Abstract
The city of Madrid is the capital of Spain, and the urban sprawl has been important and continuous over the years. There has been a spillover effect since the use of urban land has increased in the municipalities around the capital. Among other factors, the price of housing is increasingly high in Madrid. Thus, in the municipalities near the capital, the population makes trips to work but then returns to their municipality to reside, where the housing price is lower. Satellite images through Land Cover Corine have made it possible to quantify the hectares destined for urban use in 1990, 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2018 through a geographic information system (GIS). It has been possible to identify those municipalities of the autonomous community that have grown better as continuous urban fabric or discontinuous urban fabric. Therefore, it has been possible to identify municipalities most influenced by the capital.
TopUrban Sprawl
Urban sprawl has had a major influence on land-use changes in recent decades, as population pressure on a global scale is increasing. As a result, land uses are changing intensively in many parts of the world. Thus, some of them become urban lands. This phenomenon turns out to be very important for different reasons. Because urbanization produces radical changes in the quantity, type, and spatial distribution patterns of land use (Xu et al., 2016). Therefore, the description and analysis of these changes are key to proposing strategies for territorial development (Díaz-Pacheco et al., 2014).
In Western countries, urban sprawl is generally considered to have various negative effects on urban growth, such as heavy traffic loads, deteriorated inner-city neighbourhoods, and the disappearance of public spaces (Wang et al., 2009). However, real estate developers can make big profits from building residential housing in new urbanized areas. Due to high housing prices and commercial redevelopment projects in city centre areas, through urban renewal, local and regional governments can reap great benefits from the transmission of land-use rights and related taxes (Wang et al., 2001). Thus, urban sprawl is emerging from suburban centres to peripheral areas, and the increase of built urban areas is generally considered as an effect of expansion (Barnes et al., 2012).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Municipality: In Spain, it is the administrative-territorial division corresponding to the basic local entity in the territorial organization of the Spanish State governed by a town hall.
Autonomous Community: In Spain, it is an administrative-territorial division formed by one or more provinces. It has specific territorial limits and is endowed with legislative autonomy and executive powers, provided that it is not common with the rest of the Spanish State.
Urban Sprawl: Dispersed residential urban development that separates itself from other urban land uses, occupying rural land and heading towards the periphery of central urban areas in an uncoordinated manner. Usually through homes that tend to be single-family.
Population Density: An indicator that measures the number of people living in a given extension. The number of inhabitants living per square meter is usually related.
Geographic Information System: The system that uses georeferenced graphic and alphanumeric information stored in a spatial database, and to solve problems by analysing the spatial relationships of the elements that represent the Earth, using raster or vector models.
Land Use: Particular use made of a specific part of the land surface and which is essential for territorial planning.
Remote Sensing: A technique for collecting information from the Earth’s surface, by using sensors installed on space platforms, from the record of the electromagnetic interaction produced between the ground and the sensor, to interpret the Earth’s surface.
Suburbanization: The action of urbanizing geographical spaces located on the periphery of the city in urban areas, or in the rural environment the rehabilitation of the old habitat of a village, construction of new houses on the outskirts of the villages, construction of houses and subdivisions of the houses on the outskirts of the village.