Abstract

We start with the question of city definition and we present the concept as it is normally accepted in geography. That means focusing in concentration, centrality and services, besides the fact that the city is a social-economic process and a spatial form. The first component however raises the question of territorial appropriation and identification of space by users. Urbanization implies transformation, thus in the second part we refer to the most important components of the urban change. They run between opposite trends that almost enable the prediction o f the future for the cityscapes, once they are concentration and descentralization, growth and decline, global homogeneity and place differentiation. We look at them through the modifications they have in the urban land or in the social structure.