Oaxaca, de "ciudad intermedia" a metrópoli de Los Valles Centrales

This thesis aims at observing the current situation of Oaxaca city, a medium-size urban area in the southwest of Mexico. After the industrial era, the globalization of economic and cultural issues in the information era resulted in the deep transformation of practically every part of the world. We tried measuring how a specific urban area was able to react to such changes. We started by asking ourselves what was the current role of these cities and this one in particular, from an urban point of view, after the intensive social and economical transformations occurred at the end of twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. In order to answer this basic question we carried out a territorial research based on a spatial and functional analysis. Although in the end also other perspectives, such as social or economics facts, have also become part of this work very naturally. At the same time we tried to understand how these different factors have been impacted over the territory, and which new urban forms have been merged as part of this chain of actions and transformations. The conclusion of our research and experimentations brought us to draw some answers and explications for some social and urban phenomenon that are currently taking place in the city area. The first consequences of these changes resulted in the transformation of a compact city, which has been such since the colonial times, up to the mid part of the twentieth century, into a complex urban space extended over a regional territory. Some times the cut has been rather blurred and some other times it was instead clearly defined. That configuration in fact defines the urban area that was analyzed in this thesis. This radical change follows a series of social phenomenon that are responsible in big part for the actual conditions of the city. This is the case -for instance- of the impact left by the migratory phenomenon onto the spatial distribution. The same goes for the relation between the fragmented political geography of the Oaxaca State and the shape of the urban sprawl. The pattern is such that, thanks to the analysis carried out in this thesis, we can now not only understand the city itself, but also some general features of its population. Oaxaca city and its region show how hardly one single urban space can be isolated from the great economic and communication changes of the modern times, particularly the information era where we live. Therefore, the study of the political and social actors of the city was taken seriously into account in our research, so to be included as a fundamental part of the current shape of this urban region. In this thesis there are also several parts dedicated to the understanding of these important aspects, that in the end are reflected in the territory as urban spaces, which is the core of this study. But over all, our research is a deep, morphological analysis of a city that nowadays lives a contemporaneous global reality. Therefore we must understand from an urban perspective what is the condition of this city under new conditions. Finally, this work gives a first glance at a set of similar cities that also have faced deep changes resulting from the enormous transformations occurred in the past decades. We are sure that there are similarities with other urban areas that are just waiting to be discovered and studied as well. Such cities have probably witnessed the same urban processes that take place in the rest of the world, and fully understand the intense global urbanization that is now defining our time