we combine multiple components that characterize and synthesize the substance of the abiotic, biotic, and cultural elements. As a result, we have a diagnosis where the centrality of the tourist nucleus brings together economic activity, the movement of people and vehicles, but at the same time, allows the development of other former rural-based nuclei, transforming them into residential ones, as well as the explosion of buildings dispersed between them. We propose that planning should be based on the landscape patterns that characterize it, starting from the corridor that links the urban centers of the agglomeration.

Part of the book: Sustainable Development Dimensions and Urban Agglomeration