Strategic Planning of Cities, Master plan and Participation: The Case of Sevilla (Spain)

This article analyzes three aspects of urban planning in the city of Seville (Spain): The Master Plan, the participatory process that gave rise to it and the incorporation of strategic planning. The Master Plan is an instrument of urban planning limited to the territorial ordering of land uses and occupations, while strategic planning adopts technicality originating from manage-ment paradigms of the private company, assumes the concept of governance and postulates articulating multiple dimensions of development, notably economic, social, environmental and urban. Institutional regulations do not establish a hierarchical order between these different planning modalities, however, the actions and impacts of strategic planning impose the sub-ordination of urban planning instruments. The participatory spaces during the preparation of the Master Plan were implemented by the local government, but this finding is not enough to infer that they had an effective decision-making status.