High-level consumer services in polycentric urban regions - hospital care and higher education between duplication and complementarity

In many European countries, territorial development strategies identify the development potential of so-called polycentric urban regions: regions in which a multitude of more or less similar-sized, formerly independent and distinct cities are located close to each other and among which functional relationships seem to be on the increase. Often, such polycentric urban regions are referred to using metaphors as city networks or urban networks. Well-known examples are the Randstad and Brabantstad in the Netherlands and the Flemish Diamond in Belgium. Taken together, the cities of such a region would provide for more critical mass and more agglomeration economies so that the region can compete on a higher level. In order to exploit the potentialities of such regions, often co-operation links have been forged between the cities. From a geographical perspective, applying the network metaphor to such a regional collection of cities seems only appropriate when the regional spatial structure corresponds to what has been labelled as the ‘Network Model’ (Batten, 1995; Van der Knaap, 2002). It could be argued that the presence of a networked spatial structure is necessary for a polycentric urban region to be more than just a collection of cities. One of the defining characteristics of the network model is that the cities, or the activities and places within them, should complement each other. The paper addresses this issue of complementarity in polycentric urban regions, focussing on the regional structure of urban facilities such as hospital care, higher education and the cultural sector in Dutch polycentric urban regions. The paper will demonstrate how spatially relevant decisions taken within these micro-sectors alter, on a macro-level, the spatial structure of the polycentric urban region. The question is whether these lead to less duplication and, through differentiation, to a higher extent of complementarity. In other words, are polycentric urban regions as the Randstad turning into urban networks?

Polycentric Development to Combat Regional Disparities? the Relation Between Polycentricity and Regional Disparities in European Countries

Trends in regional disparities have been a major issue in regional science for many decades and knowledge of ways to overcome such disparities has great importance for regional policy-making. Strong initial differences between regions affect the capacity of each region to grow and their ability to respond to challenges imposed externally, for instance globalisation and growing international competition and trade (Cuadrado-Roura, 2001). Initial differences can relate to a wide variety of factors, for instance the availability of human resources, the accessibility of a region and the presence of advanced production services. A factor that gets increasing attention is the city system. Flourishing regions can often count on a large, well-accessible and internationally known city or regional clusters of cities. Concentration of support to dynamic growth poles would be an engine for growth of the whole country (or regions) through regional spillovers (Perroux 1955 and Kaldor 1970) Particularly also in regional and spatial policies addressing regional disparities attention is paid to the city system. It has been suggested that polycentric development can be instrumental to reducing regional disparities, see for instance in the European Spatial Development Perspective (CEC, 1999) and the Second Cohesion Report (CEC, 2001). In the Third Cohesion Report the main emphasis is territorial cohesion, which is placed on an equal footing as economic and social cohesion in the (unratified) Constitutional Treaty. Within the discussion on territorial cohesion polycentricity gets much emphasis (Faludi, 2005). Also many European countries pursue a polycentric development, often addressing the dominance of their prime city to diminish regional disparities. Apparently, policy makers assume a strong relationship between the urban system and the persistence of regional disparities. However, this assumption lacks empirical justification. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that a polycentric city system leads to less regional disparities. The paper presents measures of the extent of polycentricity of the national urban systems of 26 European countries. This data is linked with calculations of regional disparities within these 26 countries. Are countries with a relatively polycentric urban system characterised by less regional disparities than more monocentric countries? And, what are the consequences of our findings for regional development policies?

Synergy in Polycentric Urban Regions:

In understanding and explaining the functioning of cities, contemporary urban and regional studies attribute great significance to relationships between cities. This book focuses on relationships between cities in polycentric urban regions (PURs), which are regions containing proximate but distinct cities that are rather similar in size. This book explores whether there are synergies between cities in PURs. In doing so, several widespread assumptions with respect to PURs are questioned. Do cities constituting a PUR increasingly complement each other? Does a PUR provide a similar critical mass for supporting amenities as a monocentric city region? Does a network model of spatial organisation describe the spatial-functional structure of PURs more accurately than a central place model? The author develops theories on synergy in PURs and clarifies related concepts such as complementarity, regional organising capacity and critical mass. Drawing on empirical evidence from PURs in North West Europe, particularly the Randstad, it appears that PURs are often far from being more than the sum of the parts

