Centralitet och periferi i det nya Europa : Städer som regionala nav i samarbete och konkurrens

Sammanfattning: European cities of today are under the challenge to find ways to stay competitive and flourish in a rapidly changing world, where the old patterns of centrality and periphery not necessarily holds true. New and improved communication networks, a changed political geography in Europe, and the globalisation of not only the financial and industrial markets but also to a certain extent the globalisation of people, have all led to great challenges for cities and regions. In a changed spatial reality the classic monocentric models are challenged by newer models of urbanisation. The polycentric urban region is one such model which has been used to describe urban regions like the Randstad in the Netherlands and the Rhein-Ruhr region in Germany. Regions which lack the single dominant central city of the monocentric models of old, and instead shows a high degree of more equal-sized and sometimes more specialised cities in regional cooperation. The polycentric urban region is in that aspect a possible model for how other urbanised regions in Europe may act to be able to position themselves as attractive urban regions and regional hubs in the European urban network. Polycentric urban regions are not a universal solution, though. For such regions to work there are a number of prerequisites to be filled, something that makes it a possible future for regions like Haute-Normandie in France, where the two cities of Le Havre and Rouen have the possibility to form one urban region and already show signs of heading in that direction, while a region like Dolnośląskie in Poland – where the city of Wrocław is the dominant city in what makes for a more classic monocentric region – has much less opportunity to use a polycentric strategy on the regional level to become competitive. On the other hand such a city and region can instead benefit from the fact that Poland is to a high degree a polycentric nation, and as one of the larger cities in such an environment, Wrocław has the opportunity to position itself as a hub in the European urban network in a way that Le Havre and Rouen cannot, due to their physical location close to the giant European urban region of Paris.