Morphometric relief characterization of the Andalusian Urban System
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Abstract
The Urban System of Andalusia is the main reference for the Andalusian Regional Plan, the instrument which contains the highest-level spatial planning politics and strategies under development by the Regional Government. This system is a model built considering a hierarchical classification of cities, towns and villages of Andalusia, using demographic and functional criteria, studied over the last decades. This model is inspired in a well-developed work line in Quantitative Geography, consolidated since 1950s. In this paper, we present a method based in a geomorphological classification of reliefs, made using an automatized process with information from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). This process makes it possible to add terrain data to the Urban System model, referred to the site which each city/town/village occupies, systematically obtained using GIS. The result is a dataset containing information about the site and relief of each analyzed urban entity, which allows us to classify them considering the characteristics of the relief they occupy. Data shows a clear relationship between the relief each town occupies and its historical origin, an important link between physiographic aptitude and urban growth, and a tendency to increasing complexity of reliefs as the hierarchical level of the settlement decreases.