ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a particular approach to the study of urban policy. It provides the general outlines of an ‘agenda’ of research aimed at studying and quantifying, with the appropriate indicators. Ensuring a high level of access to the functions of ‘superior’ urban services that produce the city effect, which no modern citizen is prepared to give up. The knowledge of constraints in each of the two policies is often lacking, that is, of the conditions which have to be respected for the feasibility of a strategy such as that indicated. These constraints must be the object of study, research and experiment. In particular, necessary cognitive instruments may, it seems, be treated and developed in the framework of a traditional approach to urban and regional planning: as instruments to promote the city and its regional basin as local interactive networks. Another essential component for the territorial delimitation of centrality is the existence of a mix of fundamental spatial functions.
