FOCI Future Orientation for Cities
Résumé
Interest in cities is growing again in Europe. Theories of "growth poles" forgotten since the 1960s re-emerge, although in different form, without the idea of building new cities in the desert. Metropolitanisation, although sometimes difficult to grasp empirically, is recognized as a post-fordist phenomena, with a gain of the importance of large cities, linked to the increasing need for size-based agglomeration effect in the global, networked knowledge economy. And European policy makers are once again discussing the need of and the form for new urban policies at European (as witnessed by the above quote), but also at national scale. From the outset, this project has had two, complementary, but not always easily reconcilable orientations: provide a broad overview of the current and future issues relevant to urban development in all of Europe, advance scientifically beyond the established and well-known data and analyses, provide innovative research. As this report was elaborated in parallel to the new State of European Cities report to be published by DG Regio, we also aimed at complementarity with that report, not wanting to repeat the same analyses based on the same data. In this project, we, therefore, worked in three parallel strands. First, all teams went through the current literature to extract the knowledge about trends, perspectives and, most importantly, driving forces for urban development in their thematic fields. Second, each of the teams focused on one or two innovative empirical research questions, generally tapping new data sources. Finally, our scenario team has taken the work of the other teams, and substantially augmented it through additional literature review, aiming at covering an even larger horizon and to provide a complete knowledge base on urban development, necessary for integrated prospective thinking. On this basis the scenarios were developed. The structure of the report reflects these three strands, adding a fourth, new strand, which consists in an assessment of the current national policy visions on urban issues across Europe. Details of all the literature reviews and analyses are presented in the scientific report.
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