Socio-demography of Andalusian Urban Agglomerations at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Introduction:

Our work was born with the aim of analyzing the process of population growth induced from the centres towards the peripheries of the Socio-demography of Andalusian urban agglomerations produced since the end of the last century. This starting point was justified by the appreciation of an acceleration in the rate of demographic growth of certain sectors of the Andalusian peri urban areas and the simultaneous stagnation and even retreat of the Andalusian metropolises from the mid-1980s to the peak of suburbanization, shortly before the current systemic crisis. Suburbanization prospered thanks to the supply of quality housing at affordable prices through mortgages. Once the marketing product was designed, the idea was to “sell” the product to a population of a certain social status that began to demand housing on the periphery in the face of the permissiveness and lack of control of some public authorities.

The young middle class, thanks to the very expensive investments in ring roads that were created to facilitate mobility, saw the opportunity to avoid the socially discredited spaces of the central cities, to move, by urban exodus, to the peri-urban areas surrounding the central cities of the Andalusian agglomerations. The false idea of “indefinite progress” stimulated the interest of these middle classes who fell into the nets of real estate developers to fulfill their dream of “happy Arcadia”. With this demand, and with the existence of mortgages to pay for these houses, the middle class got into debt but, while there was credit there were no problems, the growth could be indefinite in a sign of irresponsibility that made the “culture of the brick”, speculation and corruption grow.

As can be supposed, no one could even remotely consider the possibility that dispersed urban growth was going to be interrupted and suffer a sudden slowdown, with the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis, popularly known as “garbage mortgages” in the United States, a crisis that spread, due to financial globalization, to the European countries most exposed to the brick, including Spain.

The City And The Genesis Of The Concept Of The Urban Belt:

The term city comes from the Latin word civitas or place where the inhabitants who had the right of Roman citizenship lived. Faced with the difficulty of a precise conceptual definition, descriptive characters have been used for some time in an attempt to overcome merely subjective ones. Within these criteria, statistical and spatial criteria can be distinguished. The first, focused on measurement, and the second, on delimitation. In both cases, the underlying mental structure rests on the theories of contrast, that is, to define the urban as the opposite of the rural. But its application is not simple, because although it is true that, in past periods, the city had a closed perimeter that materialized historically in the wall, more and more the transition from urban to rural takes place according to a different spatial pattern, without rigid limits or spatial discontinuities.

The Drivers Of The Urban Growth Paradigm Shift:

There are two interpretations that attempt to explain the decline of the city’s concentrated growth model and the supposed “rural renaissance” to which Kayser refers: an interpretation in which economic factors predominate and an interpretation in which ideological factors prevail, but, as we shall see, there is no incompatibility between the two. In economic interpretation, the economy plays a fundamental role in terms of work and access to the housing market. There are authors who consider that urban change or transformation must be conceived from the point of view of economic restructuring, typical of the post-Fordist, postmodern or post industrial era.

Introductory notes on the metropolitan phenomenon in Andalusia:

There are words, acronyms and expressions that, despite being novel, are accepted and spread quickly. That is what has happened, according to F. Zoido (1996), with the term metropolitan area. According to the author, in Spain the expression metropolitan area refers to a local entity of supra-municipal scope, capable of providing common public services, planning and unitary management of an important urban agglomeration.

An approximation to the characteristics of recent urban development in Andalusia during the 20th century:

According to J. Cruz Villalón, and in light of the data provided above, “the twentieth century has been the century of exponential growth and physical transformation and Socio-demography of Andalusian cities. It has been a change, not only demographic, but also physical and functional, so that from an agrarian base or market centre of a more or less extensive agricultural area, they have become cities of services in a generalized way. The magnitude of the growth experienced in these cities is, in turn, a synthesis of other major transformations produced in the region during the last century: that of its demographic transition, that of its economic transformation, that of changes in urban and regional modes of transport; or those of substantive changes in the urban landscape.

Socio-demography of Andalusian Urban Agglomerations:

The objective of this section is determining to know the entity of the metropolitan processes in Socio-demography of Andalusia. It is vital, in turn, because it makes it possible to justify that these spaces function as a whole, as a system, in such a way that what happens in the metropolis has direct repercussions on its periphery, which grows, induced from the interior, by the relocation of the population from the centre to the periphery, or, at least, this is the starting hypothesis that we will go on to expound. It is, therefore, of crucial importance the study of the registrations by immigration and by origin in these spaces, which has decisive consequences in the natural dynamic, to contribute fertile population, in age to have children, to the spaces of the periphery.

Conclusion:

The research Socio-demography of Andalusian conclude without criticizing a model of urban growth that postmodern society has idealized, without considering the countless costs involved in promoting a model based on unlimited growth. Faced with an extensive city model, little planned and spontaneous, which is proving to be unsustainable, due to the numerous costs, not only environmental, but of all kinds that it brings with it; the current crisis must serve to correct the errors of the past.

Faced with a model of an elitist city, segregated, unsupportive and high cost, not only environmental by the irreparable loss of natural landscape, but also economic (just think of the large investments that have had to be made to build the rounds and hyper rounds and thus meet the demand of this exurban population); the return to the traditional city should be advocated, what has come to be called the human metropolis, the humane metropolis, widely defended by a large sector of North American urban planners, and based on promoting intelligent growth as an alternative to urban sprawl or uncontrolled urban growth.

Also Read: Strategies for Increasing Housing Affordability in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania