Spain's urban area growth phases: spatial patterns and causal analysis

From a geographical perspective, these last decades, Spanish urban areas have constantly expanded. This urban sprawl has broken the traditional compact city model. However, from a demographic point of view, the picture is not as simple as Spanish urban areas have been through a series of growth and stagnation periods with significant spatial differences. This paper firstly intends to describe how the population of Spanish urban areas has increased this last forty years (1970-2011) and then to build, through cluster analysis, a spatial typology grouping urban areas which have similar growth trends. Finally, it analyzes, through factor analysis, the socio-economic causes behind the spatial patterns. 64 urban areas are incorporated to the study. In each of the cases, core city and periphery growth levels have been separately analyzed to enable the construction of an urban growth typology. Descriptive results show that two phenomena, suburbanization and foreign immigration, are the main drivers of a clearly defined spatial pattern in which highly-growing eastern urban areas would be clearly opposed to lower growing western ones. Preliminary analytical results demonstrate that this east-west divide would be manly caused by the deep differences in the economic/labor market structures of the respective urban areas.