The studies about the correlation between transportation and land utilization were one
of the fundamental contributions to our knowledge of cities by adding, in the mid-twentieth
century, a dynamic vision to the concept of urban structure. Ira Lowry’s model of a metropolis
for the city of Pittsburg presented in 1964 became the fundament to the systematic analysis of
the urban phenomenon.
This conceptual framework was used to observe the impact on the territory of the Metropolitan
Buenos Aires (BAM) at a time of major changes in modes of transportation used, residential
strategies and centers of mass consumption
Even though the urban structure produced by the early robust “metropolization” process still
persists in “urbios” and suburban áreas, a new and more dynamic layer of recent
“metropolization” with private patterns of urbanization (gated communities) starts in the
“periurbio” and grows towards the central core of the metropolis
The new territorial behavioral rules showed a change in human sociability from public to private
or semi-private spaces. This tendency to confined human interactions limits the urban
population’s fundaments of universality, a privileged attribute of the social phenomenon that
historically is known as a city