Resumen en español

The urban expansion on the rural peripheries is a phenomenon of world-wide occurrence, treated by diverse authors. To this situation the great metropolitan city of the Valley of Aburrá does not escape, expressed in the presence of rustic and semirustic urbanizations, and commercial enclaves and of services in countryside of its immediate surroundings, which cause multiple impacts in the development and quality of life of the population of the central region of Antioquia. In the paper considerations on this phenomenon are presented around three aspects: the correspondence of this form of occupation of land with the model of city wished and defined in the POT (territorial ordering plan); the coherence in the definition of the urban, suburban, rural zones, those of expansion and protection, with the model of city and the norms regulating the suburban and rural areas; finally, the possible impacts of this process of suburbanization are exposed, in the different aspects of territorial development.