Medium-Sized Cities in Spain and Their Urban Areas Within National Network
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Article Medium-sized Cities in Spain and Their Urban Areas within National Network Luis Alfonso Escudero Gómez 1 , Juan Antonio García González 2 and José María Martínez Navarro 3,* 1 Department of Geography, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 45071 Toledo, Spain; [email protected] 2 Department of Geography, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 02071 Albacete, Spain; [email protected] 3 Department of Geography, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 16071 Cuenca, Spain; * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +34-925268800-5312 Received: 30 October 2018; Accepted: 28 December 2018; Published: 2 January 2019 Abstract: Traditionally, medium-sized cities have been compact urban centres, which have also emerged as satellite nuclei within metropolitan areas of larger cities. However, urban dispersion models have led to growth in population and the increasing urbanisation of large cities’ peripheral areas. This article will analyse medium-sized cities in Spain, as well as their urban areas within the national urban network. Medium-sized cities will be defined herein, and their urban areas of influence will also be established. The increase and growth in area and population of the so-called medium-sized cities draws a new map of urban relationships. Empirical analysis will resort to a nuclear, demographic source, the population of urban areas. Source data will be analysed both statistically and cartographically. Finally, a spatial analysis of Spain’s urban network will be presented as the main method used to obtain results, with a characterisation of Spain’s urban system and the role of cities in such system being displayed. There is a trend which aims at re-balancing the permanent configuration of the country’s urban network. The article concludes with a typology of medium-sized cities regarding their relative position in the territory. This research contributes to the current scientific debate on the dynamics of urbanisation in the environment of medium-sized cities. Keywords: urban geography; urban system; urban dispersion; urbanisation; urban typologies; city systems 1. Introduction Let’s take a drive Through the sprawl Through these towns they built to change [1] Medium-sized cities have been, generally speaking, regional nuclei which have played the role of a market, producing and—above all—distributing goods and services; they have also structured the network of road and transport infrastructures and, very frequently, have managed a political and administrative unit (in Spain, the so-called “province”). Recent developments in urbanisation which have appeared over the last decades in these cities have altered their traditional compact, intense and dense structure, paving the way towards new forms and extensive and more dispersed territorial structures, which have been accompanied by morphological, functional and social transformations: from centralisation to a kind of post-modern dispersion [2]. The phenomenon of urban dispersion is applied following the criteria of Anas, Arnott and Small [3]. They take in account the diffusion Urban Sci. 2019, 3, 5; doi:10.3390/urbansci3010005 www.mdpi.com/journal/urbansci Urban Sci. 2019, 3, 5 2 of 15 of functions and urban uses to spaces increasingly distant from the central city, and with areas of separation from each other, the product of a process of urban decentralisation. This article proposes to participate in the debate on the current dynamics of urbanisation in the environment of medium-sized cities. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of studies on intermediate urban nuclei. This interest appears in works of large regional global groups, mainly of European middle-sized cities [4]. The definitions of ‘medium-sized city’ or ‘intermediate city’, reflecting its main territorial structuring role [5], are very diverse in the world. These are nuclei that act as a link between higher and lower urban levels, establish relationships with other cities and territories of the same hierarchical level, and act as intermediaries between the big city and rural spaces. However, there is currently no standard definition of medium-sized cities [6]. In fact, calls into question the true need for a final definition on this complex phenomenon with diffuse limits [5]. In this sense, in this article, we understand the medium or intermediate city as follows: A medium-sized city would be defined as a centre of social, economic and cultural interaction. It also constitutes a centre for more or less specialized goods and services for a population group that exceeds the limits of its own municipality. It has stabilized as a regulatory centre for relations through transport and information infrastructures at the regional, national or even international level and, furthermore, for understanding that these nuclei are, in most cases, the home of the public institutions of the administration, with all the social aspects that this function entails [5]. Recently, the process of urban growth has extended to the peripheral areas of medium-sized cities. In this article, the term peripheral area is understood in the context of the Spanish urban system. Thus, the central intermediate city corresponds to the municipal area of the main nucleus, and its peripheral urban area with the municipal terms that surround the central city. In these peripheral municipalities, there has been a strong urban expansion in recent years. However, in Spain, the responsibility for urban planning and for administering certain urban services is the responsibility of each municipality. The administrative separation clearly marks a political division of urban responsibility. For this reason, it is easy to distinguish between a central city and its peripheral area, which is formed by very interrelated spaces, in terms of the movements of people and flows of goods and services with the main city, but is administratively separated. In most of the peripheral areas, there has been an intense process of urbanisation at the expense of neighbouring rural nuclei. This is a process more typical of recently urbanized areas in less developed countries than in areas as urbanized as Spain [7]. The trend in such nuclei and their surrounding areas is the progressive occupation of territory, which involves assuming part of the residential role which was, until so recently, reserved for the city centre [8]. This process has developed under random logics that have acted with uneven intensity at the different urban scales. For example, dynamics in medium-sized cities which are linked to large metropolitan areas have evolved differently from those which are situated far away from a large urban nucleus [8]. In addition to this, urbanisation has a unique geographical specificity by virtue of the very nature of the spaces and areas being created and produced [9]. The current medium-sized city looks like a dispersed one; in the case of Spanish cities, different diffuse processes can be found, as shown in this article. In a general way, since the 1980s, and, particularly, between 1990 and 2008’s economic meltdown, there has been an intense process of urban dispersion in Spain, involving all medium-sized cities. These recent dynamics may be linked to the real estate boom and the increasing artificialisation of land, a speculative bubble that has had extremely serious environmental, territorial and socio-political consequences and has given rise to unsustainable areas [10]. In fact, an intense process of urbanisation, without adequate urban planning, can end up creating serious natural and anthropogenic risks [11]. There has been a subversion of urbanisation, which has allowed a housing bubble burst in Spain [12]. The growth of Spanish cities was encouraged, to a large extent, by the capitalist system, which is a trigger factor towards fragmentation and territorial discontinuity [13]. Thus, an alliance was established between business and political lobbies by virtue of which the city adopted its well-known Urban Sci. 2019, 3, 5 3 of 15 role as a growth machine [14]. This fact has given rise to the usual unsustainability and destructiveness of neo-liberal forms of urbanisation [15]. In Spain, the development of urbanisation encouraged expansive growth based on classifying large areas of land as urban and favouring urbanisation. Empty urbanism has spread the urban phenomenon and urbanisation networks throughout the territory [16]. This recent diffuse growth of Spain’s urban medium-sized areas has involved heavy consumption of land and considerable consequences, including rising costs and expenses in infrastructure and equipment [17], as well as deep environmental impacts [18]. With the crisis of 2008, the Spanish urban growth model broke down and resulted in extremely serious effects, both social and territorial [19,20]. Urban vulnerability has been generated in Spain’s medium-sized cities [21]. Spain’s medium-sized cities experienced a frantic pace of growth between 2000 and 2008, which dropped dramatically after the economic downturn. A moderate urbanisation process is regarded as optimal for good integration, intelligibility and social access [22]. Contrary to such a model, in just two decades, the Spanish territory has seen the effects of the greatest process of rise and fall of real estate activity in its history [23]. In short, massive urban growth led to a deeply unsustainable mismatch in the medium term, which ended up provoking a crisis that has been particularly intense and long-lasting in Spain. The final outcome of this process has been