A new 21st century urban phenomenon is emerging: the networked polycentric mega-city region. Developed around one or more cities of global status, it is characterized by a cluster of cities and towns, physically separate but intensively networked in a complex spatial division of labour. This book describes and analyses eight such regions in North West Europe. For the first time, this work shows how businesses interrelate and communicate in geographical space - within each region, between them, and with the wider world. It goes on to demonstrate the profound consequences for spatial planning and regional development in Europe - and, by implication, other similar urban regions of the world. The Polycentric Metropolis introduces the concept of a mega-city region, analyses its characteristics, examines the issues surrounding regional identities, and discusses policy ramifications and outcomes for infrastructure, transport systems and regulation. Packed with high quality maps, case study data and written in a clear style by highly experienced authors, this will be an insightful and significant analysis suitable for professionals in urban planning and policy, environmental consultancies, business and investment communities, technical libraries, and students in urban studies, geography, economics and town/spatial planning.

The aim of this book is to look at the dominant representations that at present underpin the issues of territorial organisation and planning in Europe. Cities and networks are often envisaged as inevitably driving territorial development. However, the conceptualisation of European territorial integration has often been reduced to two conventional models: the centre-periphery model and the hierarchical model of urban networks. Limiting territorial integration to these two schema means that integration is limited. Today, reference to polycentric territorial development has to some extent changed the picture. Rather than being viewed in a polarised, pyramidal manner, spatial dynamics are being read in terms of interconnection and reticulation. In addition, reflection on the subject of polycentric territorial strategies has encouraged politicians and spatial planners to include the principle of “territorial cohesion” in the priorities of European public policies. From considerations which associate conceptual approaches and analytical studies, this book makes it possible to understand in what manner polycentrism, viewed as an alternative to metropolisation, could sow the seeds for new readings, at various scales, of the organisation of European territory.

Analyses European Union governance from the perspective of polycentric theory, aimed at improvements in achieving individual self-governance.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Rethinking the ways global history is envisioned and conceptualized in diverse countries such as China, Japan, Mexico or Spain, this collections considers how global issues are connected with our local and national communities. It examines how the discipline had evolved in various historiographies, from Anglo Saxon to southern European, and its emergence in Asia with the rapid development of the Chinese economy motivation to legitimate the current uniqueness of the history and economy of the nation. It contributes to the revitalization of the field of global history in Chinese historiography, which have been dominated by national narratives and promotes a debate to open new venues in which important features such as scholarly mobility, diversity and internationalization are firmly rooted, putting aside national specificities. Dealing with new approaches on the use of empirical data by framing the proper questions and hypotheses and connecting western and eastern sources, this text opens a new forum of discussion on how global history has penetrated in western and eastern historiographies, moving the pivotal axis of analysis from national perspectives to open new venues of global history.

Metropolitan areas concentrate the main share of population, production and consumption in OECD countries. They are likely to be one of the most important units for economic, social and environmental analysis as well as for the development of policy strategies. However, one of the main problems that occur when adopting metropolitan areas as units of analysis and policy in European countries is the absence of widely accepted standards for identifying them. This severe problem hinders comparative research between European countries using metropolitan areas as units of analysis. In this text we defend the necessity of a methodology to identify metropolitan areas in Europe. This methodology should fulfil three requisites: first, to be useful for analysis and planning, which requires to represent in a realistic way economic, social and environmental phenomena; second, to be applicable to all the European countries; and third, to be flexible enough to deal with the existence of different administrative and territorial structures across countries as well as to take into account that many metropolitan areas, particularly the largest ones, are polycentric. The aim of this paper is to identify metropolitan areas in Spain and Italy using similar methodologies and to evaluate their application to other European countries. The results allow comparing the metropolitan realities of these countries as well as providing the metropolitan units that can be used in subsequent comparative researches. Two methodologies are proposed: the Cheshire-GEMACA methodology (FUR) and an iterative version of the USA-MSA algorithm, particularly adapted to deal with polycentric metropolitan areas. Both methods show a good approximation to the metropolitan reality and produce very similar results: 75 FUR and 67 DMA in Spain (75% of total population and employment), and 81 FUR and 86 DMA in Italy (70% of total population and employment).