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...

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 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 log/log...

The urban development of the twentieth century can be characterized by rise of the metropolitanization process. However, especially since 1950, it has been producing a real change of scale in this growth: the infinite growth of metropolitan peripheries, encouraged by the process of urban sprawl,...

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...

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,...