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Long Term Implications of HSR on Small cities: Ciudad Real and Puertollano revisited 25 years after
the arrival of the HSR

tourism destination called “Reino de Don Quijote”, and the future private airport and its industrial
area. This last project was approved as ‘Singular interest project’ an exceptional planning legal
figure of the Regional Land Use Law, and therefore was assumed by the city planning (FIG).
Nevertheless, the urban patters, building typologies and distribution, etc. created with the
new urban plan of Ciudad Real did not take into consideration the opportunities that may have
appear between the new station and the existing city centre. The plan left several barriers
between the city centre and the station (a park, and old prison, etc.) and there were no
intervention planned to improve this connection. On the contrary, on the other side of the
tracks, new lands for tertiary and industrial activities was reserved.
In 2011 Ciudad Real started to revise its municipal development urban but the real sate crisis
started in Spain in 2008 stopped its elaboration process as its growing in population and
urban land previsions soon were found oversized (66000 new dwelling units, and housing for a
population of 184.000 inhabitants (Rodríguez-Doménech, 2012).
Urban Development Planning documents seem to maintain a hope that these HSR cities will
grow importantly, but reality doesn’t follow, maintaining slow growth rates, and thus making
it much less urgent to approve new development plans. Ciudad Real approved its new Urben
Development Plan just before the Spanish real state crisis, thus with abundant new possible
urban expansion, which is still able to cope with today’s urban growth, thus there little need to
approve a new urban development plan.
Figure 6:
Urban Development Plans: Ciudad Real-Miguelturra, Puertollano and airport area.

Source:

Ribalaygua, et.al. (2004)

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 219