The demographic growth seen during the 20th century will lead the world population to approach seven billion in the year 2030, formalizing an inversion in the location of the people, leading to occupy, in greater numbers, the urban centers and to the detriment of the rural areas. In South American, African an Asian countries, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of megacities such as São Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Kinshasa, Mumbai or Seoul, since the beginning of the 20th century. The topic of urban peripheries has become central to discussing their future.

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In Brazil, the country in Latin America where the phenomenon has gained a large proportion, urbanist John Turner, described in the book The Planet of Slum by Mike Davis (2005) as one of “the friends of the poor”, it is told to say back in 1968: «They present to me housing estates as a solution, and they seem like a problem. They present to me favelas as a problem, and they seem like a solution».

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In the case of Cape Verde, cities began to develop, since the 1940s, with problems related to housing and urbanism that, increasingly, raised an imperative need to discuss their future urban development. Between this time and the 1980s, the period in which began the first plans for territorial organization of cities in the Country, some attempts at regulatory actions for spatial planning were made, which, having not been applied, allowed only the punctual appearance of planned growth zones.