Urban Planning Terms and City Development Concepts

Key Urban Planning and Geography Definitions

• Adarves: Narrow, winding streets with irregular flat ends.
• Metropolitan Area: An urban area formed by a major city that serves as the organizing center for a large region and several surrounding municipalities.
• Rururban Area: The transition zone between the city and the countryside, located further from the urban periphery.
• Neighborhood Garden: The result of naturalistic and hygienist ideas in Spain during the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, which aimed to bring the countryside into the city.
• Cardo or Decumanus: A street grid plan featuring two main routes running North to South or East to West.
• Citadel: Housing located inside a residential house, hidden behind a wall to escape municipal control.
• Ciudad Lineal (Arturo Soria): A high street lined with blocks of single-family homes that provided basic services such as transportation, trade, and social centers.
• Conurbation: A continuous urban agglomeration formed by the parallel growth of cities until they merge.
• Finisterre: Axes falling along the Cantabrian and Galician regions; characterized as a stagnant area.
• Substandard Housing: Housing that lacks the minimum conditions for habitation; this includes shanty towns built on illegal land without planning organization.
• Megalopolis: A supra-extension conurbation made up of several urban elements with distinct functions.

Urban Layouts and City Plans

Plano: The assembly of built-up and open areas within a city. It can be categorized as:

• Irregular: Narrow, winding streets and squares without definite forms (e.g., Toledo).
• Radiocentric: Radial streets that start from a center and are intersected by others (e.g., Vitoria).
• Orthogonal: Streets that intersect at right angles (e.g., Castellón).

Urban Expansion and Development

• Polygon Congestion: Created along main access roads to combat the excessive growth of large cities like Madrid.
• Urban Area: An area formed by discontinuous but dense scattered cities, giving the entire territory urban characteristics.
• Sures: The southern Meseta and Andalusia regions, representing the European urban periphery.
• Plot: The arrangement of buildings, which can be classified as closed or open.
• UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It defends and preserves places of special significance through World Heritage Site declarations.
• Widening Bourgeois (Ensanche): A new urban space designed to meet the growth demands of the bourgeoisie, reflecting ideas of order, hygiene, and economic benefit.
• Old Town: The urbanized part of the city from its origins until the beginning of industrialization in the mid-19th century.
• INE: The National Institute of Statistics, which considers municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants as urban.
• Urbanization Rate: The percentage of the urban population in relation to the total population.
• Location: The concrete physical space where a city is situated.