The Benaguasil City Council (Valencia) has approved the Zoning and Homologation of non-urbanizable land and two new sectors of industrial urbanizable land to the Revised Text of the Law on Territorial Planning, Urbanism and Landscape (TRLOTUP) of the Valencian Community. In the same plenary session, the request for the Strategic Environmental and Territorial Declaration to the regional environmental service was also agreed, in order to conclude this phase of the environmental and territorial assessment and to be able to definitively approve the planning instrument. This file was initiated in May 2018 with the presentation of the Draft and the Initial Strategic Document written by AUG-ARQUITECTOS, SLP and during its processing it has had to overcome different situations, including an important change in the legal framework.
Leaving aside the need to adapt local planning (with more than three decades of validity) to the new legal framework that regulates land use, urban planning, landscape and in general, everything that is the object of a document such as this Zoning-Approval, the main objectives of the same are:
- Zoning and homologating to TRLOTUP of non-urbanizable land and two new sectors of industrial urbanizable land. To provide a cartography that also includes the current classification of the land, as part of the urbanizable land initially planned in the NNSS of 1989 has been developed, as well as certain areas of public use adjacent to the urban land.
- From the environmental, economic and landscape point of view, the attribution to a large part of the rustic land, of the degree of protection that is proper and necessary to safeguard its values, raising the percentage of protected non-urbanizable land from 17.35% to 63.81%.
- The integration into the planning of all the determinations of supra-local instruments and sectoral regulations, so that the protected territory is given the capacity to host activities specific to rural land that enhance its value. In other words: the application of a “positive” interpretation of the condition of protected land is encouraged, so that, far from fossilizing the territory and exposing it to the risk of abandonment or forest fires, it is given the capacity to create synergies and encourage its conservation in an active and not just passive way.
- The adaptation of the growth forecasts of productive land to the thresholds set in the ETCV and to the real expectations of the municipality, including the consideration of existing land for industrial use. Propose a development model from a containment perspective, which necessarily involves the reduction of the developable land provided for in the PGOU promoted in 2008 by the city council and archived in 2018.
- The provision of new productive land in sufficient quantity to favour, in the shortest possible time, the location of productive activities in an ideal location. In this sense, accessibility and sustainable urban mobility have been basic criteria when locating the appropriate location, together with the lack of impact on residential land and the capacity to generate large plots, distinguishing the new sectors from vacant industrial land, characterised by the small size of the available plots.
- The declassification of 231,658 m² of residential developable land, the development of which by the methods specific to that type of land is completely unacceptable, as evidenced by the 28 years that have passed without any solution or programming proposal for that land having been proposed. In the Zoning-Approval, most of this land is assigned to the regime provided for in Book II, Title IV, Chapter III of the TRLOTUP (Actions to minimize the territorial impact generated by housing nuclei on non-urbanizable land)
- The assignment of the declassified land and other areas, up to a total of 362,858 m² of land, to the regime of the Territorial Impact Minimization Actions, delimiting 23 zones that must be developed by this regime.
- The preparation of rigorous cartography, based on the official ICV, updated in those points where it presents deficiencies, so that the new planning becomes an effective tool, prepared in accordance with the criteria established in DECREE 65/2021, of May 14, of the Consell, regulating the Digital Urban Planning Platform and the presentation of urban and territorial planning instruments. This cartography, once the file is definitively approved, will be ready to be sent by the substantive body, for the purposes of its registration in the Registry of Urban Planning Instruments, as established in article 2.2 of the aforementioned Decree. Regarding the delimitation of the municipal term of Benaguasil, the cartography used in the preparation of the Zoning-Homologation has been adapted to what is established in the last five ICV Resolutions published in the Official Journal of the Generalitat Valenciana between 2021 and 2022.