This article is part of a series of works that are intended to explore alternatives to the model of urban
sprawl that is characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. In response to the unsustainable
use of land, it starts from a zero-growth assumption that is based on the recovery of inherited housing
stock, enhancing and completing the existing in response to the challenges of today's society.
This hypothesis is based on the demographic and economic potential that many neighbourhoods of socalled first urban periphery have1
. This has been defined as the area of urban expansion that was built to
the urgent quantitative needs of homes existing in Europe at the end of the mid-century wars due to
massive migration from the countryside to cities2
.
It should be understood that these areas have been in a strategic position between historic city centres and
the new developments that have emerged in the real estate boom3
. This makes them appear as areas of
opportunity in the move towards sustainable city models departing from approaches that seek to
“optimize, preserve or increase the value of all the existing urban capital (social, urbanism, built heritage,
etc.), in contrast to other ways of intervention which, inside this urban capital, only prioritizes and
preserves the value of the land”4
.
Despite taking the precepts of the modern city compiled in the Charter of Athens (1933) – the basis of the
western urban theory – they can be recognized as areas that have grown without an overall view,
"urbanized areas where the construction of town is absent"5
. In this sense, their development has led to
spontaneous processes through which the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods have modified the original
morphology using natural processes to adapt the generic typologies to the specific modes of life and the
particular conditions of their own place. Therefore, this article recognizes these processes within the
concept of urban opportunism.
Characterized by spontaneity and therefore lacking of regulation, these processes have historically been
valued by experts and other urban agents as anomalous situations by “claiming that have associated
negative effects on the habitability of the built environment”
6
. However, we wonder about the extent to
which this fact can be used as a useful tool to address the plurality and the instability that characterizes
Bauman’s liquid modern society7
.
Before analysing an example in the Andalusian context, the article reflects the experience of the urban
model of the city of Tokyo as a reference for these spontaneous processes of city construction.
Subsequently, it picks a prospective methodology for a specific study case that is based on the recognition
of the concept of opportunism as good practice to regenerate obsolete neighbourhoods
