Customize

Home Study Areas: Almeria

Print

Study Areas: Almeria

Campo de Dalias-Campos de Níjar | Almeria

Campo de Dalia-Campos de Nijar

Agrocity: The agricultural structure that extends all along the A-7 from Adra to Níjar can be distinguished from space. One of the most exuberant and spectacular forms of city development has sprung up in recent decades, associated with the rise of a landscape historically at odds with development. Next to the shanty towns that house the cheap agricultural labor force, a mantle of housing estates and golf courses begins to spread in an ever more stormy coexistence with natural parks and nature reserves. This is a coastline that has been progressively strained by mass tourism, the plastic horizon of which breaks on the El Ejido construction plans for the highest skyscraper in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.

The effort of diverse groups of citizens to reconstruct urban and natural environments is an indication of the growing resistance to the setting up of a predictably schizophrenic future scenario. In it the conflictive alienation of immigrants in an updated version of Campos de Nijar superimposes the hyper-real segregation of tourists in Roquetas de Mar, a firm candidate to replace the Mini Hollywood of Tabernas in an incipient Andalusia repertoire of fictional cities.

Other Study Areas

  • Costa del Sol The metropolitan region of the Costa del Sol, where tourism has constructed a radically contemporary urban territory, shaped by infrastructures that support an overdeveloped space in which the population seeks ways to establish itself in what is glocal.
  • The Straits of Gibraltar This is an intercontinental region where the contradictory conditions of nexus and frontier converge, a space of transit with a subverted fluidity which makes it a space for traffic, people, goods, and communication.
  • Bay of Cadiz This geographical region extends from the Jerez countryside to the coast of Cadiz, where towns of considerable tradition are located, on which is superimposed the complexity of new urban settlements with a tendency towards growing specialization.
  • SE30-SE40 The space delimited by the phantom route of the forthcoming SE-40 dual carriageway bypass presents itself as a segmented metropolitan panorama, torn by the centrifugal dynamics of the periphery and the centripetal attraction inherent to its capital status.

back to top