ABSTRACT
Not long ago, this journal published a special issue on the future of European Cities (Volume 1, issue 3, 2008). It described how the pessimism about the future of cities in the 1970s and 1980s shifted to a more optimistic state of mind in the 1990s and from there it examined some of the expected future trends for the twenty-first century. The ‘collective deprivation’ of the 1970s and 1980s as Hall (1981) put it was followed in the 1990s by a vision where the main aim of urban policies was not only to find new economic bases for those former industrialized cities but to adapt their very urban spaces to global changes and thus to turn cities themselves, no matter their size, into engines of regional economic growth. The collapse of the financial markets in the summer of 2007 froze the growth of urban dynamics of the previous 10 years, which were already beginning to show, on severe symptoms of exhaustion accompanied by a worrying emergence of social conflicts. That issue on the future of urban cities launched in 2008 seemed then to be more appropriate than ever. At the same time and focusing on Europe, its editorial drew the attention to urban trends in the European Union as stated in the 2007 State of European Cities Report. They were widely analysed there (Atkinson 2008), but it is interesting for the purposes of the current issue to note how Spanish and Portuguese dynamics were depicted in that report. Both Spain and Portugal belong to the Southern Europe Large Urban Zone (LUZ) together with Italy, Greece and Cyprus. Analysing the 1995–2000 trends, the report showed that Southern Europe cities grew strongly and said the following on Spain and Portugal:
Spanish cities in particular witnessed strong population growth, at rates far above the average for Spain as a whole. Immigration as well as natural population increase has been driving this population growth. Similarly, Portuguese cities have experienced high levels of foreign immigration, particularly from Portuguese-speaking Africa, Brazil and Eastern Europe. A distinctly different picture emerges for Italy, where population stagnation was the dominant demographic characteristic in Urban Audit cities between 1996 and 2001. (Commission of the European Communities (CEC) 2007, p. iv)
