The urban use, or right to urban use, in the legal field, in Spain, must be conceptualized considering the subordination of land ownership to its social purpose (cf. art. 33.2 of the Spanish Constitution) and also the constitutional mandate of making the community participate in the capital gains generated by the urban development action of public entities (cf. art. 47 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978).

We can define the right to urban use as the quantification of the ius aedificandi, derived from the urban regime of land ownership, carried out by the public Administration, even if it is merely programmed, for a surface space without individualized attribution, which is also contained and named, once it has been delimited in uses, rights and duties, in what is known as the statute of land ownership (cf. art. 7 of the Consolidated Text of the Land Law of 2008).

Highlight at this point that urban use should not be confused with surface right because although both contain a separate portion of the ius aedificandi of land ownership, only this portion is suitable to immediately undertake construction in the case of surface right, since urban use is immature for that purpose as it is only an instrument of the urban technique of equidistribution of benefits and burdens.

The quantification and zonal delimitations, referred to above when conceptualizing urban use, without individualized attribution, suppose the fact of legal consequences that originates the subsequent temporary separation of the ius aedificandi of the ownership of the land (which is expressed with the expression meters-ceiling, or square meters-ceiling), and it is also that fact, together with the fulfillment of certain duties that entail free transfers in favor of the Public Administration, in the administrative procedure of urban execution, the phenomenon that enables the determining fact in Spain of the , already individualized, of the right to quantified urban use, after whose perfection it adopts a new, and important, patrimonial dimension which, although only temporary, turns out to be autonomous for the world of law in that period, with the capacity to be the subject of legal contracts and transactions, of transfer and tax, urban and private (mortgage of the right to urban use), with separation of the land from its origin, even capable of attributing to its owner the right to be compensated in the event of review, or early modification, of the urban planning that quantified it. All of this conforms, as has been expressed before, to the general acceptance in Spain of the statutory nature of the content, in rights and charges, of land ownership.