Urban sprawl in not coordinated polycentric metropolitan areas. The case study of asturias using Geographic Information Systems

Abstract

Urban sprawl is one of the main problems of modern urbanism. Cities too much sprawled produce more contamination and worst quality life conditions. The current urban policies attempt to slow the advanced societies tendency to generate sprawled cities. There are a lot of contributions in the urban economics literature that try to understand the causes of sprawl in order to propose policies to reduce it. Many of these papers put their attention on the local policy decentralization as a relevant factor which impulse the probabilities of suffer a dispersed city growth. In this paper we put our attention in a very common situation around Europe: emerging metropolitan areas which appear as a consequence of the growth of closer previous medium cities. Just in Spain there are more than 60 cases that could be consider as this type of emerging metropolitan areas. We study specifically the case of Asturias: a small region in the north of Spain in which three cities growth generate an emerging polycentric and decentralized metropolitan area. We apply Geography Information Systems to study and contrast several hypothesis in this case. Our result conduct us to confirm that this case trend to generate sprawl due to the role of the small local areas, which are integrated in the emerging metropolitan space. However, this behavior could be easily avoided thought a political integration of the new metropolitan area.