Stages of territorial configuration in the non-planned occupation of the Huerta de Murcia, 1929-2015

Abstract

[EN] The “Huerta de Murcia” is an agricultural area of about 10,000 Ha in size, originated in the ninth century, and linked to an extensive network of canals dependent from Segura River. Such system provides a much divided and fragmented agrarian morphology, around the city of Murcia, in the southeast of Spain, basically dedicated to the agriculture. The city of Murcia has experimented an important growth in the last five decades, substituting hundreds of hectares of agrarian land, into urban. But even more important than this, the periurban area has suffered along the past 90 years a periurbanization process, caused by the unscheduled appearance of buildings. Most of them have emerged in the last 4 decades, whose use is mainly family housing and holyday homes, and have not been planned by standard planning procedures. This causes a spontaneous phenomenon of dispersed territory occupation. The paper shows, through an analysis methodology based on orto-photographical series and cadastral data, the existence of different stages along the studied period (1929-2015). These stages are substantially different each other in two ways: the patterns and zones affected by this process, on one hand, and the intensity of this process, which vary along each studied period, on the other hand. The analyses of these patterns, as well as a proposed classification, and the quantification of the process in each period, are the subjects of the paper, which allows authors to set appropriate relations between the city of Murcia and its periurban territory, to afford the globalization age.