Sustainable Tourism Law

COMPETITION LAW VERSUS SPATIAL PLANNING 309 The principle of sustainable and urban territorial development stipulated in section 2 of article 3 of the State Land Law of 2015 declares that public land policies must be directed at achieving a rational use of this resource, in line with the public good; it also makes a special mention of the need to balance the economy, employment, social cohesion, equal treatment and access to opportunities, health, the safety of persons and the protection of the environment. Section 3 of the same article, in addition to indicating that public powers should ensure that it is possible to make residential use of dwellings listed as habitual residences (item a) and that they should be integrated into the urban fabric when they serve as residences (item g), specifies another important point: that authorities must also value, when appropriate, tourism prospects, allowing and improving responsible touristic uses (item j). All of this is stipulated with the ultimate goal of ensuring the right to decent and adequate housing (at the end of section 4 of article 3). Thus, the issue of cohabitation becomes an important one when considering residential use and touristic use, and this situation arises when dwellings are subject to uses that differ from those which they were given under city-planning qualifications, e.g., when marketing a residence as a vacation rental. In the face of social concerns and feelings of tourism-related overcrowding caused by the indiscriminate use of collaborative accommodations – mainly in apartment blocks designated for residential use – responsible tourism policies must ensure that dwellings are used appropriately (residential use) while providing the possibility to make financial gains from the property (touristic use). And thus, public powers, under protection of the city planning competences that they are granted, have the legitimate ability to regulate and limit, via zoning techniques, vacation rentals in residences in the interest of reconciling the touristic use of urban spaces with their residential use, in accordance with the social function of the property, the protection of the environment, the principle of sustainable urban development, the protection of the urban environment and the objectives of social policies. This need not be mistaken for the specific classification of dwellings to be used for lodging, i.e., for activities related to accommodations, which clearly falls under the scope of tourism and should be handled by the relevant tourism authorities. To sum up, we are talking about land-use instruments that employ zoning to regulate, from a strictly city-planning and environmental point of view, the space and way in which touristic and residential uses are put into practice. This was acknowledged – as per the Spanish Supreme Court ruling of 27 July 2010