The metropolitan edge: terms and characteristics. A review

Abstract

The article provides an overview on the treatment of the edge metropolitan edge in different history moments during the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The text rescues different terms and their corresponding characteristics as a necessary input for the construction of the history of these territories between the countryside and the city. This allows to distinguish the problems in different historical moments; from the urban-rural balance in the middle of the twentieth century to the space between urban and rural at the beginning of the twenty-first century, through the urban rural continuum at the end of the twentieth century. The paper concludes that the transformation of the metropolitan edge leaves obsolete old concepts of this territorito. Today, its conceptualization does not turn out to be univocal from a scientific perspective. In this sense, the paper seems to indicate that more than defining these territories in abstract the important thing is to understand their processes and that the reality of them is not the result of a lack of planning but that they are territories in transformation That require a processual approach. In that way, this paper raises the need for characterization of these territories.