Colombia´s juridical system gives many different authorities the autonomy to define their own land use, which in addition to poor normative clarity and scarce doctrinal development on the matter, generates great difficulties to set the scope and limits for each and every authority, this is a particularly complex problem for the metropolitan areas and municipalities, because it raises the question of how far the metropolitan areas can go without limiting the municipal constitutional autonomy. On this matter, one can come to the conclusion that the assigned competencies to metropolitan areas for land use are not against to the municipal autonomy principle, always based on the right material and juridical conceptualization of municipal categories, municipal autonomy, metropolitan areas, metropolitan phenomena, metropolitan facts and metropolitan determinants for land use, matter reflected on this paper work, important to demonstrate how the adequate relationship between this concepts and institutions respond to land use principals.