GUD Home
Economic
Strategy
Eliminating Poverty
Teamwork
World's Urban Systems
Environmental
Challenge
Housing Reconstruction in Southeastern
Europe
Local and Global
Transportation in Bogota
People &
Community Assets
Where the Sidewalks End
Urban Informal Sector in Nigeria
Gender Equality
Grassroots Women's Leadership
Urban Heritage
Cities and Insurrections
Urban Heritage in Singapore
Globalization and Urban Heritage
About the Authors
Editorial Guidelines
GUD Magazine Home
Published by
Global Urban Development

Executive Editor:
Dr. Marc A. Weiss
Managing Editor:
Nancy Sedmak-Weiss
|
Volume 1
Issue 1
May 2005 |
Print Version
METROPOLITAN ECONOMIC STRATEGY
The World’s Urban Systems: A
European Perspective
Sir Peter Hall
This article suggests that there are two alternative ways of
looking at cities and world urban systems, both valid, which
need to be combined. Then it looks at the performance of the
European urban system in the last quarter century. From this,
starting from the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP),
it proposes some lines of policy, with particular reference to
the recent enlargement of the European Union.
I. Alternative
Views of Urban Systems
There are two alternative ways of looking at cities and urban
systems.
1. The Urban Hierarchy
The first is in terms of a hierarchy of cities
— a tradition that goes all the way back to Walter Christaller's
classic work written in 1933, Central Places in Southern
Germany. However, Christaller’s typology was developed for a
very different age, and it is no longer an adequate description
of the European urban hierarchy: it is dominated by small towns,
some of which have ceased to operate as service centers at all,
and it totally omits higher-level centers.
The urban system has been profoundly affected by the increasing
globalization of the world and the informationalization
of the economy
— the shift of advanced economies from primarily goods production to
predominantly information handling. Manuel Castells in The
Information Age has described this as the transition to the
informational mode of production: a shift as momentous, in his
view, as the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy in
the 18th and 19th centuries. In typical developed countries,
already by 1991 between three-fifths and three-quarters of all
employment was in services, while between one-third and one-half
was in information handling; generally these proportions have
doubled since the 1920s.
These processes have increased the importance of cities at the
very top of the hierarchy, the so-called world cities or global
cities. This is not a new phenomenon. Patrick Geddes recognized
‘world cities’ and defined them, as long ago as 1915, in
Cities in Evolution. In 1966 I published a book entitled
The World Cities, defining them as cities that performed
multiple roles: as centers of political power, both national and
international, and of the organizations related to government;
as centers of national and international trade, acting as
trading ports for their countries and sometimes for neighboring
countries also; as centers of banking, insurance, and related
financial services; as centers of advanced professional activity
of all kinds, in medicine, in law, in higher education, and the
application of scientific knowledge to technology; as centers of
information-gathering and diffusion, through publishing and the
mass media; as centers of conspicuous consumption, both of
luxury goods for the minority and mass-produced goods for the
multitude; and as centers of arts, culture, and entertainment,
along with a wide range of ancillary activities.
In the 1980s John Friedmann deepened this analysis, by
suggesting that processes of globalization were resulting in a
new urban hierarchy, in which London, New York, and Tokyo were
"global financial articulations", while Miami, Los Angeles,
Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Singapore were "multinational
articulations", and Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Mexico City, Sao
Paulo, Seoul, and Sydney were "important national
articulations", all forming a "network". Saskia Sassen, in
The Global City, developed the point that the locus of the
production of advanced business or producer services has become
increasingly disarticulated from the production of tangible
goods:
-
The spatial dispersion of production, including
its internationalization, has contributed to the growth of
centralized service nodes for the management and regulation
of the new space economy ... To a considerable extent, the
weight of economic activity over the last fifteen years has
shifted from production places such as Detroit and
Manchester, to centers of finance and highly specialized
services.
