ABSTRACT
Medieval Europe was characterized by geopolitical disorder and territorial disunion. Around 1500 AD, as the modern era dawned, Europe comprised some 1,500 districts which were largely politically independent. Gradually, medium sized territories emerged around cores made up of cultural, economic, and political centres. The Lake Malar area in Sweden was such a territory; London, Paris, Berlin-Potsdam, Vienna, and Moscow formed the cores of others. The Spanish born sociologist Manuel Castells, who works in the USA, has described the increasing transnational mobility in peculiarly drastic terms, coining the phrase ‘from a space of locations to a space of flows’. The ensuing presentation of the European urban landscape is coloured by the idea that contacts, the processing of information, and the building of new knowledge form powerful driving forces in European social evolution. The western part of Europe was moulded by repeated migrations, by Medieval urban development, and by the tenets and styles of the Renaissance.
