Systemic City Interdependencies In Advanced Producer Services: The European Space In Transition

The paper reports on an analysis of systemic city interdependencies generated by key agents in world economic transformations - global advanced producer services (APS) which use world/global cities as nodes for flows in their worldwide operational networks. The analysis draws on and develops work undertaken in a major study funded by the European Spatial Observation Network (ESPON) which set out to examine Europe’s position in the networked global economy and the implications for policy: TIGER - Territorial Impact of Globalization for Europe and its Regions.

Europe provides a unique contemporary territorial frame through which to observe the success of policy transfer and upscaling relevant to sustainable cities in globalization.  EU urban and regional cooperation programmes and funding has been a major strand of cohesion strategy for over a decade, moreover European geo-political rescaling in successive waves of enlargement has extended policy collaboration to an ambitious supra-state / regional level.

The authors identify two intersecting spatial processes in European APS-generated city interdependencies: A process of intensifying city-network links and functional specialization at a macro-region scale; and a process of extending city links and scale specialization connecting urban Europe to distant economic macro-regions. The interaction between these two processes points to the complex nature of city interdependencies in economic globalization and a need to de-territorialize urban sustainability prescriptions.