Fragmentation, spatial segregation and unsafety in the recent urban development of Madrid

The city of Madrid has experimented in the last fifteen years urban transformations of notable entity, whose effects are clearly visible on the territory, resulted also of economic and financial processes crossing national boundaries, and they show the strong characteristics of competitiveness of the city. This phenomenon allows to formulate some criticism, above all on the relationship between market and urban development and consequences on the environmental issue and social structure. The Spanish capital, with its recent development, proposes itself as a new “model” of governance for the city of the XXI century, particularly for the new challenges in urban planning: the relationship among “ pensée unique” (I.Ramonet 1995) in market and urban development; the fragmentation, the privatization and the emergency of the urban unsafety; the social equity in the changes of the inner city and new outskitses; the role of the planning legislation; the environmental efficacy and the sustainability of the process; the inadequacy of the nowadays planning toolkit.