Polycentric Urban System, Territorial Development and Resilience of the Rural Population (Extremadura, Spain)

Over the last several decades, cities have seen concentrated development and population increase. It is a global process, still unfinished, that has simultaneously generated strong territorial imbalances because of socioeconomic backwardness and depopulation of rural areas. The alternative proposed by all institutions is a polycentric urban system, so that cities contribute to decentralizing this development towards their respective areas of influence, thus stabilizing the populations in them. Extremadura is a paradigmatic example, since it has a polycentric system of small cities that have been able to retain half of the population in rural areas. The objective of this article, first, is to define the urban structure and, based on this, typify the range, the hierarchy of the system and its territorial distribution, for which a multivariate analysis is applied. Secondly, a series of isochrones and displacement ranges are defined to analyze urban accessibility, which is key to determining the degree of decentralization of development and population stability. However, a wide peripheral and remote strip remains in the region, for which a concrete proposal is finally made for discussion.