Metropolitan Management and Spaces

The physical and functional growth of Spanish cities has been very intense over the past decades. This has brought about the appearance of the metropolitarisation phenomenon in a large number of cities, which, nevertheless, has not been paralleled with the formation of organizations able to manage this new spatial reality. This has produced a large number of malfunctions and problems in the administration of public services. In this analysis, the main problems that are derived from the maladjustment between the metropolitan space, as a geographical unit, and the territorial management formulas will be presented. And, secondly, an assessment of Spanish experience in the area of metropolitan management will be carried out. The city as a physical and functional organization has acquired new forms of growth over the past few decades. The traditional ways of defining a city have given way to new realities, which change very quickly, and make them become very complex spaces. Nevertheless, political- administrative structures evolve at a much slower pace, making management and planning notably more difficult, and introducing certain contradictions between the process of physical expansion and the systems of government. Even though terms such as governing, cooperation or management innovation are becoming more and more frequent in the speeches of politicians and technicians, the reality of the case of Spain and in other countries that surround Spain is that the basic administrative division, and the municipality artificially fragments the city as a physical and functional unit. Attempts to define the main urban-metropolitan agglomerations and many other cities, independent of their sizes, are based on an inadequate local policy framework. The new urban culture advances towards the substitution of the compact city models by new forms of a dispersed city, starting with the spread of one unit family residential models and a more extensive use of space (1). The dispersion of work centres (both tertiary and industrial) throughout the suburbs must also be recognized. Linked to this process of change are new issues, which urban managers must solve include: people mobility, consumption of land, and transport management. Thus, we are witnessing the substitution of the idea of the city as a delimited unit, defined by precise limits, by concepts such as metropolitan area, and urban functional region", which define interaction spaces between a territory integrated by a reference urban center and other population nucleus placed in its surrounding zone of influence. Another frequently used concept is that of city region (2) where the city and its hinterland are seen as a social and functional unit.