ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the socio-demographic, political and economic processes have jerkily transformed big cities from compact and dense urban areas, with relatively sharp borders between their city centres and urban fringe, into ‘urban nebulae’, in which town and countryside have become interwoven in complex urban systems. The interdependency of changes in the urban landscape since the Second World War is to be found in the major advances in terms of technological development and forms of economic production in agriculture and industry, which have had considerable impacts on land use patterns and the economic functions of cities and the countryside. Other important factors of change are the rapid urbanisation of cities (which is intimately connected with technological developments in infrastructure and communications and population growth, economic development and growth, the increase in wealth (i.e. more leisure time, higher incomes)) and the change in economic structure of cities and regions.
