Along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, what we’re witnessing is not urban growth but a temporal metastasis, a sprawling, cancerous expansion of built form detached from real, continuous life. These are not towns, not even cities, but architectural husks, inflated by speculation and emptied by design. They exist for a season, then collapse into silence. This is not tourism—it’s urban thrombosis. Concrete and glass accumulate like clots in the territorial bloodstream, blocking circulation, suffocating community, paralyzing any possibility of stable social life. These spaces are conceived not to be lived in, but to be rented, sold, exploited. The home becomes transaction; the city becomes a platform for absence. The horror lies not in aesthetic vulgarity—though there’s plenty—but in the void they normalize: places without children, without elders, without permanence. Schools close, public transport withers, and hospitals become seasonal utilities. The rhythm of life is broken, replaced by the artificial pulse of holiday calendars. What we’re left with is a false urbanism, one that mimics density but negates depth. There are buildings, but no neighborhoods; infrastructure, but no intimacy. The city, once a stage for collective meaning, becomes a facade of temporary presence, a simulation of urbanity. This is a structural failure—a political and cultural amputation. It is the direct outcome of a system that values occupancy rates over lived experience, profit over belonging. To confront it demands more than urban planning: it requires a radical ethics of the inhabited, a commitment to urban duration in a time of permanent displacement. * ALLO
