Abstract
The legal and territorial definition of Greater Valencia was the most important event in urban planning for this Mediterranean city in the last century. A very ambitious project, beyond one town council, which was already initiated in 1946 Valencia and its Country Urban Plan, and which led to a final scaling in this just-born Eastern metropolis.
There is no doubt in asserting that this operation, along with the Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao ones, involved an evolution for big city urbanism in Spain: from then up until our own times, and via various different administrative bodies, the metropolitan approach to urban planning of Valencia has not been abandoned.
Taking the vicissitudes of the first of these institutions from a structural point of view, we analyze its historical transformations and development, and the manner in which it drove the morphological development of the territory. In addition to the comparative review of its metropolitan contemporary entities, this research contributes to the spread of the abundant technical labour developed by Greater Valencia, including a graphical summary –as a palimpsest– about the urban changes in its city and country.
This affords, finally, to drawing a journey on Valencia first forty years metropolitan planning. A time-travel, which enables the right comprehension about many urban present facts, and allows achieving –thanks to the necessary historical distance– a proper outlook over the technical and administrative procedures used for this.
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