ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with three additional cities in Germany, Switzerland and Spain – three federalist countries, where the political and cultural context varies considerably from one region to the other. Chapter 2 has extensively introduced our six core cities. Here we add four additional cities, one each from Germany and Switzerland, and two from Spain. For Germany, the crucial regional distinction today is the one between East and West. Among our core cities, we have included Mannheim – a city from the West. In this chapter, we introduce Chemnitz – a city which is in many ways comparable to Mannheim, but which is situated in the Eastern part of Germany. For Switzerland, we add the capital of the largest Frenchspeaking canton to our core city of Berne, which is the capital of an equally large Swiss German-speaking canton. In the case of Spain, the city of Sabadell will be compared with two other cities that represent contrasting sociopolitical contexts: Alcalá de Henares in the region of Madrid, and Bilbao in the Basque Country1.
