The Implementation of the Spanish Urban Agenda: Time for Action

The Spanish Urban Agenda responds to Spain’s commitment to the global agreements: the 2030 Agenda and the United Nations New Urban Agenda.
It is conceived as a strategic document, without a normative nature, which is aimed at action and has a clear vocation of usefulness on the part of all agents with the capacity to influence decisions that affect the territory and, mainly, local entities: towns and cities.
Since its approval in 2019, the Spanish Urban Agenda has served as a roadmap to consolidate and advance in an urban model thar puts people at the centre and gives coherence to the different sectorial policies that make up the actions to be developed by each city and territory.
Its implementation through the elaboration, mainly by Local Entities, of the Actions Plans has been a resounding success in Spain that has led to both a political and technical commitment to the need to strategically plan the future of towns and cities with sustainability criteria. But, despite its success and thanks to it, the Government of Spain is well aware that the work does not end with the preparation of the Plans, but that they are precisely the starting point to get the towns and cities of the whole country to change their way of working and address their development based on a diagnosis and the identification of ambitious but realistic proposals that they have in mind. It counts aspects such as the ecological transition, digital transformation, and innovation, the territory, quality architecture, city and health, and equity and social cohesion, as fundamental axes for good urban development, providing ideas in the understanding of the social, economic and environmental challenges and opportunities that the country will face in the coming decades.
The proposed event seeks to demonstrate how this implementation of the National Urban Policy is being implemented at all levels of the Administration, the space for the exchange of experiences of the National Urban Forum, as well as its capacity to act as a governance tool capable of changing the dynamics learned towards a new way of working oriented to collaboration between the different levels of the Administration and from it with the University and the rest of the professionals linked to the subject in a multidisciplinary and transversal way.
In order to build on what has been built, the Actions Plans that implement it must, as their name suggests, be programmatic documents aimed at their effective application.