Giuseppe Dematteis

Polycentric urban regions in the Alpine space

This paper examines the urban structure of the Alpine region and the surrounding lowland belt from the perspective of applying the Lisbon and Gothenburg strategies to the urban and regional development of the region. Throughout history the central position of the Alps in Europe has favored the formation of a polycentric urban structure which, from the functional and political-administrative point of view, can be divided into three large zones: an inner core with a more specifically Alpine identity, a border belt whose towns depend mainly on contiguous outside urbanization, and a metropolitan outer belt where we find some major European cities. The paper argues that to achieve a relatively autonomous development the cities of the Alpine core must participate in the global knowledge economy and at the same time draw on the specific resources (natural, historical-cultural, cognitive and institutional) of the Alpine territory. Taking into account the already existing geographic conditions, the transportation network, functional gravitations and cooperation networks, it is argued that this goal can be achieved by a small number of large cross-border potential polycentric urban regions networking the cities of the Alpine core with the metropolises of the foreland.

Globalisation and regional integration: the case of the Italian urban system

A recent study on the European integration of the Italian urban system shows that globalisation processes do not necessarily separate cities from their regional networks. The most successful cases of recent urban development in Italy are associated with the formation of metropolitan networked regions in which a major metropolitan centre is linked with cities of a lower level by hierarchical, complementary and synergetic relations. The paper examines the result of an analysis carried out on 148 major Italian daily urban systems. It takes into account two sets of indicators: one referring to the supraregional network interactions, measuring the degree of globalisation, and one referring to the proximity interactions inside the regional networks, measuring the degree of regional cohesion. They allow the definition of typologies of urban systems founded on a (normally positive) correlation between supraregional functional openness and regional integration.