The transformation of the apple as a morphological type is a book written by Enrique Manzano Martínez that collects the research developed for his doctoral thesis titled The transformation of the apple as a morphological type: Madrid expansion of Vallecas 2000-2010.[1]​.

Urban planning throughout the century followed planning parameters for the growth of the existing city. The support of orthogonal grids was used as a tool experimented throughout the history of cities in different urbanization processes. The research study planned in the doctoral thesis carried out by Enrique Manzano on the transition cities of the 20th century, with functionalism developed from the first International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1928 to the last one in the late 1950s, serves as the conceptual foundation for this research.

The analysis of the history of urban planning since the 1920s serves to build a story about urban forms, the block, the block, the polygon derived from functionalism that, starting in the 1950s, addresses exponential growth in Spanish cities, to reach the new vision of the democratic city with the change of political regime and the city at the end of the century and the first years of the century, in the case of Madrid and with the global perspective imposed by the times.[2]​.

From the research proposed in the thesis, the structure traces the urban evolution of Madrid in the century to analyze the new expansions carried out in the first decade of the century in the expansion of Vallecas. The temporal journey is accompanied by the morphological analysis of the Madrid neighborhoods to explore the city in a story accompanied by images, plans, graphs and photographs.

Exploring the closed block, the gridded growth of the expansion of the century, the growth of the peripheries during the century, comparing with what was happening simultaneously in other cities such as Berlin or London contextualizes and positions Madrid in the global and local. The urban planning tools used at the beginning of the century to plan the growth of the city are transformed as 50 years later, demographics change and socioeconomic perspectives modify the way of life. From the closed block, to the isolated block, passing through the peripheral polygon of functionalist urbanism, derived from learning at the International Congress of Modern Architecture. CIAM, a reading of the city emerges through its typological morphology, which in Spain presents the peculiarities of the democratic political transition of the 1980s.