Our work was born with the aim of analyzing the process of population growth induced from the centres towards the peripheries of the main 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.