Globalization and the development of the so-called “collaborative economies” has coincided with an important transformation of mass tourism in the last decades. This phenomenon has been accentuated enormously in many European cities in recent years, generating a new P2P tourist model. The situation is having a strong social impact on the urban transformation of cities, and its characteristics are closely related to real estate speculative movements. In this sense, the analysis of urban transformation can offer interesting conclusions about the sustainability of these new tourist models in large touristic cities. In this article, we will analyse the effect associated with of so-called phenomena of “tourist flats” from the Airbnb portal in the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, and Palma de Mallorca. Through the use of GIS indicators and geostatistic analysis of spatial correlation, the current incidence of this phenomenon in these cities, and possible future scenarios of maintaining the current trend, will be evaluated and discussed. The results obtained show worrying indicators in relation to the economic and social sustainability of the current urban-tourist model created in the city which are linked to gentrification processes.

The economic, urban and social development of the territory that makes up the European Mediterranean area is based on many variables of very different fields. The infrastructure policy, urban growth of cities or sustainable use of land and energy resources are decisions that need to be planned in order to establish priorities to optimize these processes. However, it is important to note that all of these fields are influenced by a multitude of interrelated economic, political or social parameters. Now that numerous protocols are appearing worldwide to develop these processes within cities (the so-called “smart cities”), the real challenge for the future is to make the leap from the urban scale to the regional scale and deploy these policies in an integrated manner, in so-called “smart territories”.This article presents a model of territorial analysis that consists of more than 50 indicators implemented in territorial information systems. The model is based on research conducted in the Otremed project, a multilateral project funded by ERDF and developed between 2009 and 2013 by various countries and institutions of the Mediterranean area. Through the results and tools developed in this project, the so-called GIS retrospective analysis is proposed. This tool, designed to help in decision-making and to advance future diagnostics in territorial management, will allow the development policies of cities to be optimized, generating synergies in transport infrastructures and planning with sustainable criteria in land and other resources use. All these processes will be integrated at regional level with an innovative methodology based on the analysis of territory evolution through referenced geographic information tools

Climate change is making intense DANA (depresión aislada en niveles altos) type rains a more frequent phenomenon in Mediterranean basins. This trend, combined with the transformation of the territory derived from diffuse anthropization processes, has created an explosive cocktail for many coastal towns due to flooding events. To evaluate this problem and the impact of its main guiding parameters, a geostatistical analysis of the territory based on GIS indicators and an NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) analysis is developed. The assessment of the validity of a proposed methodology is applied to the case study of the Campo de Cartagena watershed located around the Mar Menor, a Mediterranean coastal lagoon in Southeastern Spain. This area has suffered three catastrophic floods derived from the DANA phenomenon between 2016 and 2019. The results show that apart from the effects derived from climate change, the real issue that amplifies the damage caused by floods is the diffuse anthropization process in the area, which has caused the loss of the natural hydrographic network that traditionally existed in the basin.