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Medellín is the center of a metropolitan area that occupies part of the Aburrá Valley. Between 2012 and 2013, the National University of Colombia, local office of Medellín, conducting the study Proposal for the Development of the Metropolitan Green Belt of Aburrá Valley. The study aims to develop a project of ecological planning in the metropolitan region around Medellín in Colombia. The area includes 10 municipalities comprising the metropolitan conurbation of Medellín. The project designs an intervention strategy to promote meaningful protection for the provision of ecosystem services urban areas. The project designs an intervention strategy to promote protection of meaningful areas for the urban provision of ecosystem services. The set of strategies has been termed Metropolitan Green Belt of Aburrá Valley. It is defined three geographical areas of intervention: The External Belt for water regulation, System of Urban-Rural Transition for dissipation and containing urban expansion and Ecological Connection Structure. Each area has been associated with a key concept and a major ecosystem service. The three areas, spatially integrated, constitute the green belt. Have also been raised seven management strategies for a planning horizon of 17 years (Consistent with the 2030 vision of the metropolitan city). The work shows the conceptual coherence between ecological conservation goals and objectives of spatial planning. It also reveals the social and political acceptance with planning actions that invoke ideas of ecological conservation. This project was develop between 2012 and 2013 by a team from the National University of Colombia (School of Urban-Regional Planning) and funded by the Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley, a regional government. The authors was participate in the project as a technical coordination (L.C. Agudelo) and international consultant (J.L. Miralles).

[EN] The period between 1997 and 2007 was a period of economic expansion in Europe, and especially in Spain, where it was based on the real estate bubble. Valencian Country, in Mediterranean coast, is a special case inside Spain because its economy specialized in the housing construction sector for non-primary houses. House construction was possible due to the increase in private debt of developers and buyers. The (artificially self-generated) expectation of strong annual increases in housing values maintained an intense construction activity. In 2007, the price of houses peaked and then began a process of impoverishment due to the payment of debts. Today this process is still going on, but extensive data on the complete cycle of expansion and regression of the housing bubble are already available. This paper presents a real description of the complete process of non-sustainable urban development in Valencian Country and analyzes the process in economic, social and environmental terms. Finally, a general scheme of the process and a system of sustainability is proposed.

[ES] La Manga del Mar Menor in the Region of Murcia every year reaches a population of more than 250,000 people during the summer, with only a few thousand in winter. This crowded environment with an asymmetric behaviour submits annual progressive impoverishment in its economic return. This questionable profitability is the result of a misguided urban development, and its results are analysed through the evolution of the land market and the resulting urbanization in the last 50 years using a GIS methodology., [EN] Urban planning is a lengthy and settled process which results usually emerge after several years or even decades. That is why it is necessary for a proper urban design of cities to use parameters that are able to predict and gauge the potential long-term behaviour of urban development. In the tourist towns of the Mediterranean coast, the long-term design is often at odds with the generation of business profits in the short term. We present here the results of this phenomenon for an interesting case of Spanish Mediterranean coastal city created from scratch in the 60s and turned into a tourist destination today hypertrophied. La Manga del Mar Menor in the Murcia region every year is reaching a population of more than 250,000 people during the summer, which are reduced to a few dozen in winter. This crowded environment with an asymmetric behaviour submits annual progressive impoverishment in its economic return. This questionable profitability is the result of a misguided urban development and the results are analyzed through the evolution of the land market and the resulting urban in the last 50 years with a SIG methodology.

The urbanization process that shapes the current Mediterranean coast started in Spain with mass tourism, encouraged by the National Law of Tourist Interest Areas in 1963 as a strategic investment. Fifty years after its implementation, it is necessary to conduct a retrospective analysis of the results, for the evaluation of the goals set in the 60s. The evolution of the economic, political and legal parameters show certain deviations from the initial forecasts of many urban plans carried out in coastal places created from scratch. The case of La Manga del Mar Menor is certainly an enlightening example of the results that have been achieved on a mass tourist destination. La Manga, located in the coastal Region of Murcia (south-eastern Spain), is a destination of 250,000 holidaymakers in summer which was a desert dune in the 60s. The study of feedback between a tourist model and urban planning reveals the problems of a tourist product to maintain its attractiveness in the long term. The short-term benefit of second homes versus hotels, the cost of maintaining the locations with high seasonality in demand or the target customer in a tourist destination are elements heavily influenced by urban planning in coastal cities. In this paper, all these elements will be distributed to either side of the balance, in order to evaluate the validity of the La Manga model.

The period 1997 2007 was a period of economic expansion in Europe, particularly in Spain. The expansion occurred based on easy credit in a globalized economy. In Spain, a large part of the credit was allocated to civil works and construction of housing. So it caused a housing bubble that burst in 2007. Thus, in the period 1997 2007 unsustainable urban development was produced in Spain. Today we know a lot of the historical data of the process and its consequences in the economic recession lasting from 2007 to the present. Nowadays, it is possible to systematize the features of urban development, economic processes and behaviors of different social agents during the unsustainable development and after in Spain. Particularly in Spain, Valencia promoted especially this development model and, consequently, has become one of the paradigmatic cases. In addition, tourist residential demand has played an important role throughout this process. Tourist activity is a very important economic sector in Spain and especially on the Valencian and Mediterranean coast. This paper is a synthesis of the evolution of the main variables that explain in this case the unsustainable urban development process taking into account environmental, economic and social aspects. It also identifies the consequences. The analysis draws conclusions that can be generalized in this type of process. This allows us to generate proposals to identify the objective conditions that must be met in sustainable urban development.

La Manga del Mar Menor is an ancient dune line located in the Murcia Region (Spain). This area had an accelerated urbanization process starting in the 1960s which has had several powerful impacts on the coast, the landscape and the marine ecosystem. Among these impacts, the so-called process of mediterraneanisation of the inland lake is particularly interesting. The Mar Menor is a salty lagoon of more than 170 km2 and uniform drafts about 5 meters deep. This lagoon is a former bay of the Mediterranean Sea closed in a natural way by the sandbar of La Manga with a length of about 20 km. In 1950, this sandbar was a desert land. In around 1960 there was a tourism project to host up to 60,000 people. At present, it receives up to 250,000 people in the summer, mostly of Spanish origin. The urbanization process changed the system water flows between the inside and the seawater through channels called golas . The changes affected the coastal dynamics, the longitudinal profile of the coast and the lagoon ecosystem. Three processes in particular have caused major environmental impacts: land filling of water areas for the construction of infrastructure and building, connecting islands with routes and expanding channels and building ports for use by recreational vessels. Fifty years after the initial process, this paper analyzes the current coastal pathologies and how the urbanization process has caused them.