Regional Concentration and Urban Expansion in Spain. Fragmentation and Intra-Urban Inequality

Parallel to the Portuguese example, in Spain cities and the main metropolises have grown rapidly since 1950. This growth translates once again into a process of littoral concentration and, to a large extent, into a polycentric urban system. On the one hand, two cities and their metropolitan regions define the top level of the Spanish territorial hierarchy, Madrid and Barcelona. Another five cities (Valencia, Sevilla, Málaga, Bilbao and Zaragoza), constitute a second step with prominence to centralise regional urban networks in the country, of entity and internal cohesion. Below, there is still a proliferation of regional metropolises (Valladolid, Vigo, Gijón, Alicante, Murcia, etc.) and a large number of cities that act as both deeply rooted economic-provincial centres and administrative capital. All this panorama defines a very complex urban system, which is understood in terms of the strong role that the region and the regional (expressed in Autonomous Communities with powers) acquire in Spain. In turn, one of the main problems in the recent urbanisation process has been higher social inequalities within cities. We first look at the distribution and level of concentration of Spain’s urban population through a dual external-internal analysis. We then approach intra-urban inequalities based on income and housing indicators.