Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the last decades, urban policies have upsurged as one of the main axis in debates, innovation and changes around metropolitan territories. In this vein, urban gentrification processes have been one of the most importants features, especially in Madrid and Barcelona, where there have been two processes in Hortaleza and Poblenou that have upsurged as two models concerning changes around urban public spaces. From a perspective which stems from a critical review of the Regulation Theories and Legal Geography, and through a comparative research about urban renewal processes in Poblenou and Hortaleza, the aim of this work is to study how authorities affects these gentrification processes and, ultimately, in the arisen of both dynamics as key features regarding the production of globality in Madrid and Barcelona. 

Citizen initiatives bloom, aiming to manage alternatively public resources in Europe’s major cities, leads to reconsider the way to manage public policies. We are talking about a series of bottom-up initiatives that have completely changed the traditional way to manage cities, based until now on the traditional top-down approach. Lately, as a result of these initiatives, many governments are designing new urban development policies that involve citizens in the new management and design of the city and public spaces. These “new policies”, as well as scarcity of resources and capabilities to face as old as new challenges, seek to find alternative ways of managing public issues. It is the case of citizen consultation on investment by neighborhoods developed by the Valencia City Council. This paper aims to analyze problems of implementation this public policy has to face, as well as its positive and negative impacts, through an analysis of all phases of the citizen consultation process.

The Atlas presents in a systematic and complete way the general elections held in Spain between 1977 and 2016, devoting a chapter to each election, analyzing various variables and offering a general pre-electoral and post-electoral panorama. It also highlights some aspects susceptible of being improved, such as the clarification of the criteria to consider elections as advanced or not, or the use of a different model from one of the maps that are developed.

European society is mostly urban. However, metropolitan areas do not enjoy political recognition at European level and, in most cases, neither at a national level. In this article we make a comparative analysis of metropolitan governance models in Europe based on four variables: the territorial fragmentation, the powers of a metropolitan nature, the sources of financing and the type of political representation. In most European countries there are no metropolitan governments with exclusive competences and fiscal autonomy, although the recent reforms in Italy, England and France are framed in a greater recognition of the metropolitan reality. The absence of strong metropolitan governments contrasts with the evolution of the design of European funds, in which the urban dimension of policies has gradually been included. Nevertheless, the management of European funds by metropolitan authorities is a minority option, which poses a challenge for metropolitan governance.

Local governments through smart cities try to position themselves before the challenge of attracting investment and improving public services. In order to be more efficient, participatory, and sustainable, the city must be transformed through the use of new technologies, offering a better quality of life for its inhabitants. The concept of smart cities is now fashionable, so its definition is ambiguous due to the plurality of approaches from which the urban context is analyzed (Holland, 2008). This multitude of meanings of the concept, translated into Spanish as an intelligent city, has generated very varied typologies and a very broad literature on the subject, which has been increasing during the last years focused on studies on sustainability, the environment, governance, mobility, housing, multiculturalism, energy and technology among others, although from a more theoretical than practical perspective. The objective of this article is to know the paradigm of smart cities in the framework of urban governance, understood as «a new way of governing (...) a new method according to which society is governed» (Rhodes, 1996: 652-653), and all this from a descriptive-deductive methodology providing a conceptual structure in its beginnings to progressively get to know the findings of the research. Thus, this proposal seeks to respond to the relationship between the smart city, also known as smart city, and urban governance in the face of future challenges of participation, public ethics, sustainability, effectiveness and efficiency, transparency and accountability. of counts. It is not surprising that the main conclusions of this research do not place technology and derivatives, as the great tool or contribution of smart cities, but rather, the use and application that is made of them to improve the quality of life of their citizens. We must not forget that technology is a means to an end, and the true smart city must make optimal use of it to achieve good urban governance.

The book analyzes the modernization of public administration and, in particular, of the Spanish government, based on the study of SUMA tax management of the provincial government of Alicante (1990-2013), which is an autonomous body of it, and one of the successful examples of the local tax management. Result of the research developed in the doctoral thesis that brings cause, the work properly combines the perspectives of Political and Administrative Science and Legal Science, offering a multifaceted vision of the object analyzed.

Engagement can be defined as a psychological state in which an individual focuses all her attention and enjoys the activity she is doing. The literature highlights the importance of improving this in citizen participation by governments and administrations. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature does not offer clues about how engagement in citizen participation can be improved. This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework of citizen engagement for citizen participation in the context of smart cities. To this end, we first provide a definition of engagement, and describe some of its main characteristics. Next, we present a review of the literature on citizen participation tools in smart cities, analyzing if such tools do influence engagement attributes. The main outcomes of the study are the elaboration of a theoretical framework that integrates characteristic attributes of engagement in the field of citizen participation, and the identification of participation tools analyzing whether they can be designed to increase citizen engagement levels.

The article firstly draws an overall perspective on the urban age, a new global time where the cities play a central role as spaces which produce and reflect the key dynamics of the 21st Century. On this grounds, a second set of ideas are brought together: the common and proximity as possible answers to create collective projects of protection and recognition. In this sense, the article discusses the main challenge of empowering cities within systems of network multilevel governance. More concretely, the development patterns of local government in Spain are considered: three decades of democratic local government, the recent emergence of new urban movements, and the scenario after the 2015 local election. At this point the article deals with the shaping of a new municipalist model defined by a twofold dimension: a policy agenda committed with the right to the city, and a set of urban practices oriented to common-building. Finally, the Obra Social de la PAH is considered as a case study which allows the analysis of both aspects: the production of urban commons and the access right to affordable housing.

In this article, the author aims to present an intergovernmental analysis on high public function of the Spanish State, based on the premise that senior officials are a critical actor for the governance of societies and they constitute too a good instrument to know basic aspects of the democracy of states. The research methodology has incorporated an empirical work applied on the Cuerpo Superior de Administradores Civiles del Estado, the only collective of the Spanish General State Administration with a generalist dimension who participates in the formulation and implementation of intergovernmental policies. Besides that, research offers interesting data about geographical origin of the senior public officials in Spain; the need of promoting multilevel public career; and the roles of these officials on the complex Spanish State.

Records management system has a great impact in the improvement of transparency in public administration. Transparency by design refers to the inclusion of transparency duties stated by legislation in force in the records’ life cycle in a way that it guarantees citizens effective access to public information. In this paper, the changes that public administrations have to propel in their records management systems to improve public transparency and to make easy access to information are analysed. In particular, as a case study, provisions made by Law 19/2014, of December 29, on Transparency, Access to Public Information and Good Governance of Catalonia are explored.