Abstract
Urban development cannot be separated from real estate market operation mechanisms. This market nurtures an “urbanization industry” with a voracity equivalent to the profits it generates. The fragmentation of the urban fabric observed around the consolidated areas of medium cities creates a coarse fusion between “city” and “countryside” which is unplanned and difficult to read. “New cities” emerge here overlapping the surviving farms, the forest fragments and the innumerous empty spaces in the form of row houses and unorganized housing estates. All this is tied together by a complex road traffic structure connecting these hyper functional spaces to the city and the surrounding metropolitan region (Metapolis). We have shown that the Administration regulatory function (regulation of soil use and transformation, as well as taxation) has either been ineffective or has served (or benefited from) the greed of the urbanization market. We have reflected on the subject and discussed its theoretical coverage. We have processed information capable of quantifying these processes in a national scale and in the second part of this thesis we analyzed the case study of Caldas da Rainha. In this analysis laboratory, we quantified in several ways the dimension of the urban development over the last decades. We evaluated the real estate market evolution through the creation of a database that recorded 2446 estates advertised in a local newspaper from 1926 to 2008. We also applied a questionnaire to evaluate the house search in the last 15 years in the discontinuous crowns of Caldas da Rainha. We identified the Caldas da Rainha urban space and new urbanizations due to the fact that they are valued in the market. Key-words: urban development; real estate market; city; urbanization