The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-city Regions in Europe

Polycentric global metropolitan city regions are geographical units composed of between 10 and 50 cities and towns, physically separate but functionally networked, clustered around one or more central cities and drawing enormous economic strength from a new functional division of labour engaged within a large-scale functional urban region. They are different to global cities. The latter are defined directly or indirectly in terms of their external information exchanges, while the former should be defined in terms of their internal linkages. Thus, big questions emerge: how to conceptualize the transmission of this information along these links?; and how does that transmission impact on the urban nodes that connect them into a network? This book aims to answer these questions.

Metropolitan city regions are the emerging urban form at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In part, they are evidence that face to face functional relations are fundamental to economic and social life, and they cannot be simply replaced by advanced communications systems. This is what explains their levels of “concentrated deconcentration”, i.e. they disperse over the scale of a wide city region but simultaneously re-concentrate at particular nodes within it, limited only by continuing time–distance constraints. Traditional centres still matter, but increasingly they form part of a wider, highly specialized division of labour.

The present book is the product of the POLYNET project, whose aim was to analyze and compare the functioning of eight European metropolitan city regions which, together, constitute the core of what is known as the European pentagon area. These city regions are:

· Southeast England, where London is now the core of a system of about 30–40 centres within a 160 kilometre radius;
· the Randstad in the Netherlands, encompassing Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht, also including Almere;
· Central Belgium, comprising Brussels and a surrounding ring of large and medium-size cities, with a total population of 7.8 million;
· Rhine Ruhr, one of the world’s largest polycentric MCRs, embracing 90 towns and cities with a total population of 12 million;
· the Rhine-Main region in Germany, including the cities of Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Darmstadt, Hanau and Aschaffenburg;
· the EMR of Northern Switzerland, an incipient MCR extending in a discontinuous linear pattern from Zürich in the east to Basel in the west;
· the Paris region, where recent research shows that the region’s economic core is no longer within the historic “Ville de Paris” but, rather, in a “Golden Triangle” bounded by the city’s western arrondissements: La Défense and the suburbs of Boulogne-Billancourt and Issy-les-Moulineaux; and
· Greater Dublin, within a 50–70 kilometre radius around the city, but particularly northward along the Dublin–Belfast corridor, crossing national boundaries.

The book has five parts and two appendices. Part I is the introduction. Part II comprises four chapters, which analyze and quantify polycentric metropolitan city regions and mega-city regions. The topics range from a descriptive overview of the eight regions, to their organization through corporate structures and networks (i.e. the connectivity within the “European heartland”, measuring flows of information, business travel and telecommunication traffic between the eight POLYNET regions and between these and the 25 capital cities of the enlarged European Union), to a spatial mapping of these flows of information. The three chapters in Part III aim to understand actors and networks at the regional level, and ten conclusions are addressed in terms of sustainable regional management. Part IV addresses identities and policies at the regional level. Part V provides conclusions drawn from the comparative study. The most important are:

· the need to tackle the ongoing dichotomy between territorial disparities and territorial cohesions (a problem that mig