Strengthening the territorial position of Valladolid through planning strategies: Networks, patterns and centralities

The urban condition of the European territory requires new approaches to explain the current development of cities and to propose new planning tools. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that we can support an innovative perspective based on intermediate geographical scales, more useful for outlining the specific features of territory. While we analyze the territory, we should overcome the strictly local scale of the administrative boundaries and create new relationship between contemporary urban concepts (metropolization of territory and metapolis) and the regional ecological patterns. In the case of Valladolid (E) urban/metropolitan area, we focus on both causes and process of city growth. We have understood that it could be inefficient for planning forgetting the real spatial configuration (the city is located in an intersection between two territorial corridors) and misunderstanding the territorial role of the city at different scales (the double centrality in the emerging urban area and in the region). The significance of this case is to reveal the inter-scalar condition of places as generators of constraints in the contemporary urban fabric and, at the same time, to show the quality and the potential of places in the future urban realm