ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the institutional and political context and its connection with the relationship between town and countryside and between large and small cities. It argues that the economic success of cities cannot simply be attributed to economies of scale and agglomeration and that power is always involved—up to and including military power. The chapter shows that broader urban imaginaries from at least the Renaissance on amalgamated with imaginaries about the creative, innovative and successful individual. It also shows that product quality, too, was an ideological construction, resulting moreover from a process in which the urban context was implicated. The chapter suggests that the urban imaginary could thus work to the benefit of different power groups—be they artists or artisans, merchants or producers. The expansion of the ancient 'city-state', as in Venice, Florence or Milan, accomplished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, implied the annexation of important urban centres, with a strong cultural, economic and political tradition.
