In the contemporary Spanish geography the Balearic and the Canary Archipelagos have been and are often studied as a function of its tourism specialization and of the various impacts that such activity occurs on the territory. In addition, although the double status of insularity and tourist specialization have developed evident peculiarities in the social construction of space, in general, and in the urban development of the Balearic and Canary Islands, in particular, the comparative analysis of their urban processes and cities are certainly limited in the scientific geographical literature. In both island territories, along with other of the Peninsula, the last real estate bubble has been significantly intense and, as a result, are suffering from the effects of the crisis that began in 2008. With this the socio-spatial segregation in island cities seems to have worsened.

In this context, the aim of the project is to study, since the outbreak of the crisis of 2008, the urban transformations in the spaces of social reproduction of the insular cities in Spain; i.e. to examine the changes in the urban areas that are suffering the most severe consequences of the crisis and the widespread implementation of neoliberal urban policies. The analysis will focus on the spaces of social reproduction of the capital cities at both archipelagos (Palma, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife) and in three other medium level insular cities. The development of a social and urban vulnerability mapping for each of the cities will be a basic pillar for the analysis of the neighborhoods in intra-urban scale study.

The review of the transformations socio-urban is inseparable from the scrutiny of the underlying logic that financial capital establishes over the urban space. For this reason the study of these changes will be tackled from the incidence of the capitalist logic in the dual perspective of the public and private spaces. In the first case, the emphasis will be on the collective spaces of everyday life; this is, in those places and areas of the city that are basic to the public dimension and which constitute a significant variable in the evaluation of the quality of urban life and the uneven development of the cities. In the second case, the project will focus on the housing question. Precariousness, dispossession and displacement have been processes occurring as a result of the financialized capitalism dynamics over the production and appropriation of urban rent.

On one and other space, private and public, citizens have been affected and have reacted in different ways, in both as the emotional dimesion as in politics, and both at the individual and collective level. For best untangle this multidimensionality, the research will combine the use of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Among the main results that can be gotten with the project it should be noted two: (1) to define the new social geography of the insular cities of Spain and (2) identify the island similarities and differences in the process of uneven development. Also, it is presumed that the methodology developed, not so much applied in other similar studies in Spain, may be extrapolated to the comparative research in other urban contexts and in other territories.