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Study Areas: The Straits of Gibraltar

The Straits of Gibraltar

The Straits of Gibraltar

The frontier becomes a metropolitan region made up of an archipelago of towns scattered in a territory of strategic potential. Gibraltar and Ceuta are armor-plated islands that spark off the flourishing of exceptional economies, duty-free enclaves that spread through the area, where the delocalization of European production transforms arts and crafts into precarious industrialization.

This area is immersed in a worrying process of segmentation that goes beyond its limits again and again, exceeding legal and humanitarian margins. On one side, Algeciras (al jazeera, the island) is the largest port in the Mediterranean and the visible head of the Gibraltar region. On the other, Tangiers is the North African metropolis that pins its hopes on the creation of the new Economic Development Area associated with the ambitious Tangiers-Med port project. Between the two the disheartening routine prevails of surfers dodging immigrant boats off the Tarifa coast, a harsh landscape where numerous groups work for freedom of movement and knowledge, in order to transmute cyber-territory into a space with real connections.

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.
  • 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 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.

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