Study Areas: Costa del Sol

A true lineal city that not even anti-urban development could imagine, the 125 kilometers that separate Estepona from Vélez Málaga along the A-7 represent a concatenation of urban episodes without comparison in Europe: Estepona, San Pedro de Alcántara, Nueva Andalucía, Puerto Banús, Marbella, El Chaparral, Fuengirola, Benalmádena, Torremolinos, Málaga, El Rincón de la Victoria, and Torre del Mar. The result of the property metastasis, the new continuum of golf courses, hotels, refreshment stands, and resorts has been confirmed as a serious contender for inclusion in the exclusive catalog of cities to which Dejan Sudjic gave the name of "100 Mile Cities" in the early 1990s.

The ingenuous imaginary group driven by development tourism has given way to a complex hybrid between urban development and a huge show that generates a vitality unknown in other urban regions of Andalusia.

Fed by the financial generosity of foreign capital, the liquidity that currently drives the productivity of services and leisure may be insufficient to support the mortgage of sustainability that the coast has signed, with its environment, its social fabric, and its political governability as its sole guarantees.

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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.
• 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 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.