ABSTRACT
Europe is a diversified territory made of towns, cities, agglomerations, conurbations and regional networks. The very notion of a ‘European city’ might seem obsolete with respect to the kaleidoscopic and undef ined urban structure of Europe. The fuzzy boundaries of urban areas in the EU have been politically defined, and statistically homogenised in the past decades in order to set the stage for a common European urban policy framework. The past programmes of urban restructuring and regional growth (URBAN I-II, TEN-T etc.) have been largely tailored to a clear identification of a European urban-regional network made of nodes and corridors. The European city has no particular perimeter or recognisable morphological physiognomy. What characterises the European city is a way of governing, a particular form of governability, a tradition of policymaking and a multi-scalar organisation of governance. It is not a spatial character per se. The main problem of today’s urban policies is the misconception, certainly inherited from two decades of urban policymaking, that ‘urban’ is synonymous with ‘city’, and that an urban policy is a policy that targets to the ‘city’. Urbanity is not exclusively a feature of what we imagine as fully fledged cities. Today’s urban areas are instead increasingly characterised by polycentric organisation of functional and lived space, which often combines historically consolidated cores with emerging postmodern zones of social and economic dynamism.