Thus there are contradictory trends: as production disperses
worldwide, services increasingly concentrate into a relatively
few trading cities, both the well-known "global cities" and a
second rung of about 20 immediately below these, which we can
distinguish as "sub-global". These cities are centers for
financial services (banking, insurance) and headquarters of
major production companies; most are also seats of the major
world-power governments. A recent study of world cities
distinguished four key groups of advanced service activity:
1. Finance and Business Services: including banking and
insurance, commercial business services such as law, accounting,
advertising, and public relations, and design services including
architecture, civil engineering, industrial design, and fashion;
2. "Power and Influence" (or "Command and Control"):
national government, supranational organizations like the UN and
OECD, and headquarters of major organizations including
transnational corporations;
3. Creative and Cultural Industries: including live
performing arts (theatre, opera, ballet, concerts), museums,
galleries, exhibitions, print and electronic media;
4.
Tourism: both business and leisure tourism, including
hotels, restaurants, bars, entertainment, and transportation
services.
All these are service industries. The process differs somewhat
from sector to sector, but it all involves generating,
communicating, and consuming information, often with a high
degree of immediacy. Whether one considers the investment
analyst trading shares, or the lawyer offering advice, or the
board of a major corporation in a meeting, or the television
producer at work on a show, or the tour guide taking a group
sightseeing, specialized information is being processed and
transmitted by highly-qualified people in real time. Further,
much of this activity involves face-to-face exchange of
information, either as a central feature or as an essential
ancillary activity (as when the stock analyst has lunch and
picks up important market information).
These categories tend to be highly synergistic with each other,
and many activities fit effectively into the interstices between
them: thus hotels and conference centers and exhibition centers
are simultaneously business services and part of tourism;
museums and galleries are creative/cultural but also parts of
tourism; and advertising is both creative and a business
service. Therefore, an extremely strong force of agglomeration
operates within and across these sectors.
Work by the GaWC (Global Analysis of World Cities) group at the
University of Loughborough in the UK goes a long way to
recognizing these trends and developing a new urban hierarchy:
it identifies a "global hierarchy" of cities, based essentially
on the relationships between different units engaged in
delivering advanced services like law and accounting. In it,
European cities are prominently represented and, of the top six
cities, four are in the so-called North West Metropolitan Area
of Europe, with London at the top. This is further supported by
recent work on the global urban hierarchy based on airport
connectivity.
Table 1 |
Cities are ordered in terms of world city-ness
values ranging from 1- 12.
European cities are underlined |
A. ALPHA WORLD CITIES |
12: London, Paris, New York, Tokyo
|
10: Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Milan,
Singapore |
B. BETA WORLD CITIES
|
9: San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto,
Zurich
|
8: Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, Sao Paulo
|
7: Moscow, Seoul |
C. GAMMA WORLD CITIES
|
6: Amsterdam, Boston, Caracas, Dallas, Dusseldorf,
Geneva, Houston, Jakarta, Johannesburg,
Melbourne, Osaka, Prague, Santiago, Taipei,
Washington |
5: Bangkok, Beijing, Rome, Stockholm,
Warsaw
|
4: Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires,
Budapest, Copenhagen, Hamburg,
Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Miami, Minneapolis,
Montreal, Munich, Shanghai |
D. EVIDENCE OF WORLD CITY FORMATION
|
Di Relatively strong evidence
|
3: Auckland, Dublin, Helsinki, Luxembourg,
Lyon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Philadelphia, Rio de
Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Vienna
|
Dii Some evidence |
2: Abu Dhabi, Almaty, Athens, Birmingham, Bogota,
Bratislava, Brisbane, Bucharest,
Cairo, Cleveland, Cologne, Detroit, Dubai, Ho
Chi Minh City, Kiev, Lima, Lisbon,
Manchester, Montevideo, Oslo,
Rotterdam, Riyadh, Seattle, Stuttgart,
The Hague, Vancouver |
Diii Minimal evidence
|
1: Adelaide, Antwerp, Arhus, Athens,
Baltimore, Bangalore, Bologna, Brasilia,
Calgary, Cape Town, Colombo, Columbus, Dresden,
