Medium-Sized Cities: Polycentric Strategies vs the Dynamics of Metropolitan Area Growth

The European territorial strategy known as the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) has as its main thrust the development of a multi-centred and balanced urban system. European, national, and regional investments have been concentrating on the formation of polycentric urban regions, or city clusters, in which medium-sized cities, acting as nodes, would have a major role. In this paper, an overall development index is applied to Spanish medium-sized cities. This uses economic, social, environmental, and territorial parameters to discover what their real growth trends are and what results have been achieved by policies for multi-centred development. In this way, it can be demonstrated that the efforts to create polycentric urban regions yield poorer results in development terms than the dynamic trend towards growth of metropolitan areas and those related to tourist activity on the coast. Factors driving this, related to the process of urbanisation in Spain over the last few decades, continue to override institutional land-use guidelines.