MANAGING EDGES OF URBAN GROWTH IN URUGUAY

With the transformation of the largest city in the metropolitan area, the concept of urban-rural edge and its problems become more complex. Territories with peri-urban interstices need their own reflection and generation of urban practices, applying innovative tools for a high quality integration, completion and design of the "patches", borders, islands and gaps of the urban fabric inherited, and organize new expansions characterized by unsuspected modes of poorly regulated hybridization territories. The question-challenge for the urban planner, facing the universal processes of urban growth, should not be whether the expansion will occur but how to lead it, "tame" it, shape it, and provide it with quality, structure and timing. In this frame and based on the singularities of the Uruguayan case, the article discusses alternatives to the management of clearly discriminated bands of urban-rural interfaces highly mixturated and fragmented, deregulated territories, urbanized edges as formally complete parts, peripheries that need to strengthen their governance and ramified periurbanisation. Each alternative proposal find, in the system of land use planning and sustainable development, the tools to deal with conflicts and paradoxes: partial plans, integrated action programs, strategies for complexity and uncertainty, the stubborn application of legal and doctrinal principles in pursuit of quality and the combined use of instruments and scales.