Edinburgh, Genoa, Glasgow,
Gothenburg, Guangzhou, Hanoi, Kansas City,
Leeds, Lille, Marseille, Richmond,
Saint Petersburg, Tashkent, Tehran, Tijuana,
Turin, Utrecht, Wellington
|
|
Source: J.V. Beaverstock, P. Taylor and R.G. Smith, “A Roster of World
Cities,” Cities, 16, 1999. |
Table 2 |
WORLD CITY HIERARCHY BASED ON AIR CONNECTIONS, 1997 |
European cities are
underlined |
1 London |
44 Dallas |
2 Frankfurt |
45 Nagoya |
3 Paris |
46 Helsinki |
4 New York |
47 Houston |
5 Amsterdam |
48 Kuwait City |
6 Zurich |
49 Prague |
7 Miami |
50 Auckland |
8 Los Angeles |
51 Warsaw |
9 Hong Kong |
52 Damascus |
10 Singapore |
53 Oslo |
11 Tokyo |
54 Ho Chi Minh City |
12 Seoul |
55 Seattle |
13 Bangkok |
56 Pusan |
14 Madrid |
57 Montreal |
15 Vienna |
58 Larnaca |
16 San Francisco |
59 Tehran |
17 Chicago |
60 Bucharest |
18 Dubai |
61 Havana |
19 Osaka |
62 Quito |
20 Brussels |
63 Tunis |
21 Milan |
64 Colombo |
22 Copenhagen |
65 Jakarta |
23 Mexico City |
66 Panama |
24 Kuala Lumpur |
67 Johannesburg |
25 Athens |
68 La Paz |
26 Istanbul |
69 Montevideo |
27 Cairo |
70 Guatemala City |
28 Manila |
71 Asuncion |
29 Buenos Aires |
72 Malta |
30 Sydney |
73 Karachi |
31 Toronto |
74 Mauritius |
32 Beijing |
75 Nairobi |
33 Stockholm |
76 Kingston |
34 Taipei |
77 Dublin |
35 Vancouver |
78 Maputo |
36 Washington, DC |
79 Budapest |
37 Santiago |
80 Moscow |
38 Boston |
81 Dar es Salaam |
39 Lima |
82 San Salvador |
40 Lisbon |
83 Riyadh |
41 Bogota |
84 Lagos |
42 Rio de Janeiro |
85 Tel Aviv |
43 Caracas |
|
Source: D.A. Smith and M. Timberlake, “World City Networks and
Hierarchies, 1977-1997: An Empirical Analysis of Global
Air Travel,” American Behavioral Science, 44,
June 2001. |
We can conclude that the Christaller hierarchy now needs to be
supplemented by at least two and perhaps three additional
levels, producing a hierarchy of perhaps six or seven levels:
(1) Global cities ("Alpha" cities) typically with 5
million and more people within their administrative
boundaries and up to 20 million within their
surrounding regions, but effectively serving very
large global territories: London, Paris, New York,
Tokyo. |
(2) Sub-global cities ("Beta" and "Gamma" cities),
typically with 1-5 million people and up to perhaps
10 million in their urbanized regions, performing
global service functions for certain specialized
services (banking, fashion, culture, media) and an
almost complete range of similar functions for more
restricted national or regional territories: all
European capitals apart from the global cities,
together with "commercial capitals" (Milan,
Barcelona) and major provincial cities in large
nation states (Glasgow, Manchester, Lyon, Marseille,
Hamburg). This last category may overlap with
Christaller's L-centers and may possibly be
equivalent to it; but a special category must exist
for the national capitals, which do not exist in his
scheme. |
(3) Regional (Christaller's Landstadt) (population
250,000-1 million); some of these have
characteristics which cause the GaWC to describe
them as "Showing Evidence of World City Formation". |
(4) Provincial (Christaller's Provinzstadt)
(population 100,000-250,000). |
Below the provincial level, the five levels which Christaller
distinguished have not physically disappeared. But the two
lowest levels, his Marktort and Amtsort, have
ceased to perform any significant role as central places; they
have lost any service functions they may have had, such as a
village store or post office, and have become purely residential
villages. The next level up, the Kreisstadt, may have
very limited village-store type services. The lowest significant
level in contemporary Europe is probably his fourth level or
Bezirkstadt, with a residential population of 10,000 and a
service market population of 100,000. It is at about this level,
for instance, that one typically finds the establishment of a
supermarket and a limited range of national chain stores. All
this demonstrates the dramatic increase in mobility and thus in
what he termed "the range of a good" in the 72 years after he
wrote his book, which has effectively replaced the small village
store by the supermarket as the basic unit of convenience
shopping for the average member of the population.
It is, however, at the next two levels upwards that some of the
most significant changes have occurred, since over wide rural
areas, depending on population density, one or other of these
usually represents the largest available central place. They are
the typical county market towns of rural Europe, found across
much of southern England, southern Germany, and most of France.
