European Regional Science Association
|
European Regional Science Association
|
|
|
|
|
The abstract for paper number 447:
Lise Bourdeau-Lepage, Jean-Marie Huriot, LATEC/MSH, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon-Cedex, France
Metropolization in Enlarged Europe
All around the world, metropolises take more and more economic importance on international scene because they concentrate high-order services such as research, innovation, finance and producer services, information and communication, decision and control. These services fulfil essentially coordination functions in relation to production and commercial activities conducted at a global scale. Four points must be emphasized. First, these high-order services have developed recently and rapidly in connection with the rise of information technologies and with the development of globalization which accompany the emergence of the post-industrial economy. Second, these activities are quasi-exclusively concentrated in metropolises, so that their presence is a criterion of metropolization. Third, inside metropolises they are strongly agglomerated in the city-centers despite their new tendency to deconcentrate in a small number of specialized peripheral poles. This agglomeration determines a new specialization of the city-centers, especially marked in metropolises. Fourth, the coordination functions of these services connect metropolises to one another, so as to form global networks of metropolises. The Economy of Western Europe is dominated by a small number of such metropolises, with Paris and London at the top of the hierarchy. In the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) which are candidates to the entry in the European Union, the major cities are changing rapidly. These new market economies generate new activities, extension of markets, increasing external interactions requiring more coordination and therefore more high-order services which contribute to transform the economy of major cities. It is worth wondering if these cities are becoming metropolises comparable to western metropolises and if they will enter in the network of European dominating cities. The success of their future entry in European Union depends largely on these urban transformations. First elements of response are given by BOURDEAU-LEPAGE (Revue d'Economie Régionale et Urbaine, 2002) and by BOURDEAU-LEPAGE and HURIOT (Canadian Review of Regional Science, 2002) in the case of Warsaw. Since the transition period, services, and particularly high-order services, grew more rapidly in Poland than in EU countries, as if a catching-up process took place. A large part of these services are located in downtown Warsaw. Despite these important internal changes, Warsaw seems to be still at the margin of the European metropolis network. However, the expectations are rather favourable. The idea of the present paper is to extend this analysis to other major cities of the CEEC. We retain only cities with more than one million inhabitants: Bucharest, Budapest, Prague, Sofia and Warsaw, which are also capitals of their countries. The analysis will be carried in two main directions. First, we will determine the presence and the degree of concentration of high-order services in these cities; second, we will estimate the intensity of their mutual interactions and of their interactions with Western Europe metropolises, notably through air traffic. This analysis should permit to characterize the form of the new urban system emerging in enlarged Europe. In particular, it should determine if CEEC major cities will be really integrated in the European metropolitan network or if they will only become independent satellites of western metropolises.
This project is part of a large research program concerning the new forms of urban growth carried in the LATEC in Dijon, with the support of the Bourgogne Regional Council and of the French Ministry of Equipment.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.