The island cities

Gran Canaria and Tenerife are island cities. They have been for about twenty years. As Federico García Barba described it some time ago, Tenerife “has been evolving in the last half century to the point of transforming its relatively flat coastal platform into a highly urbanized metropolitan system (…) It could be assimilated to a kind of annular city in which urban spaces coexist with cultivated areas, all guided by a powerful road structure and an extensive network of ravines that define the territorial drainage». This definition could be perfectly applied to Gran Canaria. And to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, with some differential structural characteristics, of course. García Barba himself has emphasized – like other urban planners and architects from the Canary Islands, who have not exactly received exhaustive attention from those in power – that an almost mythical concept of island must be overcome – tiny continents where there are still fans of the Court’s contempt and village praise – to be able to exercise real control over their territory, their economic potential, and their ecological and environmental health. It is difficult to assume that we no longer live on islands, but rather in island cities, but that reality should permeate the country’s development and social cohesion strategies on the part of legislators and public administrations, if any or any.



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