They have grown because they provide the local services for
their populations, and also sometimes national services, such as
universities. In the less-developed, depopulating regions of
Europe they have acted as magnets, attracting population outflow
from the surrounding rural areas; in the more prosperous
regions, likewise, they have attracted much of the migration of
people and businesses from the major cities at the higher levels
of the hierarchy, especially within the transport-rich sectors,
as well illustrated by the case of London's western sector.
Since 1990 this has been countered by a re-urbanization trend,
fuelled in the case of London by migration from abroad and a
high rate of natural increase due to a young population. But the
net migration trend continues strongly outward.
2. A Geographical-Functional Categorization:
The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP)
However, the precise form and degree of urban development varies
significantly from one part of Europe to another. First, it is
concentrated around the global and sub-global cities, and then
predominantly in a few key sectors, representing the most
important inter-regional (and sometimes international) transport
corridors: around London, for instance, towards the north, west,
and east.
Second, in a few cases this may result in discontinuous
corridors or axes of urbanization, most notably in the so-called
"Blue Banana" connecting Birmingham, London, Brussels,
Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, and Milan.
Third, it is not universal around every major metropolis: Paris,
for instance, has mainly deconcentrated into the five giant
suburban cites nouvelles (new towns) proposed in the 1965 Schema
Directeur, so that
— in sharp contrast to London
—
there has been only minimal dispersal beyond their limits.
Fourth, the precise urban form that results is influenced
strongly by the strength of land-use planning powers. Compare
the highly constrained urban growth typical of the United
Kingdom and the Netherlands with the much freer pattern of
suburbanization found in northern Italy. However, in general,
because of differential patterns of accessibility set by
motorway interchanges and inter-city train stations, market
forces tend to generate a quite discontinuous pattern of
development around existing central places that remain
surrounded by wide green exurban spaces. Local resistance, in
the form of NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) movements, tends to
limit the growth of smaller urban places and many villages.
Whereas the traditional Christaller central places were linked
by radial public transport systems (trains, buses) connecting
the towns with lower levels in the system and with villages, the
higher levels are directly connected with each other by systems
for business travel and information exchange (air corridors,
inter-city and high-speed train routes, motorways,
telecommunications links for voice and data) and by travel
infrastructure in the form of hotels, restaurants, and
entertainment. This suggests that a new central place system
needs to be defined, based on indicators of business
concentration (international bank transactions, stock exchange
transactions, hotels) and flows of people and information. The
logic here is that information is exchanged in two ways
—
by telecommunications and by personal/business travel
— and that the information technology revolution
almost certainly will not mean that the need and desire
for face-to-face contact will diminish. On the contrary: the
historical record shows very clearly that the growth of
telecommunications traffic is paralleled by the growth of
travel; and this will continue to be true in the future.
Far from telecommunications reducing the need and desire to
travel, it is likely to multiply it: the growth in information
exchange will bring with it a necessity for more and more
face-to-face meetings. Therefore a key question is where this
activity will happen. All the evidence, even from high priests
of cyberspace like Microsoft’s Bill Gates or William Mitchell of
MIT, suggests that city centers will retain their unique role in
providing the most efficient locations for much of this
activity, simply because of the accumulated weight of
interrelated functions that have historically accrued there, and
because radially-oriented transport systems focus on them.
Again, the empirical evidence suggests that the hierarchy of
cities in Europe has not changed very much in the last
half-century and will not change much in the future.
The main new influence is likely to be the development of the
high-speed train system in Europe. We know from experience these
trains will take about 80-90% of traffic up to about 500
kilometers and about 50% of passenger travel up to about 800
kilometers. This means that by 2010, when the system will
connect all the principal cities of Europe from Bari right up to
Glasgow and Umea, virtually all traffic between key city pairs
will go by rail. The longer-distance traffic, even within
Europe, will largely be based on air travel. Within what used to
be called the European Central Capitals Region, business traffic
will transfer overwhelmingly from air to rail in the next few
years. A critical urban planning question will be the linkages
at the airports with the rail systems. We can already see these
at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, and soon also at Amsterdam
and Frankfurt. The likelihood is that these places will become
new urban centers. They will attract a vast amount of business
in the form of conference centers, exhibition centers, and
hotels; and they are also likely to become shopping centers,
such as Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Five, that will compete with
traditional downtown areas as business hubs.
