The traditional European apartment city has declined almost everywhere. But there is one big exception.
Spanish cities are unusual. They are much denser, tighter, and more deliberate than other European cities, let alone North American ones. They reject picket fence for apartment block and choose balcony over front lawn. Two thirds of Spaniards live in flats, against 41 percent of Poles, 36 percent of the French, and just 10 percent of the Irish. Of the remaining third, most live in terraced rowhouses. In Spain’s cities, over four fifths of people live in an apartment. At the edge of Madrid or Valencia, dense mid-rise blocks stand beside open countryside without sprawl in between, something that has almost never happened in an English-speaking country, and that has been rare in France or Germany for a century.
You’ve likely felt the result if you’ve ever been to a Spanish city. Spain’s settlements have some of Europe’s lowest per capita transport emissions, in part because about 70 percent of trips in Madrid and Barcelona are made on foot, tram, or metro. Almost every neighborhood is mixed use; almost all urban Spaniards live in the ‘fifteen-minute cities’ that seem like remote ideals in most affluent societies. Add nationwide life expectancy higher than almost anywhere else in the EU, and you can make out an urban form that keeps carbon, commute times, and hypertension in check without asking citizens to sacrifice home ownership.
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This urban form arose in part by accident. Spain became rich enough for suburbia very late, after the worst problems with premodern urban density had already been solved, and only shortly before planners around the world started to see urban density as desirable. But there are many countries that became rich after Spain and sprawled out. Apart from timing, Spain’s cities benefited from sophisticated public and private planning efforts that helped them overcome many of the collective action problems that prevent dense building. Spain shows that suburbanization is not the inevitable corollary of affluence, and that multiple futures are possible for the cities of Asia and Latin America, if they take the right steps.
Preserved by poverty
Spain was one of the last countries in Western Europe to industrialize. This profoundly shaped how its cities developed. During the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution transformed the cities of Northern Europe and North America. They grew enormously, often becoming ten, twenty, or even a hundred times larger than they had been at the beginning of the century.
An emerging middle class also created a new demand for low-density suburbs. In Britain and North America, huge suburbs of single-family homes emerged, and by 1914 most British and American city-dwellers were living in a townhouse of some kind. This process had also begun in France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, where cities came to be orbited by affluent ‘villa colonies’ of detached houses, connected to the main city by railways.
Spain, like other Mediterranean countries, was less affected by these changes. In the 1880s, the population of Spain was still very rural: only 26 percent of Spaniards lived in towns of over 5,000 people, against 56 percent in the United Kingdom and 43 percent in Belgium. Spaniards were far poorer than northern Europeans, meaning that fewer of them were able to afford a single-family suburban home. But although they were materially poor, Spanish cities were relatively highly planned by the standards of the time. Municipal governments drew up street plans and required landowners to implement them, creating well-designed street networks with generous endowments of public space. The Eixample district that is now Barcelona’s city center is the most famous example, but similar schemes governed the growth of nearly all major Spanish cities.
Spanish cities were also constrained in their footprints (and thus forced to stay dense) by a lack of public transportation. In 1914, the tram routes of Chicago were about as long (around 1,000 kilometers) as those of all the cities of Spain put together. The commuter suburbs that many European and American cities were rapidly developing at this point were impossible in Spanish cities, where walking was the primary means of transportation. Later, Spain was slower to adopt cars. Spain had just 8 vehicles per 1,000 people in 1930, versus about 216 in the United States and 37 in France. Over the following decades, car ownership continued to be suppressed by high taxes on imports and by unsuitable roads. The dispersed urbanism that cars were beginning to engender in North America remained unthinkable.
This situation remained fundamentally unchanged well into the twentieth century. Although Spain enjoyed some economic growth in the 1910s and ‘20s, it was plunged back into poverty by the Civil War and the autarkic policies of the early dictatorship, a disastrous attempt to make the country economically self-reliant. In 1950, Spanish incomes per person resembled those of Senegal or Cameroon today, though of course it had a much greater built-up stock of wealth than those countries do. Its cities remained remarkably old-fashioned, with a housing stock consisting almost entirely of rented flats and car ownership restricted to a tiny elite. Footage from the mid-1950s shows cities where most journeys were made on foot, and most freight was transported with donkeys and hand carts. Almost half the population still lived in rural areas.
Spanish cities remained old-fashioned in another less conspicuous way. In continental Europe, robust legal structures enabling condominium ownership, where residents own a flat but share ownership of the underlying building, emerged only in the mid-twentieth century. Before then, flats were overwhelmingly rented. During the First World War, most European countries implemented rent controls, which lasted until the late twentieth century. In France and Germany, these largely destroyed the viability of ‘build to let’, as building owners could no longer recoup the cost of their investment. Given the weakness or absence of legal structures for multiple ownership of buildings, this meant the private sector had no easy way to build flats.
