THE CITY OF THE OPEN PLANNING. 
VALENCIA, 1946-1988.

Javier Pérez Igualada.


The object of this work is the study of open-planning residential areas in the city of Valencia. We call open planning, in a general sense, to that whose volume arrangement allows to most of the buildings faces a direct contact with the outside. The period we have studied begins with the "Plan General de Valencia y su Cintura" from 1946 and ends with the "Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Valencia" from 1988. This period has two intermediate landmarks: the "Plan Sur" from 1958 and the "Plan General adaptado a la Solución Sur" from 1966.

The residential units, usually called "polygons" in Spain, are ensembles integrated by housing and complementary services, developed through an unitary project that envolves both urbanisation and bulding works. The polygons are the characteristic form for the urban growth in the modern city: instead of the house-to-house building of the traditional city, they involve an urban developement made by complete residential lots, by parts (residential units or neigbourhoods), in accordance with an hipothesis of a step by step integration of urban units (house-neigbourhood-city).

The main part of the urban peripherical growth in Valencia does not take place by means of the creation of polygons, but by means of the traditional house-to house buiding, trough plans that, in spite of his formal resemblance with the polygons, are really simple plans of alignments and volumes. It all means that it was impossible in Valencia, in the period object of our study, to manage a growth made by addition of complete new urban sectors, in order to control the conditions of the urban transformation.

In spite of his morphology, the open planning residential areas in Valencia have more in common with the "ensanche" (grid of city blocks) than with the polygons. The reasons of it are its location, continuous to the rest of the urban frame, its high density and the compactness that results from a very short land provision for equipment and, finally, its mixed-use character, with a high proportion of linear blocks placed over commercial plinths that connect them at floor plan level.