There is thus an emerging contrast between the European Central
Capitals Region, with its dense cluster of cities closely
networked through air, high-speed-train and telecommunications
links (London, Paris, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Brussels,
Amsterdam), and the "gateway" or "regional capital" cities in
the more peripheral European regions, each dominating a large
but less-densely-populated territory (Dublin, Edinburgh,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Madrid,
and Lisbon, plus the central and eastern European capitals of
Ljubljana, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, and Tallinn). These cities
are connected by air into the central region, even though they
are also becoming the cores of local high-speed-train systems.
Here, we find an interesting degree of competition between a
higher-order city that appears to control such a wide sector of
European space, and next-order cities controlling parts of that
space (as, for instance, Copenhagen versus Stockholm and
Helsinki; Berlin versus Vienna; Madrid versus Lisbon).
Additionally, in one or two instances, this critical
Euro-regional role is divided between a "political" and a
"commercial" capital (Rome and Milan; Madrid and Barcelona).
A
system, derived in part from the analysis in ESDP but also from
my own work, tries to capture these geographical relationships
within the European urban hierarchy, provisionally developed as
follows:
-
Central
High-Level Service Cities:
major cities (national capitals) and major commercial cities
in the so-called "Pentagon": London, Paris, Milan, Munich,
Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Luxembourg. As
the ESDP analysis shows, these cities have the highest
multi-modal transport accessibility within the European
Union. They are connected by dense air corridors now being
supplemented by new high-speed train lines.
-
Gateway
Cities (Sub-Continental Capitals): national capitals and major commercial cities
outside the "Pentagon", acting as high-level service centers
for major parts of Europe: Madrid-Barcelona, Rome, Athens,
Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest.
They are normally major air hubs for flag carriers and
increasingly the cores of regional high-speed train systems
which are not yet connected to the "Pentagon" system, and
they may be too distant in some cases for rail to compete
effectively. These also include some larger commercial
cities: Manchester, Lyon, Stuttgart, and Leipzig.
-
Smaller
Capitals and Provincial Capitals: these are smaller equivalents of the previous case, commanding
less extensive space in terms of population and economic
production; in many cases they are at the periphery of
Europe: Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Helsinki, Stockholm,
Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Sofia). This also includes
smaller commercial centers controlling "provincial"
territories: Bristol, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Strasbourg,
Hannover, Bologna, Poznan, and Krakow.
-
"County towns": this describes the
typical rural administrative and service center for a
surrounding area 40 to 60 kilometers in radius, of which
hundreds exist in Europe. Some, in "accessible rural" areas,
are growing very rapidly by dispersal from major cities,
thus tending to form highly networked "mega-city regions"
such as southeastern England, the Delta Metropolis around
Amsterdam, and Lombardy in northern Italy. Other, less
accessible, examples are experiencing more varied fortunes:
some are growing through tourism and migration for
retirement, others are stagnant or even declining. The last
represents a particular problem of deindustrialization that
is highly localized in certain parts of Europe, especially
the coalfield belt from northern and midland England through
Wallonia, Lorraine, the Ruhr valley, and upper Silesia.
II. Putting the
Taxonomies Together: The Recent Record
What happens when we try to put the two different systems of
classification together? At the macro-level of analysis, the
dominant feature is the contrast between the European Central
Capitals Region, with its dense cluster of high-level cities
closely networked through air, high-speed-train and
telecommunications links, and the "gateway" or "regional
capital" cities in the more peripheral European regions, each
dominating a large but less densely-populated territory. Here,
we find an interesting degree of competition between a
higher-order city that appears to control a wide area of Europe,
and next-order cities controlling parts of that space.
Additionally, in one or two instances, this critical
Euro-regional role is divided between a "political" and a
"commercial" capital.
These intermediate-size gateway cities have proved relatively
dynamic in the 1970s and 1980s. They invariably act as regional
airport hubs, with a range of long-distance destinations
(Copenhagen) and as the hubs of regional high-speed-train
systems (Rome); they have a wide variety of global service
functions, especially where they play a special role of
providing advanced services for linguistic regions, as Madrid
does for Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. With
expansion of the European Union eastwards, the eastern gateway
cities (Berlin, Vienna) are playing larger roles in their
respective areas. However, policy does not appear to have played
much of a direct role in this development; it is a function of
European geography and its relation to the wider global economy.
