The phenomenon of counterurbanization and the prominence of smaller cities and rururban metropolitan areas

Abstract

The classical model of city is transformed by a series of processes that respond to the characteristics of this Informational Era: population and economic deconcentration, functional decentralization, pendular movements of workers , urban spread, rural repopulation, crisis of large agglomerations and dynamism of small and medium-sized cities. The inter- and intra-urban demographic dynamics of the metropolitan area of Santa Fe, shows the new leading role of the smaller cities and the suburbs constituted both by winning spaces (fenced condominiums), loser ones (slums) and rururbans spaces (previously called rural). Thereby we observed the phenomenon of counterurbanization in Argentina, which offered us the tools to understand the complex processes that happen in Latin America and make it possible to act on them.