The new urban planning plan will correct the excess of lots from twenty years ago

Mérida’s urban planning of two decades ago was expansionist. The famous PIR sent people to the outskirts and it seemed that there would not be land for all the houses that the promoters planned to build. Current urban planning is more sustainable. Less car, less distance and more community.

The plenary session yesterday closed an urban stage in the city and opened another. The councilors approved the initial document of the new general plan.

Merida needs a deep revision. The current instrument is the General Plan for Urban Planning (PGOU), in force since 2000 (it replaced the one from 1987) and which the government team already considers amortized.

What was approved yesterday is a generic and global starting point that will now have to be endowed with more specific measures and contributions made by political parties, residents and groups in the city.

The mayor promised to open a customer service office to answer questions.

For any parcel owner to ask if the new plan affects them.

The municipal groups asked that the call for participation be real, that interested parties not be offered a technical document with a list of location codes and maps.

They asked for pedagogy so that it becomes understandable to those who are not experts in urban planning but who are owners and neighbors who may be affected. The City Council is now beginning a long process until the new general plan for Mérida is definitively approved.

The Town Planning delegate, Carmen Yáñez, presented it yesterday at the plenary session as a technical tool to achieve a more compact city, recovering the gaps in land that are undeveloped within the city and that they finally integrate. The idea is to correct the excess of residential land to build that was made in the year 2000.

Osuna closed the turn of interventions explaining that it is about adapting to current urban priorities. There is a lot of construction in Mérida, he clarified, but it is built in a different way to how it was done in the year 2000. And he gave as an example the change of applications that are being processed to go from high-rise homes to single-family homes.

The previous report that the City Council has written concludes that the current PGOU was an ambitious instrument that has improved the city, but has also caused imbalances by generating urbanized land in larger dimensions than the real demands.

The projection that was made in the year 2000 was to build 17,829 in Mérida, something that has not been fulfilled by far in these twenty years.

Four PIRs have been developed (La Calzada, La Paz-San Lázaro, Parque Industrial Sur Extremadura and La Godina, which was finally annulled) which has resulted in an excess of residential land because there is now a stock of plots between the neighborhoods urbanized that meet the condition of solar but are not developed. According to this technical report, we now see an unfinished city with neglected lots and neighborhoods that have a low density of effective residents. The aim of the new general plan is to develop part of what already exists inside before continuing to expand outside. Correct in the plan that the excess of lots that was raised twenty years ago to promote interior construction before expanding outside.