Smaller cities seem to have experienced some advantages when
they are clustered, creating a wider economic area sharing labor
markets and specialized services. The outstanding examples are
the Greater South East region outside London and the fringes of
Randstad in the Netherlands. But many other parts of Europe have
developed regions of intense urbanization along major transport
corridors, as in the Rhine Valley above Frankfurt, the Rhone
Valley below Lyon, or the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. In a
few cases (as in southeastern England) urban and regional
planning policy has played a role; elsewhere, it has been a more
spontaneous evolution. There is now general agreement that such
a form, combining small mixed-use urban developments
concentrated along strong public transport corridors, represents
the most sustainable form of urban development. Some national
planning strategies are beginning to adopt it, particularly in
the UK. In the future they will be joined by similar cities in
central and eastern Europe, such as Wroclaw, Poznan, Pilsen, and
Szeged.
Many more isolated medium-sized towns, outside of the major
European-wide transport corridors but located on national
transport corridors connecting larger cities, have shown
remarkable dynamism. Examples include Nottingham and Bristol,
Hannover and Munich, Grenoble and Toulouse, Naples and Ravenna,
Zaragoza and Valencia. The key seems to be that they are in
“sunbelt” rural regions that are themselves prosperous, either
through efficient agricultural production, or more commonly
because these cities have become centers of business,
professional, and financial services. Public sector spending
policies have also played a role, by concentrating such
functions as higher education and hospitals in these places.
How does one try to summarize this mass of partial and sometimes
contradictory data? To begin, some kinds of urban areas are
unambiguously growing through in-migration:
First, regions near major cities, mainly in northern and central
Europe, that are benefiting from the exodus from these cities
into wider "mega-city regions"
—
as around London, Copenhagen, and Randstad in the Netherlands;
this trend has weakened somewhat since 1980 with a counter-trend
toward reurbanization, though rapid growth has also continued in
the fringe areas.
Second, medium-sized and smaller cities and metropolitan regions
in less-urbanized "sunbelt" zones, particularly in the southern
UK, southern France, Portugal, and central and northern Italy.
Third, a few selected larger urban centers and their surrounding
regions in the less-developed, less densely-populated regions
characterized by rural out-migration, particularly in
Scandinavia, Mediterranean Europe, Ireland, and some central and
eastern European countries. This reflects the magnetism of such
cities at the stage of development these regions have reached,
along with government policies. Also, there are relatively few
large urban regions in these parts of Europe that can serve as
magnets for in-migration.
These trends reflect underlying economic realities.
Globalization and the shift to the information economy give
special value to large cities as centers for efficient
face-to-face information exchange. They are the locations of the
major hub airports and the high-speed train stations; they also
are hubs for commuter traffic. But they also experience some
economic disadvantages: high rents, congestion, pollution, the
costs of attracting middle- and junior-level staff. Certain
activities, including back offices and research and development
(R&D), are increasingly tending to migrate outwards: to
corridors near airports, to suburban train stations, and to
country towns in the surrounding ring. Meanwhile, medium-sized
cities ("provincial capitals") in “sunbelt” rural regions
(Bristol, Hannover, Bordeaux, Oporto, Seville, Bologna) are
growing through strong concentrations of public sector
employment in higher education and health services, along with
retailing and tourism. Some of these also act as centers of
high-technology manufacturing, and have attracted
longer-distance office decentralization. Medium-sized cities in
older industrial regions (Dortmund, Leeds) have seen a similar
growth, though others have been less successful. Finally, there
are numerous cases of growth at the next level of the European
urban hierarchy: the "county town", or medium-sized
administrative-service center of a rural region, of which
hundreds of European examples exist. These centers have grown
through in-migration and investment as local service centers;
they often offer an attractive physical environment, like
Freiburg.