Spatial Structure and Productivity in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Recent concepts as megaregions and polycentric urban regions emphasize that external economies are not confined to a single urban core, but shared among a collection of close-by and linked cities. However, empirical analyses of agglomeration and agglomeration externalities so-far neglects the multicentric spatial organization of agglomeration and the possibility of ‘sharing’ or ‘borrowing’ of size between cities. This paper takes up this empirical challenge by analyzing how different spatial structures, in particular the monocentricity – polycentricity dimension, affect the economic performance of U.S. metropolitan areas. OLS and 2SLS models explaining labor productivity show t

The cities we need: Towards an urbanism guided by human needs satisfaction

This article proposes moving beyond the tyranny of economic imperatives towards a human needs-based framework to assess cities and envision their development. Existing calls for such a transition lack a foundation able to capture the various dimensions of human life in cities, which can be provided by the concept of human needs. We ask whether cities deliver satisfiers that make them good places to cater for the full range of human needs in a similar way to how they cater for economic needs. The article develops a framework that allows us to address that question. We show how the main debates in human needs theory are illustrated by urban phenomena, and search for a human needs model which is able to advance those debates and tackle the problem specifically in cities. Then we highlight the specifically urban aspects of needs satisfaction processes and construct a table of indicators to assess how cities fare in that respect, ensuring global comparability as to whether, as well as local contextualisation as to how, needs are satisfied

Closing the Gap: Territorial Cohesion through Polycentric Development

This article discusses and analyses national polycentric development policies aiming at cohesion. Due to its insertion in the 1999 European Spatial Development Perspective ‘polycentricity’ has become an important concept in discussions on Europe’s territorial and economic development. Its content remains however rather unclear. This paper contributes to the discussion on the meaning of polycentricity by looking at national polycentric development policies. These policies can be distinguished according to two types of disparities, or gaps, which they try to bridge. The first concerns the gap between different levels of the national urban hierarchy, the most common being the gap between a primate capital city and the next category of cities. The second gap is the one between cities located in regions with diverging rates of socio-economic development. On the basis of a conceptual and quantitative discussion of these gaps a basic definition is presented of what polycentric development policies are about: policies that address the distribution of economic and/or economically relevant functions over the urban system in such a way that the urban hierarchy is flattened in a territorially balanced way. A discussion of the polycentric development policies of France, Poland and Germany illustrates our findings. The article concludes that for the period 2007-2013 – the new EU budget period – a clear synergy is needed between EU and national policies and that without such synergy policies cannot be effective

The evolution of the systems of cities literature since 1995 : schools of thought and their interaction

This work was funded through a VIDI grant (452-14-004) provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).The study of relations between cities has long been a major focus in urban research. For decades, this field has grown integrating contributions from many disciplines. But today, the field appears rather fragmented. This study analyses the body of literature that has developed over the last 23 years to identify schools of thought on interurban relationships and to see to what extent these interact with each other. It does so by innovatively employing bibliometric analysis to the study of systems of cities, which allows a bottom-up identification of five schools of thought: one predominantly focusing on the regional or intra-metropolitan scale and centred on concepts of polycentricity; one addressing the global scale with a focus on world city networks; one employing simulation and complexity theories to understand behaviour of agents building the urban system bottom-up; one rooted in (new) economic geography and focusing on growth and decline in the urban system; and, one seeking regularities with respect to city size distributions. The conceptual, methodological and empirical aspects of these different schools are discussed by means of a ‘semantic map’ derived from the vocabulary of titles and abstracts of papers. The coupling of the semantic map with the citation networks of these schools of thought confirms the increasing fragmentation of the field over the last decades. However, in the most recent years, the different schools of thought start to interact slightly more. The desirability and feasibility of a move from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity in urban systems research needs further exploration.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Does broadband internet allow cities to ‘borrow size’? Evidence from the Swedish labour market

Funding: VIDI grant no. 452-14-004, provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).Borrowed size refers to the idea that small cities nearby larger metropolitan centres are able to reap the advantages of large agglomerations, without the agglomeration costs. This study explores whether broadband internet helps such smaller cities to enjoy the labour market benefits of a larger city. Using Swedish micro-data from 2007-2015, together with unique data on broadband, we find suggestive evidence that broadband allows smaller cities to reap such benefits indeed. We find that borrowed size is primarily driven by the overall penetration of broadband in the place of residence, rather than by broadband availability at the residence.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe