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Abstract

The cities have suffered in the last half century a process of decentralization of economic activity and development of new centralities outside their traditional helmets. This process has allowed the generation of sub-centers, that capture economic activity to generate new patterns in the territory, which coexist with the scattering processes. In this research, by analyzing the density of employment, polycentric structure characterized by seven metropolitan areas Spanish: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Seville, Zaragoza, and Málaga, in the sense of identifying how and how people and economic activity is settled in into four types of settlement: 1) nuclei central activity, 2) Central continuous, 3) satellite nucleos , and 4) rest of the metropolitan area. The results suggest that the level of polycentrism is associated with two factors: the size of metropolitan system and the territorial matrix in which are located they, thus, the larger the first and most rugged is the second, the process of spatial self-organization of the economy tends to generate polycentric system.