Thus, the overall picture is not easy to summarize. On the one
hand, significant concentrations of activity are occurring in
the cores of the very largest cities; they generate wealth and,
through multiplier effects, jobs, even though some of the
production and incomes may be "exported" to suburban commuter
towns in the surrounding ring. However, such growth does not
generate sufficient employment to compensate for the loss of
traditional manufacturing and goods-handling activities. The
result is a paradox: high levels of income generation are
accompanied by localized long-term structural unemployment. In
terms of employment and population growth, medium-sized and
smaller towns are showing more rapid growth than larger ones;
and some are benefiting from spillover effects from larger
cities into their suburban commuter rings. However, their
performance varies significantly from region to region: it is
strongest in the zones of deconcentration around the largest
metropolitan areas of the European Central Capitals Region,
strong also in sunbelt regions, and more variable in the
peripheral regions of out-migration. In central and eastern
Europe, cities at this level of the hierarchy tend to be weakly
represented.
Another way of looking at the evidence, therefore, is to return
to the macro-level of geographical analysis. The Eurocore or
Central Capitals Region continues to exhibit strong growth, with
a reversal of the counter-urbanization tendencies of the 1970s
in at least some of the cities, but with continuing local
out-migration extending the metropolitan region into a complex
polycentric structure. The more peripheral political and
commercial capitals also exhibit growth, sometimes accompanied
by local decentralization to smaller cities; here, the pressures
for deconcentration, in the form of congestion and other
negative externalities, are fewer. The Euro-periphery exhibits
general continued out-migration, but accompanied by local
migration patterns which benefit a relatively few local service
centers.
III. Towards a
Spatially Integrated Approach: The ESDP
In this last section, lines of policy are proposed to encourage
higher levels of growth in less-developed regions and cities,
some of which will be older industrial cities in need of
restructuring, but a much larger number of which will be cities
in the less densely-populated, less-developed fringe regions of
Europe.
Here, it is necessary to realize that the central word,
polycentric, needs to be carefully defined: it has a
different significance at different spatial scales and in
different geographical contexts. At the global level,
polycentric refers to the development of alternative global
centers of power. Relatively few cities worldwide are
universally regarded as global command-and-control centers,
located in the most developed economies: London appears in all
lists, Paris appears on many. Importantly, however, Europe has a
number of "sub-global" cities, performing global functions in
specialized fields: Rome (culture), Milan (fashion), Frankfurt
and Zurich (banking), Brussels, Luxembourg, Paris, Rome, and
Geneva (supranational government agencies).
Within a specifically European context, therefore, one meaning
of a polycentric policy is to divert some activities away
from "global" cities like London and Paris to "sub-global"
centers like Brussels, Frankfurt, or Milan. But there is also a
very important spatial dimension: while some of these cities are
found in the Central Capitals Region (Brussels, Amsterdam,
Frankfurt, Luxembourg), a much larger number are "gateway"
national political or commercial capitals outside the Central
Capitals Region: these include Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and
Dublin. They serve broad but sometimes thinly-populated
territories such as the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and east
central Europe. Because they are national capitals serving
distinct linguistic groups, they invariably have a level of
service functions larger than would be expected based on size
alone; they tend to be national airport and rail hubs, and the
main centers for national cultural institutions and national
media.
A
major issue is whether it will be necessary or desirable to
concentrate decentralized activity into a limited number of
"regional capitals", each commanding a significant sector of the
European territory
— Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome, Madrid
—
or whether it would be preferable to diffuse down to the level
of the national capital cities, including the smaller national
capitals. Essentially, should Madrid be regarded as the dominant
gateway for southwestern Europe, or should it share this role
with Barcelona, Lisbon, Bilbao, and Seville? Similarly, should
Copenhagen share its role in Scandinavia with Stockholm, Oslo,
and Helsinki? This issue could become particularly important in
central and eastern Europe, where Berlin and Vienna may develop
very important roles, but where there is also a need to reassert
the service roles of the various national capitals, and even
selected provincial capitals (such as Gdansk, Krakow, Pilsen,
and Szeged).
At a finer geographical scale, polycentricity can refer to the
outward diffusion from large cities to smaller cities within
broadly defined geographic regions. We have already noticed that
such a process has occurred on a wide scale around London, which
is now the heart of a system of some 30-40 smaller urban centers
within a 150-kilometer radius, while Paris and Berlin, in
contrast, have less developed urbanized regional systems. At the
next level of the European urban hierarchy, cities like
Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Milan also show widespread outward
diffusion. On the other hand, central and eastern European
cities have had relatively little decentralization effects on
their surrounding regions, though this may change in the future.
