A Method for the Evaluation of Metropolitan Planning: Application to the Context in Spain

The metropolitan urbanization shows evidence that planning at the regional, subregional and municipal levels with its wide range of territorial, urban and sectorial competences is now longer able to significantly influence territorial development. This has led to a greater demand for alternative approaches, methods and instruments. For this research study, the metropolitan area of Granada was used as a field laboratory to assess the capacity of metropolitan planning to have an impact on metropolitan processes and dynamics. For this purpose, a method for metropolitan planning evaluation, MPE methodology, was proposed, which involves two evaluation processes. This method first evaluated the coherence of plans of different competences and at different scales within the metropolitan context (trans-scalar evaluation); it then evaluated the interaction between methods and proposals in plans and metropolitan dynamics (interactive evaluation).