Urban-rural gradient: Deciphering the semantic labyrinth in a Latin American context

While the global tendency of urbanization is stills increasing, cities’ growth pattern has been transformed in the las decades through the emergence of megacities or metropolitan regions. Here, defining a clear border is becoming more complex and the traditional binary conception of rural versus urban has become obsolete. Due to the hybrid condition of these new territorial configurations, an extraordinary collection of concepts are currently used to describe them; in some cases with ambiguity or as synonyms to describe this area as a unique notion, but in other cases used as terminology that seeks to capture the most outstanding features of these diverse geographies. This contribution aims at establishing new precisions about the most recurrent terms-concepts used in the scientific literature to describe the urban-rural gradient in a Latin-American context (Periphery, periurban, suburban and rurban areas), developing a sort of catalogue that clarifies and visualizes these territorial realities in a technical and scientific language. The contributions of Latin American studies have been built on the demand for recognition of their reality as different from the European or North American ones.

As a methodology, a Citation Frequency Index has been calculated from 64 scientific articles and -specifically- in 598 quotes. Through it, the most outstanding attributes for each concept have been identified and systematized. A total of 50 attributes were identified and organized in 8 categories: Morphology, Functionality, Dynamics, Demography, Social and/or Cultural Conditions, Politics, Environment and Economics. From these, morphology (20%) and function (29%) showed to be the most recurrent and relevant characteristics for describing a territory.

This exercise of classification represents a first theoretical finding for Latin-American realities and an applicable conceptual proposal that can be useful, as a guide, for understanding the contemporary patterns of urbanization in other realities.