In general, at this scale a policy of "deconcentrated
concentration" would suggest adopting the principle of
polycentricity fairly widely, adapting it to the specific
development stages and problems of each city and region.
Specifically, the general principle should be to guide
decentralized growth, wherever possible, on to a few selected
development corridors along strong public transport links,
including high-speed "regional metros" such as those under
construction around Stockholm and Copenhagen, and planned for
London, or even along longer distance regional high-speed train
lines such as London-Ashford, Amsterdam-Antwerp, or
Berlin-Magdeburg. These would not be corridors of continuous
urbanization, but denser concentrations of urban development
located around train stations and key motorway interchanges that
offer exceptionally good accessibility. Some of these sites
could be at considerable distances of up to 150 kilometers from
the central metropolitan city.
In the more remote rural regions, much farther in distance from
the global and sub-global urban centers, the pursuit of
polycentricity must have yet another dimension: to build up the
potential of both "regional capitals" in the 200,000-500,000
population range (Bristol, Bordeaux, Hannover, Ravenna, Zaragoza,
Gdansk, Lublin, Brno), including some smaller national capitals
(Vilnius, Ljubljana) and smaller "county towns" in the
50,000-200,000 range. The main agents will be enhanced
accessibility both by road and high-speed train, coupled with
investments in key higher-level service infrastructure such as
health and education; the systematic enhancement of
environmental quality, re-making many of these cities into model
sustainable cities; and finally the competitive marketing of
such cities as places for capital investment and in-migration.
Again, but on a smaller scale, the growth of such urban centers
could be accompanied by a limited degree of deconcentration to
even smaller rural towns within close proximity.
However, there is potential contradiction in meeting the
European Union’s spatial development policy objectives:
dispersal from large cities into "mega-city-regions", which may
be occurring around several different kinds of city
—
Central Cities (London-South East England, Amsterdam-Delta
Metropolis, Rhine-Ruhr, Rhine-Main), Gateway Cities (Copenhagen-Orestad,
Barcelona-Catalonia) and Provincial Capitals (Stockholm-Malardalen,
Seville-Andalucia)
—
may produce a more polycentric system at the local level but a
less polycentric system and more heavily concentrated urban
hierarchy at a higher, European-wide level.
This impinges particularly on the 10 countries that entered the
European Union in May 2004, and on their urban systems. Most are
small nations, some very small, and they are very strongly
monocentric in their urban hierarchy: their capital cities are
highly dominant both demographically and economically. European
Union membership is likely to accentuate and exaggerate this
quality, as the most dynamic economic sectors grow in the
"gateway" capital cities and as long-delayed economic
adjustments take place, leading to rural-urban migration on the
pattern characteristic of western European countries. Perhaps
only in Poland, by far the largest of the new EU countries, is
this likely to be balanced by growth of larger regional cities
such as Gdansk and Krakow. But in none of these countries, as
yet, does there appear to be a phenomenon of local
polycentricity (the formation of "mega city regions") which is
characteristic of the most densely populated northwestern
European heartland. The nearest candidates for the future may be
the Central Bohemia region around Prague, the Katowice-Krakow
corridor, and the international Vienna-Bratislava-Gyor region.
So far, these tendencies are latent and incipient. Given the
emerging importance of mega-city-regions in terms of the
competitive advantages of economic agglomeration, it will be
vitally important throughout Europe to measure and evaluate
polycentricity, and its accompanying transport systems, on more
than one spatial scale. It is a complex strategy, and its
further elaboration will be an important central part of the new
program for the European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON),
as well as the related Interreg IIIB and IIIC initiatives which
will play a vital complementary role in analyzing the future of
urban development in the European Union.
Sir Peter Hall is Vice Chair of Global Urban Development,
and Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at University College,
London, UK, where he is also a Senior Research Fellow at the
Young Foundation. His many books include The
World Cities, Cities in Civilization, Urban and
Regional Planning, Cities of Tomorrow, Urban
Future 21, Technopoles of the World, and Silicon
Landscapes. Dr. Hall’s article is an adaptation of his
GUD report, produced in 2003, for the European
Union’s ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observation Network)
policy research initiative.
Return to top |
|