As a result, homebuilding either switched over to single-family housing or was taken over by the state. The densely massed blocks favored by the private build-to-let sector, which seek maximum rental income per square meter, were replaced immediately with small owner-occupier houses, or with whatever housing typologies government officials happened to favor. By 1930, Paris had extensive suburbs of downmarket single-family owner-occupier houses, while Berlin had acquired its famous Siedlungen, modernist social housing estates built by the municipal government at low to medium densities.
In Spain, the housebuilding sector remained basically nineteenth-century in character: the switch to single-family housing or public housing estates never occurred. The Spanish government did introduce rent controls in 1921, but it was slow to enforce them effectively, and it cushioned their impact with subsidies for developers. This meant that build-to-let apartments remained dominant until a form of condominium ownership (propiedad horizontal) was introduced in 1960. Urban Spain thus still had few owner-occupied houses or modernist public housing projects in the mid-twentieth century, continuing to prefer the same dense block structures that the continental build-to-let sector had chosen since the 1700s.
Nonetheless, beneath the surface, modernity had already changed urban life in Spain. Premodern cities were extremely unhealthy places, chiefly because of disease and water contamination. Their residents incurred what demographers call the ‘urban penalty’, a substantially reduced life expectancy as a result of living in cities. This was one of the factors that drove the wealthy to move to the suburbs in the cities of America and Northern Europe.
Modern drainage, piped water and vaccination ended the urban penalty in the early twentieth century. Nationally, death rates ran about 31 per 1,000 in cities versus 27 per 1,000 in Spanish rural areas in 1860, but the gap shrank steadily and had almost converged by 1930. Violent crime rates, high in nineteenth-century Spain, also fell rapidly. By the time economic growth really took off, between the 1950s and the early 2000s, some of the main push factors that had driven suburbanization elsewhere had faded away.
Spanish cities today
Spain’s late development affected its urbanism in another way. Around the world, planning orthodoxy changed drastically in the late twentieth century, coming to prize the density and mixing of uses that it had long rejected. This shift began in the 1960s with the classic work of writers like Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, and Aldo Rossi, and by the 1990s a preference for dense urban spaces and dislike of suburban sprawl had become the established view in all countries.
In most countries, however, the legacy of the preceding decades had created powerful path dependencies difficult to reverse. The dense mixed-use cores of Northern European and American cities were surrounded by vastly larger, low-density, car-dependent suburbs. There are no tram or metro lines running through them which can be extended, no walkable street networks to join onto, and no nearby main streets to make use of and support. Sites at the urban periphery really are car dependent, and it really is difficult to build them at higher densities. Cultural factors may have reinforced this, with single-family homes coming to be seen as the only high-status housing type in most contexts. Meanwhile densifying existing neighborhoods is often economically possible but tends to be politically difficult.
In Spain, by contrast, traditional urbanism had only just begun to fray at the time when density came back into fashion around the world. The Francoist authorities switched over to supporting modernism in the 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s, large modernist housing projects began to appear in Spain, called polígonos de viviendas or ‘dwelling polygons’. These repudiated the corridor streets and perimeter blocks of traditional Spanish urbanism, but they were still fairly mixed use and they still had quite high levels of density. In 1976, the government imposed a maximum density, though quite a high one, of 75 dwellings per hectare with provision for 100 dwellings per hectare in special cases. As a national rule, this lasted only until 1978, when the new democratic constitution devolved land-use policy to the regions, though some regions continued to operate density caps thereafter.
By the time Spanish planners joined the international movement towards density in the 1980s and 1990s, suburban path dependencies had not established themselves. Spanish planners were able to apply ‘new urbanist’ approaches to cities that already basically corresponded to their ideals. This was much easier than applying them to cities that had radically departed from them.
Spain is not alone in Europe in having become wealthy only recently: most Southern European countries have a similar economic history. And Portugal, Italy, and Greece do share the distinctive features of Spanish urbanism to some extent, with relatively dense cities and relatively high shares of people living in apartments (46 percent in Portugal, 53 percent in Italy and 59 percent in Greece compared to 65 percent in Spain).
In other ways, however, Spain is distinctive in Southern Europe. The cities of Portugal, Greece, and Southern or Central Italy are generally surrounded by ragged fringes of unplanned suburban development: their urban cores are dense in the same way as Spain’s, but their peripheries are a chaotic mixture. The transport situation is also dramatically different. About half of journeys in Lisbon and Athens are by car; in Rome, the figure is two thirds, with another substantial share on mopeds; in Nicosia, it is 85 percent, the highest of any European capital. In Madrid, the modal share of cars is below 30 percent. Cities tend to be dense all over Southern Europe, but they have not all achieved the transport outcomes that urbanists associate with density: in this respect, Spain is the outstanding model.
