The challenge of compacting contemporary residential periphery: effective densification, selective centralities and functional diversity

Abstract

Objective

Recover and enrich the disciplinary debate on the revitalization of the low-density periphery, so that the practice of urban planning undergoes a change of cycle that allows the transformation of the residential fragments - socio-functionally undernourished and, in a few cases, half completed - inherited from the explosive urbanization process experienced during the last real estate bubble into a city.

Methodology

The cities system on the Andalusian coast has been used as a case study to verify the dispersive tendencies that have characterised the metamorphosis of the Spanish city in recent decades. The quantitative drift of the "institutionalized concept of the compact city" - focused on establishing minimum thresholds of residential density - is analysed, revealing a nostalgic positioning on a type of city that is impossible to restore, in view of the absence of urbanity attributes shown by the contemporary residential periphery.

Conclusions

Strengthen this territorial phenotype with effective densification is a necessary antidote to combat its sickly "anorexic condition", but not enough to create the urban intensity that its revitalization needs. For this, it is necessary to insert selective centralities that provide a significant public space that, in addition to social diversity, offers a battery of services that guarantee self-sufficiency in the daily life of these settlements.

Originality

This article aims to provide guidelines that oxygenate the current urban planning, prioritizing the containment in the consumption of territory and the revitalization of peripheral residential spaces of the latest generation.