Study Areas: Bay of Cadiz

To the traditional Jerez-Cadiz pairing is added the de facto conurbation of the strip of territory parallel to the coast that is Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Chipiona, Rota, Puerto de Santa María, Puerto Real, San Fernando, and Chiclana de la Frontera. They are like the beads of a political and administrative necklace that it shows off on a strategic scale, but at the same time squeezes and strangles when the specificity of each place is unrecognized.

As they lack the sufficient infrastructure to unite its growth, the coexistence of disparate phenomena is shown in a growing specialization of the rurban medium. Next to the flourishing agriculture of Sanlúcar, Chipiona, and Jerez, the Rota base represents an armor-plated precinct of global strategic importance, while the hectic pace imposed by mass tourism in Puerto de Santa María and Chiclana contrasts with the industrial decline of Puerto Real and the fossilized stillness of San Fernando and Cadiz. Vegetable gardens and salt flats that have equal status as dormant areas of empty ground await their turn on "the front row of the beach" courtesy of the urbanizing fever of the coast: Cadifornia Dreamin'.

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Other Study Areas

• Campo de Dalias-Campos de Nijar The southern part of the province of Almeria has been transformed by the intensive agricultural exploitation of the desert, the support of migratory flows that take shape among greenhouses, the massive urbanization, and the tourist occupation of the coast.
• 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.
• SE30-SE40 The space delimited by the phantom route of the forthcoming SE-40 dual highway 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.