Late affluence is not, then, the complete explanation of Spain’s distinctive urbanism: public policy is also part of the story. One element of this is that the nineteenth-century tradition of urban planning has survived in Spain to a greater extent than almost anywhere else. To understand this point, it is worth contrasting Spanish development with the ‘developer led’ system dominant in Britain and the United States.
In Britain and America, the public authorities develop the main arterial roads and set out broad parameters for the kind of development they are minded to permit in their ‘local plans’ (Britain) or ‘comprehensive plans’ (America). They then have a reactive function, considering and approving applications from developers rather than making plans of their own. This leads to fragmented urban forms, since each development is designed independently of the others. They tend to be linked to each other only through their respective access roads connecting them to the arterial network.
In Spain, the authorities largely plan the street network themselves, imposing it across existing property boundaries regardless of whether any given landowner wants development on their land. The extension plan also designates sites for other infrastructure and public buildings. Land marked for all these public uses is then ceded to the municipality, and infrastructure is laid out, either by the local government or by a special administrative body called a Junta formed by the landowners themselves. In either case, the landowners are required to cover the costs. The remaining land is readjusted, meaning that it is reapportioned among the affected landowners so that they each end up with a share proportionate to what they had before the cession of land for public works.
All this may seem rather hard on the landowners, who not only lose some of their land but are also required to pay for its development. Their consolation is that this infrastructure greatly increases the value of their remaining land, since it can now be sold for housing or commercial buildings. So although each landowner will have less land than they started with, they will almost certainly be a major net beneficiary of the change. What is more, the land readjustment process means that they all receive a fair share of the uplift: everyone wins, rather than just those whose land was serviced by the public infrastructure but not consumed for it. Spain thus pairs a relatively interventionist approach to extension planning with a relatively generous approach to sharing uplift with affected landowners.
This has yielded cities with exceptionally good infrastructure. About 28 percent of Madrid’s surface area is taken up by roads, almost exactly the 30 percent recommended by UN specialists. This compares to 21 percent in Paris, 19 percent in London and 20 percent in New York. Even Los Angeles, a famously road-heavy city, uses only 25 percent for roads. As we have seen, these roads are also more skilfully interconnected, which is indispensable for pedestrians and cyclists.
Despite having far superior road infrastructure, Spanish cities also have high public transport use. Around 60 percent of trips in the Madrid metropolitan area and over 70 percent of trips in the Barcelona metropolitan area are made through public or active travel, similar to other major European cities and far higher than American, Canadian, or Australian cities, which typically fall below 30 percent. In other words, Spanish cities have Los Angeles-tier road infrastructure and Paris-tier public transport access.
This is paired with some of the continent’s best intercity transport. Spain has significantly more motorways than any other European country: 17,228 kilometers, versus 13,183 in Germany and 11,671 in France. It has the second-longest high-speed rail network in the world, after China. And this rail is well used: the railway between Barcelona and Madrid currently wins 82 percent of the traffic on that route in competition with air travel. (The train captures somewhere between three and eight percent of the market for Boston-DC, which is roughly the same distance.)
When it comes to both inter- and intracity infrastructure, a significant part of Spain’s success is hard to replicate, in that the funding came from generous European largesse. Between the late 1980s and 2020, Spain received something like €200 billion in cohesion funding. For a decade, 1993–2003, this was worth over one percent of Spanish GDP per year.
Still, from the perspective of transport infrastructure, Spain spent the money well. Whereas other recipients, like Portugal, Greece, and Ireland, spent a big fraction of their money on social cohesion, on subsidising small businesses, and on workforce training, Spain put the bulk towards roads and railways. They were rarely funded wholly by the European Union: typically they would be at least partly locally, regionally, and nationally funded as well.
More importantly, Spain kept costs low. If Britain had enjoyed the European Union’s largesse to the tune of €200 billion, it would have covered the cost of HS2, Britain’s bloated 200-kilometer rail project, and enough extra to, perhaps, extend HS2 to Manchester and Leeds as originally intended, rather than having it stop at Birmingham. Spain, combined with its non-EU injections, built 4,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, 10,000 kilometers of motorway, and numerous metros, trams, ring roads, and radial arterials, because it kept costs extremely low.
It did this by maintaining good practice: flexible environmental rules (although these have since become more problematic), top-tier in-house capacity in engineering and contracting, a commitment to a steady pipeline of projects over decades, and, above all, rapid decisionmaking, avoiding the costly delays and redesigns common elsewhere. Another part of this was giving small areas the power to decide on and fund infrastructure, like the Madrid Metro, avoiding the ping pong between authorities seen in some high-cost countries. Together, this has allowed it to build metros more than 20 times cheaper than in New York City. For the price of one mile of the New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension, Spanish builders covered the entire 35-mile 1995–1999 expansion of the Madrid Metro.
