It is a fact that the urban sprawl, known as the process of gradual spread out of urbanization has become a worldwide phenomenon. The growing consumption of land, as a result of the extension of highway networks, open up vast space of territory, which seems to have become an unstoppable cancer,...

The present paper has as goal the analysis of the urban sprawl phenomenon, from a planetary scale, assuming the hypothesis that this is an unsustainable process. It aims to demonstrate that what were initially a way of human settlement characteristic of many civilizations (northern and eastern...

The specialized researches have proposed various approaches to the delimitation of urban and metropolitan systems. Administrative aspects (administrative units historically inherited), morphological (urban continuum), some linked to the economies of agglomeration (population and employment...

Several authors (Berry 1970, Krugman 1996 or Eaton and Eckstein 1997, among many others) have experienced amazement about the accurate functioning of the law of “least effort†established by Zipf (1949) in most places. Cities, ranked by population, seem to follow almost exactly a...

The European political discourse has denounced the increase in land consumption in Spain, resulting from contemporary processes of urban development. The occupation of land deriving from demographic dynamics generates different patterns of urban growth, defining spatial structures with different...

Cities can be classified according to morphology of their urban structures. Depending on the spatial relations between built-up and empty spaces, blocks and streets (or squares) we can distinguish compact or fragmented cities as well as continuous or discontinuous. The configuration of the...

The main objective of the study is the development of a model for the evaluation of the environmental and energy efficiency of the interaction (mobility) and land use structure (called as 'territorial functionality'), applied to the metropolitan area of Barcelona . In particular there are four...

Far from a typical Mediterranean model, today is practically impossible not to discuss European cities without taking into account phenomena of urban sprawl, which bring at dynamics of dispersion of artificial soil in rural areas, discontinuously but plentiful. Excessive alternating between...

The study of the developed land and the energy consumption is part of a main project, which objective is the development of a model for the evaluation of the environmental and energy efficiency of the interaction (mobility) and land use structure (called as 'territorial functionality'), applied...

Since the start of tourism as rewarding and massive activity in the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional urban systems of the Spanish coast have been transformed to satisfy an increasingly changeable and demanding typology of tourist. Among the different models of urban development that have...