ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century will be metropolitan. In the ongoing globalisation of economic, social and cultural processes, metropolitan areas play the role of nodal points where human activities concentrate. They have entered a global competition and hierarchisation, and thereby participate in the making and the shaping of a global order of centrality. This has also led to internal change within metropolitan areas, notably to the transformation of the relationships between traditional core-cities and their surrounding territory. Assessing these dual exterior and interior dynamics, four elements have been put forward to characterise contemporary metropolitan areas across the world: (1) urban sprawl has broken up the historic boundaries of the city, extending on the surrounding rural space by waves of suburbanisation; (2) functional specialisation of space has intensified social segregation, that is, homogeneity of luxury residential areas, distressed neighbourhoods, single purpose zones etc. has grown simultaneously; (3) spatial mobility of persons and goods has become the lifeblood of the metropolitan system of economic production and social reproduction; (4) cosmopolitan localism has become the organising principle of metropolitan politics and culture, where global endowments are considered necessary to international competitiveness, but must be rooted in local culture in order to be socially and politically acceptable.1
