¿METRÓPOLIS DISPERSAS?

Urban sprawl has become, today, the topic theme of the speech for anyone who wants to debate the problem of urban groth; a problem on which disciplinary, political and institutional interest has been concerning for long. This interest mostly corresponds with the statistics (EEA, 2006) which confirm that: 75 percent of European people live in urban areas; more than a quarter of European territory is urbanized and, responding to many realistic valutations, in 2020 approximately 80 percent of European people will be living in urban areas. It’s a long, still open range of investigation where this tesis has been placed on, purely occurring in response to the consciousness that knowledge, in urbanism, is a planning and cognitive action at the same time. Therefore, the research deals with the “sprawl problems” within a metropolitan urban ambit, giving answer all the following questions: What is sprawl settlement and, above all, how does it deal with territorial ambit? Is it to consider as a new periphery, or, merely, as a sort of urbanization plan resulting from a limited urbanistic praxis turned to be a pure, building license regularization? Moreover, what kind of instruments and action strategies should have to be provided in order to really answer all the questions about settlement sprawl using within the metropolitan context?