interfase urbano-rural en ecuador hacia un desarrollo territorial ...

The very large metropolises suffer from many ills afflicting above all the poorest populations and
those whose status is the most precarious. This is related mainly to access to land and the inadequacy
of the forms of land possession, characterized by an increasing informalization of access to inhabitable
lands (invasions or illicit negotiations, by recent immigrants or low income sectors), and territorial
segregation (through which these individuals are rejected toward the most devalued spaces on the
economic plane, such as areas without facilities, on the outskirts or at risk) (Durand-Lasserve &
Royston, 2002). The same pressure observed as far as land in concerned is repeated in access to
housing (Gilbert, 1992, Bolay, 2002). This real-estate insecurity increases with three classes of
particularly serious negative elements in the metropolises: the serious degradation of environmental
resources and the pollution deriving from it (World Resources Institute et al., 1996; Hardoy, Mitlin
and Satterthwaite, 1992); the lack of services, facilities and urban networks and their cost; and the
growing informalization of employment and its negative repercussions on income.
Compared with the negative aspects of metropolitan areas, what are the advantages that can benefit the
less important cities, or at least what are the elements of comparison that would enable them to
become true residential alternatives
The first temptation is to reverse the picture, claiming that the negative phenomena observed in the
large agglomerations are nonexistent in the smaller cities and describing the latter as: less polluted,
more economical, less precarious and offering a better quality of life. Reality, however, is more
complex than this and does not confirm, in the strict sense, the hypothesis as we formulated it.
Indeed, the statistical evidence does not allow us to affirm that there is a true change of trend: the
world continues to become metropolitan. However, this growth of the very large agglomerations is –
no longer- taking place at the expense of the smaller cities; the small and medium-sized cities are also
growing. In the countries of the Maghreb, for example, the urban explosion initially goes through “a
diffusion of the urban phenomenon through the multiplication of the lower level cities, which initially
filtered the rural exodus and later became a separate category and strengthened their role in the local
space; this role is often recognised by the public authorities, and today they ensure a new progression
of the urban structure inside the territories" (Rousseau, 2001).
So it is in this light that we must revise our initial assumptions, not as a change of tendency, but rather
as the extension of the urbanization process, which now extends from the megalopolises to the urban
centres most integrated in their rural environment. And it is in this recent context that we must rethink
the attraction of these cities and the conditions that make their existence possible.
Going back to the lessons learnt from examining the regional urban centres during three years in
Ecuador, the conditions that favour the dynamism of these cities correspond to the following criteria.
First of all, there is the issue of employment and the generation of incomes; the development of new
kinds of activities, related to agricultural exports for two of the three cities studied by us, generates
rural jobs of a new type, with an evident socio-demographic impact due to the arrival of rural and
urban immigrants responding to this new opportunity. This economic trend is never isolated, and it is
difficult not to see that we are faced not with a rural-urban dichotomy, but rather with a phenomenon
of re-urbanization, the rural localization of enterprises with skills and modern technology that attract
manpower, whose members are of external origin, but prefer to live in the city.
There are also the new phenomena of closeness created by today’s communication media, regardless
of whether we are thinking of technical infrastructures (land, air and even river routes) that facilitate
connections between the smaller and larger poles of an increasingly well connected urban network, or
of the telematics networks. Mobility, speed, immediacy and convenience of use are the key words for
cities whose interest now lies not so much in their location in space, in a local and micro-regional
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