Spanish metropolitan urban space at the turn of the century

Abstract

From a morphological perspective, the Mediterranean city has usually been defined by its compact, multifunctional nature and by the role its historical centre as a representation of its development and spirit of identity. The profound changes that took place throughout the whole XXth century imply, however, a break with this traditional scheme. New urban models appear, where the different phases of urbanization imply an important land consumption, an acceleration of the growth rate and a certain reorganization of both internal and peripheral spaces whose social, environmental or economic sus-tainability is questioned. While the gradual spatial monofunctionalism forges new centralities linked to spaces of leisure, commercial and tertiary centres, the urban system becomes supramunicipal and polycentric, losing the diverse character that used to characterize it. Based on this observation and within the classical themes of urban geography, this paper analyses the territorial dynamics associat-ed with metropolitan Spanish urban growth. After a general introduction, it presents an analysis of the territorial dynamics of the major Spanish metropolitan areas: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville, addressing the issue of the reorganization of these territories in the period 1990-2006, corresponding to the housing bubble. The conclusions stress the different models and degrees of maturity of urban structures and assesses to what extent the speculative movement associated with Spanish urban growth -accompanied by a lack of global vision of the metropolitan system- has defined or not the contemporary urban metropolitan landscape.