IDENTIFICACIÓN DE PATRONES ESPACIALES DEL BORDE URBANO: MEDIANTE MAPAS AUTO-ORGANIZADOS DE LA CENTRALIDAD DE LA RED VIARIA.

The characterization of city borders is of especial interest, since it may provide hints to understand the urban growing taking place in peripheries and it also allows to identify continuity and discontinuity relationships between cities and their surroundings. Within this context, many different approaches could be adopted to undertake this kind of analysis. In this paper, we explore the possibilities offered by the use of Self-Organized Maps built from the results of the application of different centrality measures in the mixed road network, which is composed by streets, metropolitan roads and rural roads. The application of centrality measures to this mixed road network is already an innovative exercise, considering that the centrality analysis tend to be applied just on intra-urban contexts. The spatial representation of the profiles obtained by the Self-Organized Maps allows us to identify different structural characteristics throughout the city border. The proposed method is tested in the city of Granada (Spain), in the city border in contact with the Vega de Granada, an agricultural landscape linked to the Genil River. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]