Urban Structure, Sprawl and Polycentrism: the Examples of Madrid and Barcelona

Abstract

The paper owes its genesis to the authors’ wish to examine the widely spread understanding that
over recent years, metropolitan areas have become polycentric structures and that this, necessarily
has led to the appearance of sub-centers rather than the traditional downtown areas. The monocentric
city paradigm has thus been thought superannuated and the hypothesis that the polycentric
city is more effi cient (European Commission, ESDP 1999) than the mono-centric one from the
environmental standpoint has been embraced by many. Be this as it may, for them very little effort
has been put into a contrasting of this hypothesis. Though much empirical research has focused in
on demonstrating the existence of singularities in the shape of the employment densities at subcenters,
little has been devoted to understanding these as genuine subsystems of the polycentric
metropolises.
This paper aims to lay down a fresh conception of polycentrism. To do this a methodology has been
set up to simultaneously: 1) defi ne the limits of any given metropolitan areas; 2) identify the submetropolitan
fact and its proper internal structure, and 3) evaluate the hypothesis that the
polycentric city is more effi cient than the mono-centric one when it comes to considering these from
the environmental perspective as to land consumption.
The study is grounded upon two major Spanish cities, Madrid and Barcelona, here assuming the
mono-centrism of the fi rst as against the polycentrism of the other.