ABSTRACT
A long history of territorial fragmentation, division of the country and its capital Berlin during the Cold War, and the decentralized federal organization of political power have all contributed to the development of a polycentric urban system in Germany. This is characterized by complementary functional and sectoral specialization (Blotevogel, 2000): metropolitan functions are distributed across a series of mid-sized and large cities and city-regions, none of which has achieved dominance as a primate city (BBR, 2005, pp177–190). As a consequence, clusters of advanced producer services (APS) – the subject of the urban analysis presented here – can be found in varying constellations in the core cities of all major metropolitan regions and in other urban centres (Krätke, 2004a).
