ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, when there was a low demographic growth of about 5 per cent, the Portuguese urban system demonstrated distinct dynamics, even though the urbanisation process intensified and vast areas of the territory suffered continuous population drain, affecting about 69 per cent of Portugal’s total area. Schematically, we can group the patterns of urbanisation into three types: the Metropolitan Conurbations of Lisbon and Porto; the non-Metropolitan Conurbations (diffuse urbanised areas with a polycentric urban structure in the northwest, on the western seaboard and in the Algarve), and the small and medium-sized cities located in regions marked by strongly regressive economic and demographic trends. The urban tendencies of the 1990s reinforced this pattern, maintaining a strong imbalance in the Portuguese ‘urban condition’, in which we can highlight the following:
the predominant weight of the two metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, which register growth of 5.6 per cent (Lisbon Metropolitan Area – LMA) and 4.6 per cent (Porto Metropolitan Area – PMA), especially as a result of the dynamism of their peripheral municipalities;
the intensification of diffuse urbanisation in the non-metropolitan conurbations (the largest, the northwest seaboard which includes the PMA, registered a population growth of about 11 per cent);
the intensification of processes of ‘urban centrifugation’ particularly around the PMA, where the administratively considered metropolitan area stretches along the whole of the northwest seaboard, without any perceptible boundaries. This area represents about 2.4 million people (3 million, if other measurement criteria of the urbanised continuum are used) which, added to that of the LMA, corresponds to a concentration of 53 per cent of the total Portuguese population in the two metropolitan regions;
the fragility of the medium-sized city system (only three cities with about 100,000 inhabitants: Braga, Coimbra, and Funchal in the Autonomous Region of Madeira) and the unequal dynamics of the small-sized city network. For example, Guarda and Leiria register growth between 30 per cent and 35 per cent; Coimbra and Beja only about 6 per cent to 7 per cent; Portalegre registers negative change. This unequal behaviour was observed in very distinct contexts of urban dimension and geographic situation, due to their more or less favourable location in terms of proximity or inclusion in large urbanised sprawls (metropolitan conurbations or not), or of strategic location in the main mobility corridors. In the vast territories marked by population drain, the urban network remains fragile and diffuse, if we exclude Viseu and Évora with about 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants each.
