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The article analyses development and recent projects to modify two important concentrations of peripheral activity in the urban region of Amsterdam: the Schiphol airport city, with the activities located around the airport, and the Arena area with large-size commercial and entertainment areas constructed close to the Arena multi-functional stadium. After the rapid growth in the economy and in settlements experienced by the region in the 1990s, the emerging external centres are now considered as preferred areas for the construction of the contemporary city, with intervention to physically modify the spaces and the elements of which it is composed in compliance with the general strategies for the region formulated in the ‘Opting for urbanity Structure Plan’ (2003-2010) and in the recent ‘Structure Visie’ (2011).

Cairo, mega-city or mega-slum? Demographic trends and elements of the urban form of the Egyptian capital - The paper gives an overview of the development of the main elements which various attempts at planning in the twentieth century had to face up to: the urbanisation of increasingly greater proportions of the population for which the quantitative (demographic) and qualitative (elements of the urban form) framework is given. The first part schematically reconstructs the demographic trends for the city since the middle of the twentieth century, when the urban explosion commenced which brought the population of the Egyptian capital up from 2.2 million in 1947 to twelve million today. The second part looks at the distribution of the population in space, identifying the main elements that characterise the present day urban form of the metropolitan area.