The south territory; the city limits as recognition in new ways of urban-regional growth between Bogota and the Municipality of Soacha

The purpose of this paper is to study the context of the great urban developments occurring in the south of Bogota and Soacha, as two towns that form an extremely complex urban, continuum, emerging from the spread of residential areas and diverse productive activities, during five decades. The Tunjuelito River basin-being part of the Savanna's main ecological structure became the foundation for these settlements. To acknowledge the process of urban expansion, taking the river as a natural borderline, allowed us to identify certain social and functionally homogeneous areas that we named the South Territory. Advances in the understanding of the of Colombian cities we the passing and coming into operation of the first generation of the territorial ordering plans, have allowed us to identify, at least, two shortcomings. The first one has to do with an inherent weakness in regional analyses, which to the present day has hindered progress towards a rational distribution of metropolitan territories; the second one has to do with the lack of adequate tools to interpret the so-called peripheral spaces; spaces which, actually, constitute a complex urban and rural system having extraordinary regional impact. The study of the South Territory helps to prove the truth of this hypothesis and suggests new interpretations and ways to approach the problem