The arid southeast region has been one of the areas with the oldest settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. Despite limitations imposed by lack of water and low soil fertility, a great number of dwellers have settled in this land for three thousand years thanks to its easy access to the commercial paths of the Mediterranean. The area is currently under great territorial and socioeconomic transformation activated by intensive agriculture through greenhouses and irrigation. The history of this territory offers a series of successful and downward cycles determined, from an ecological and economic point of view, by its integration in different stages of the globalization process. Most recently, in the 19th century an intensive deforestation process took place caused by the mining and iron industry. The deep economic and social crisis which followed the declining of this development model brought also about an ecological crisis. In the second half of the 20th century, negative environmental effects have continued and extended to the next generations with problems such as territorial saturation and aquifer depletion that characterize the new intensive agriculture under plastic. The current debate about the sustainability of this developmental model in such vulnerable environment can take advantage of some ecological lessons from the past.
This paper analyses the consequences of urban environmental degradation on the well-being of Spanish miners. It is based on analyses of differences in mortality and height. The first part of the paper examines new hypotheses regarding the urban penalty. We take into consideration existing works in economic theory that address market failures when analysing the higher urban death rate. We explain the reduction in height using the model recently created by Floud, Fogel, Harris and Hong for British cities. The second part of the paper presents information demonstrating that the urban areas in the two largest mining areas in Spain (Bilbao and the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range) experienced a higher death rate relative to rural areas as a consequence of market failures derived from what we term an ‘anarchic urbanisation’.
Los cambios en el transporte de mercancías durante el siglo XIX conllevaron unas mejoras significativas en las prestaciones de los diferentes modos de transporte. Sin embargo, estas evoluciones no solucionaban el problema completamente y fue necesario integrar las diferentes cadenas de transporte en una sola, que diera continuidad con la mayor eficiencia posible al flujo de mercancías para reducir los costes de transporte y los tiempos de viaje, y aumentar los volúmenes de carga y el valor de las mercancías en los mercados de destino. La economía andaluza entró en el primer tercio del siglo XX en este proceso, a través de una nueva etapa de especialización económica basada en la explotación de sus recursos naturales. Se desarrolló entonces un potente sector agroalimentario y su industria asociada (aceite, azúcar, vino, etc.), y se alcanzó también el máximo apogeo en la demanda de materias primas minerales.Lograr esa especialización económica requirió una profunda modernización logística, una relativamente rápida modernización de las redes de tráfico y un incremento de los intercambios entre los diferentes modos de transporte.
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