The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host the presentation of the report Territory, mobility and roads. A new perspective for Lanzarote, prepared by urban planner Alfonso Sanz in response to a request made by the FCM in August 2022, next Thursday, October 3, at 7:30 p.m. The event will take place in the José Saramago room (La Plazuela, Arrecife) and will be broadcast live through the web and the Institution's YouTube channel.
In the last 25 years, the Foundation has prepared various mobility reports and presented allegations in periods of public information to road infrastructure projects in Lanzarote (1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2014, 2023 and 2024), with the collaboration of experts such as Antonio Estevan, Vicente Torres, Emma Pérez Chacón or Alfonso Sanz, among others.
The objective of this new report is to contribute to the adoption of a strategy for the roads of Lanzarote, which puts them at the service of a mobility model compatible with the challenges of today's society, the territory and the environment, allowing to broaden the public debate beyond the specific road projects that are being announced in the media and, beyond that, also, the mobility debate anchored in the logic of the indefinite growth of the use of the automobile.
The three concepts that title this report: territory, mobility and roads, are not ordered at random, but as a reflection of a hierarchy that is often distorted. Territory, mobility and roads have a common strategic and regulatory framework, but also their own sectoral frameworks that should be aligned in the indicated hierarchy: first the territory, then the mobility system and, finally, the road system.
The document, which will be presented this Thursday, focuses on orienting the problem towards the consideration of island mobility as a whole - attending to sustainable and efficient transport approaches and landscape integration - above responding to disaggregated road projects. This last approach is based on future growth of the car fleet, without considering the maximum load capacity of the territory, nor assessing mobility alternatives.
On the other hand, it avoids the consideration of landscape values and dispenses with adjusting the parameters of speed and capacity to the context of climate change and decarbonization, as well as to the regulations and commitments of the governments and Public Administration themselves.
The person in charge of preparing the report, Alfonso Sanz Alduán, is a geographer, mathematician and urban planner. Specialized in mobility and climate change, he has worked as a consultant in several dozen Spanish cities and in Latin America. He has carried out numerous studies and reports for the improvement of active (pedestrians and bicycles) and sustainable (buses and railways) mobility and has directed mobility plans and climate plans. He is a consultant for the Grupo de Estudios y Alternativas 21 S.L. (gea21).
His publications include: “Towards the ecological reconversion of transport in Spain” (La Catarata, Bilbao, 1996); “Calming traffic. Steps towards a new culture of urban mobility” (Ministry of Development, 2008), “The bicycle in the city” (Ministry of Development, second edition 1999), “Walking in the city. Pedestrian mobility manual” (Editorial Garceta, 2016). “Strategy T. A new approach to the treatment of crossings” (Directorate General of Traffic, 2019), “Almost Zero Cities” (MAPFRE Foundation, 2020), “Low Emission Zones. Guide for its application with climate and air quality criteria in medium-sized cities” (2022) and “Roadmap for collective transport. 2030” (ATUC, 2022).
