The City Council of Enguera (Valencia) has promoted the environmental and territorial evaluation of the Draft and Initial Strategic Document of the General Structural Plan (PGE) and the Detailed Planning Plan (POP). The first instrument will be evaluated and definitively approved by two autonomous bodies, while the second is for definitive municipal evaluation and approval.
Enguera is located in the heart of the mountains that bear its name, the well-known Sierra de Enguera. It has an approximate area of 241.7 km², making it one of the largest municipalities in the Valencian Community, with a population density of approximately 21 inhabitants per square kilometer. It is also the capital of one of the southernmost regions of the province of Valencia, La Canal de Navarrés, characterised by the importance of some of its natural spaces, such as the Sierra de Enguera itself or the Muela de Cortes de Pallás.
The new planning, developed by the AUG-ARQUITECTOS, SLP team, aims to correct an anomalous situation, derived from the excessive longevity of the current planning, a Subsidiary Regulations of 1986 that have hardly been modified and have not been developed. The current urban framework is very outdated and far from the needs of a town like Enguera. Thus, the Enguera City Council intends to undertake a new general plan, adapted not only to the current regulations on urban planning, environmental, heritage, landscape and urban regeneration and renewal, but also to a different vision, which assumes the need to accommodate growth expectations to the real needs of the municipality, making the plan a viable and economically sustainable instrument. This is why the Draft PGE is formulated from a position of self-restraint and with a clear objective of adjusting the growth and soil sealing perspectives, without giving up, in any way, the objectives of territorial and urban structuring, in a municipality of large dimensions, such as Enguera.
The objectives of the plan must fit into a territory that has suffered from the inadequacy of planning and excessive laxity in matters of urban discipline, causing a situation that may compromise some actions. The long validity of the NNSS, of almost forty years and the impossibility of carrying out the revision of the planning, together with the lack of urban management carried out in the town during these decades have contributed to promoting urban evolution and development outside of urban planning and its legal framework, generating a scenario that is unsustainable and that this PGE aims to correct.
The POP, for its part and as a development of the PGE, aims to expand on the criteria for the planning of the latter and to transfer to the detailed planning the basic concepts established in articles 3, 6, 12 and 13 of the TRLOTUP, among others.
Enguera is a town in which, for almost forty years, no urban development activity has taken place, beyond small growths in border areas with very precarious urbanisation and aimed exclusively at the promotion of housing or the execution of some industrial warehouses. The regulated transformation of the land has remained outside this process, based on a loose interpretation of the norm or directly outside the urban planning determinations themselves, which configures a scenario that is essential to correct.
Most of the aspects corresponding to the detailed planning must be reviewed and the imposition of the techniques and tools provided for by the current legislation is urgent. In this context, both the Administration and individuals must find in the POP the argument to transform the way of acting on urban and developable land, so that its programming and development become something habitual. Respect for cultural heritage, the search for objectives of urban quality and structuring of growth, the creation of a local green infrastructure and the perception, in short, that the town is the common object to protect and enrich from a collective perspective, are objectives directly associated with the POP that should be established, when it is approved and comes into force. Along with these objectives, the economic and social inclusion perspective cannot be forgotten and that is why the detailed planning proposals have been drawn up with the idea of guaranteeing the sustainability of the model.
The POP therefore aims to become the element that marks the turning point of the urban, environmental and heritage culture of Enguera, and aims to serve as a catalyst for an orderly, well-planned and regenerative growth process. To this end, the plan.