As a result, Spanish transport infrastructure is both abundant and cheap. Madrid’s metro underwent one of the fastest growth spurts in the world between 1995 and 2007, adding around 203 kilometers of new lines to its already impressive footprint. Barcelona has been continuously expanding its metro network since the Second World War: in a period of astonishing activity between 1990 and 2010 there were 18 separate extensions, and seven more since.
Cities including Valencia, Bilbao, Seville, and Málaga all built metro or light rail systems in the 1990s and 2000s. Madrid and Barcelona have both joined their old suburban rail lines up into Cercanías/Rodalies systems, similar to London’s Crossrail scheme but far more comprehensive (though not always well run). The upshot of this is that, despite having some of the world’s best road infrastructure, Spain still has relatively low levels of car use and ownership: the modal share of driving is low not because driving is a bad option, but because other options are so good.
Too much planning
Unfortunately, the Spanish planning machine is starting to fall apart. While it still builds homes in the right ways, it no longer builds enough of them.
Before 2007, Spanish land was buildable by default: it could be developed unless it had been positively designated otherwise, as forest, farmland, or some other non-urban use. In 2006 alone the country permitted 920,199 dwellings and completed 657,990. In 2007, the government inverted the law: land is only zoned for housing if the local council specifically decides to make it so.
In the decade since, almost every level of government has added requirements of its own. A 2013 law, for example, requires any change to a general plan to go through an environmental assessment, with its own consultation, area study and final report from a separate administration. There are also new regional requirements, including landscape integration in Valencia and a health impact assessment in Andalusia. When you combine all of these, creating a new city plan in Andalusia can require completing around a hundred compliance reports. The same accumulation has happened to the building rules, like the 2019 building code that requires heat pumps and rooftop solar panels on every new dwelling, and grid reforms that prioritized keeping charges low over investment, and then used up all available connection capacity on connecting 129 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Planning a major Spanish urban extension now depends on agreement from the municipality, the community (the regional government), the landowners, and, individually, each of the environmental, water, roads, electricity, public transportation, and social housing authorities. The result is that creating new city plans now takes an enormously long time. Creating the plan takes between six to eight years, while designing the streets and plots takes another three to seven.
This would be a problem even if Spain’s population were shrinking due to its low fertility. Countries like these, such as Russia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Italy, are seeing extreme increases in the demand to live in the cities with strong economies and amenities. Spain’s population would be falling naturally, but the demand for homes in Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid, and Malaga is not.
But on top of that, Spain is experiencing rapid immigration, primarily from Latin America. Since 2021 the country has gained 1.2 million households compared with just 474,000 homes. In 2025, Spain had the developed world’s fastest immigration, gaining 1.1 percent of its population in a single year.
This is leading to high prices. Madrid asking prices are now nearly €6,000 per square meter, and Barcelona over €5,000, above Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, Milan, and Rome, although not quite as high as Dublin, Munich, or Paris. But Spanish wages are low. Household disposable incomes average €27,000, versus €32,000 in France, and €37,000 in Germany. This has left leading Spanish cities with some of the worst house price to income ratios in Europe.
The lesson from Spain
Spain’s planning difficulties today suggest it is not immune to the problems that caused cities in the rest of the rich world to stagnate. But even in stagnation urban Spain remains unique. Although luxury suburbs of detached houses have started to appear in Spain in recent decades, they remain extremely marginal. Seventy percent of households in Spanish cities own cars, and Spanish cities actually have distinctively good road infrastructure, but its cities remain extremely dense places where residents use transit for the vast majority of travel.
Spain’s success is not an easy model for emulation in Northern Europe or the US today, because to a large extent it is the product of historical conditions that not all suburbanized countries share. Spain became rich enough to suburbanize just as Western planning orthodoxy was shifting back towards appreciation of density and mixed use. It was far easier for pro-density planners to promote density under these conditions than when planning for cities that had already become extremely diffuse.
Around the world, however, there are many countries whose situation today resembles Spain’s in the late twentieth century. Latin American and Asian cities tend to be dense and mixed use, and incomes in those countries are comparable to those in Spain between 1950 and 1990. For these cities, Spain’s urban history offers an extremely important precedent. Becoming wealthier need not mean living in cities like those of the US and Australia. Sao Paulo, Tehran, Delhi and Jakarta could choose to become rich in the way that Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia, and Barcelona have instead. Affluent city-dwellers may continue living in generously sized apartments, walking to local shops, and riding an efficient metro system to work. Spain proves that modernity has room for more than one kind of city, and that through vigorous public policy, people may choose which of them they want for themselves.