Page 220 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Coronado, José María. Ureña, José María.

It seems that the industrial city of Puertollano, the second stop of the Madrid-Seville HSR
line, has taken a negative growth path in comparison to other similar industrial cities. A
transportation means only for persons, together with the proximity of Ciudad Real also served
by HSR is reducing and or extracting the dynamism of this industrial city. In this bipolar setting,
HSR seem to extract from Puertollano and add to Ciudad Real.
Comparing the population findings of the analysis undertaken 10 years ago by Serrano, et. al
(2006) with those of the present longer term analysis the findings are not identical but similar;
2
thus, it could be argued that the usefulness of long term population evolution analysis is not
crucial. Nevertheless, longer term analysis suggests that the growth population dynamism of
Ciudad Real (the administrative city) is maintained in relation to that observed post HSR but
ten/fifteen years earlier, while that of Puertollano (the industrial city) seems to worsens in
relation to that observed ten/fifteen years earlier. Thus the longer term population analysis
does provide some additional qualitative differences.

4. Comparison of strategies

Usually, cities with new HSR connections attract/generate many urban projects, from the city
itself, of from external/foreign investors trying to take advantage of the accessibility and image
improvements. The policies/strategies implemented in these two cities are also revisited, as
it was done ten years ago, ten years after the existence of HSR in Ribalaygua, C., Ureña, J.M.,
Coronado, J.M., Escobedo, F., Guirao, B., Menéndez, J.M., Rivas, A. y Rodríguez, F.J. (2004)
“Alta Velocidad, integración metropolitana y proyectos territoriales. El caso de Ciudad Real
y Puertollano”, URBAN, n. 9, pp. 30-44.
Ribalaygua, et.al. (2004) studied the effects of HSR upon this HSR corridor ten years after
it started to operate. They considered mobility and territorial structures, and made special
attention on big projects that can only be understood under their close link to HSR. Here we
are interested in their findings in relation to the main projects and to global planning criteria.
The relevance of comparing projects 10 years and 20/25 years is what Ribalaygua, et. al (2004)
indicated that mobility changes may happen rapidly (few years after HSR), while changes on territorial
structures need more time to happen.

Around ten years after the arrival of HSR the implications that were considered relevant were called
“Effects on urban planning and the appearance of territorial scale projects” (Ribalaygua, et.al., 2004).
In relation to the municipal development urban plans, Ciudad Real renewed his in 1988, and
a new one was approved in 1997, while Miguelturra, an adjacent town of 10000 inhabitants
functionally integrated in the Ciudad Real socioeconomic dynamism, approved a new municipal
development urban plan in 1994. On the contrary, Puertollano only started a new planning
document in 2002, 18 years after the previous plan dating from 1984, and ten years after the
arrival of High Speed Train.
In the case of Ciudad Real, the urban analysis done by Fariña et al. (2000) concluded that the
impact of HSR in planning was very important, although not by itself and the opportunities it
created, but because of the new locations of the tracks and the station. In fact, the stronger
effects in the city were located in the old railway brownfields, transformed into residential land.
Ribalaygua et al. (2004) indicated that the new urban plan defined a city three times bigger
than the 1987 plan, with a combination of very high and very low-density areas. As a result,
four main urban spaces appeared: the compact urban nuclei of Ciduad Real and Miguelturra, a

2 These are the conclusions/findings on this aspect by Serrano et al (2006) “Del análisis demográfico entre 1975 y 2001 se puede
concluir que Ciudad Real mejora claramente su ritmo de crecimiento a partir del AVE en comparación con la media de las capitales
similares, pasando de crecer solo un poco más que la media antes del AVE a crecer el doble que la media después del AVE; mien-
tras que Puertollano empeora claramente su ritmo de crecimiento a partir del AVE en comparación con la media de las ciudades
similares, pasando de crecer algo menos que la media antes del AVE a ser el núcleo que más decrece después del AVE.”

218 360.revista de alta velocidad