EN
In the present article a model is treated as an instrument applied in order to present the functioning of the system of a big city. Such a model should correspond to a real system that is being modelled, and its features should facilitate its easy application for the proposed purpose. This kind of models have been created in order to describe and explain the spatial forms in which socio-economic processes and phenomena manifest themselves within the limits of Latinamerican metropolis. The first attempts of representing those forms as models took place as soon as in the sixties. But only the second half of the seventies brought many new works on the subject of urban processes in Latin America. The authors of those models usually perform on macroscale interpreting spatial patterns and their dynamics in the context of functioning of general socio-economic forces. Having studied the historical evolution of the urban landscape they included some of the conclusions into the models of contemporary structure of cities. But in the meantime, beginning in the decade of the eighties, big Latinamerican cities, started the new phase of their development, related to emergence of new, different then in the preceding decades political and economic factors, effect of internal as well as external situation of Latinamerican countries. The systems of cities, and especially of metropolitan areas, are deeply affected by structural changes. The present day model of a big Latinamerican city has a multicentric form, shaped as a result of processes of deconcentration and reaglomeration of the population as well as economic activities, clearly directed from the center towards the periphery of the urban area.