Date : 2016
Editeur / Publisher : Berlin : Springer , 2016, cop. 2016
Type : Livre / Book
Langue / Language : anglais / English
Politique urbaine -- Mélanges et hommages
Urbanisme durable -- Mélanges et hommages
Villes -- Effets des innovations technologiques -- Mélanges et hommages
Urbanisme -- Aspect social -- Mélanges et hommages
Résumé / Abstract : This special issue of the Annals of Regional Science contains a selection of advanced contributions to a better understanding of the complex nature of city systems, seen from a multi-faceted and varied strategic perspective. A modern city appears to be a complex multi-actor organism that is driven by a multidimensional behavioural and policy force field. Urban economics has—based mainly on a market perspective—made a respectable attempt to come to grips with such forces from an economic-analytical perspective, but such analyses are hampered by serious limitations, so that urban-economic studies have either no general validity for different agglomerations in the world or lack concrete policy handles in a given situation. Alternatively, in another and more policy-oriented context serious contributions and arguments have been put forward to study the evolution of cities on the basis of ‘command and control’ measures which may include economic, land-use, social and architectural ingredients, but which regard the city as principally makeable. Clearly, in between a market and a planning perspective on the future of our cities, we may find a series of cognitive frameworks that aim at offering a proper understanding of urban evolution. The present special issue does not take more a paradigmatic viewpoint, but aims to offer a panorama of important contributions to an enhanced understanding of the complex evolution of the urban ’organisms’. They are all original in nature and may be seen as novel studies on pathways for exploring the ‘New Urban World’. The special issue opens with an important contribution of Roberto Camagni, in which he argues that one of the main problems today in urban development is that of finding the necessary financial resources at a time of profound crisis of public, national and local finances. Therefore, a more balanced distribution of the surplus values of urban transformation between public and private sectors, in favour of the former, a since qua non. This is also advocated by a number of large international bodies and leading research centres. Whilst in the short run this may seem like a simple zero-sum game for the distribution of a given and fixed amount of resources, in the longer run the situation may turn into a virtuous, win-win situation, because a renewed, modernised, and more vibrant urban system might become the driver of renewed worldwide socio-economic development..