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One factor that has influenced the expansion of the northern and eastern outskirts of the metropolitan area Mexico City is the massive housing development. In this paper is explored the relationship between housing policy and urban management of local governments in the growth of the urban periphery. The central thesis refers to the absence of metropolitan coordination, local governments promote housing construction in order to increase their financial resources, a situation favored by changes in housing policy in a neoliberal context, which generates a supply potential consumer by granting housing loans. From an analysis of data on housing construction, loans granted by public institutions for house purchases and amounts of tax revenue by local governments, the impact of housing policy in the expansion of the metropolitan area is analyzed. As final reflections states that housing supply, not the demand of the population, the factor that determines the location of the housing complexes, and therefore, the recent expansion of the periphery of the metropolitan area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aljarafe region, located west of the city of Seville, presents a traditional landscape characterized by rural features developed throughout history. Mediterranean dry-land farming (grain crops, olives groves and vineyards) has been predominant all along, also with an alternative presence of orchards and citrus fruits. The settlement pattern has been set up through small multinuclear urban centres, numerous but concentrated, inherited from ancient times. Nonetheless, from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, the intensification and increase of urban and regional processes have directly affected the region. Hence, landscape in this region is the result of two constitutive processes that share the same spatial reference but different temporal sceneries: on the one hand, there are long-term processes resulting in a traditional landscape, whereas, on the other hand, recent and accelerated changes in the spatial matrix have entailed a new metropolitan landscape. This paper analyse several demographic, spatial and urban variables in order to explain the levels of relationship and dependence of peripheral sectors in large urban areas such as Seville metropolitan area. Therefore, the article is intended to underline how the identification of the metropolitan reality is the result of an interpretative practice, which is multiple and complex. The interdependence between centres and peripheries consist of a network of links with different intensity levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]