Usign GIS technologies for evaluatign urban sprawl in Asturias and Spain

Urban sprawl is one of the main problems of modern urbanism. Cities too much sprawled produce more contamination and worst quality life conditions. The current urban policies attempt to slow the advanced society´s tendency to generate sprawled cities. There are a lot of contributions in the urban economics literature that try to understand the causes of sprawl in order to propose policies to reduce it. Many of these papers put their attention on the local policy decentralization as a relevant factor which impulse the probabilities of suffering a dispersed city growth. In this paper we put our attention in a very common situation around Europe: emerging metropolitan areas which appear as a consequence of the growth of closer previous medium cities. The EU is very conscient of this problem. The document ESPON 1.1.1[6] is a nice reference about this subject. Just in Spain there are more than 60 cases that could be consider as this type of emerging metropolitan areas. We are applying Geography Information Systems to studying and contrasting several hypotheses in this case. Our result brings us to confirm that this case trend to generate sprawl due to the role of the small local areas, which are integrated in the emerging metropolitan space. However, this behavior could be easily avoided through a political integration of the new metropolitan area.