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In many European cities, railway stations have become urban hubs in which a variety of functions and uses are focused. These include retail, cafés, offices and housing. They are often also complemented by adjacent amenity open space, in both hard and soft landscaping, alongside a broader provision for other modes, such as public transport, walking and cycling. In this sense, large-scale transport hubs resemble small-scale city centres and, like other urban centres, the public space in stations should meet the needs of a wide range of users. The design and management of railway stations is highly complex and the risk of such nodes failing as quality public spaces is significant. In addition, railway stations play a pivotal role in encouraging public transport use and they have the potential to contribute to a modal shift from more polluting transport modes. We argue that the design and management of such spaces is a key variable in the modal choices many travellers make. Based on empirical research across Europe, this paper presents a set of indicators for assessing the quality of railway stations and their adjacent areas and summarizes our research findings to increase the attractiveness of rail journeys through enhanced public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, major planning agendas in Europe steer the future of territorial organization towards an urban polycentric perspective. The accessibility to services of general interest (SGI), a significant source of spatial inequality in Europe, is one of the key challenges to address. However, instruments needed to support the implementation and monitoring of territorial policy measures regarding the distribution of, and accessibility to SGI are still under-developed. Studies generally relate to the (intra)regional and not the national scale. When they do so, they lose local specificity as they often consider the existence/availability of services at a given scale and not the actual capacity to reach their (often just estimated) location through the transport network. In the context of the revision of Portugal's National Plan for Territorial Planning Policies, this paper presents a comprehensive multi-criteria location-based approach for measuring the factual accessibility to a representative range of SGI at the national Portuguese scale. Results are evaluated considering the dichotomy between centrality and periphery, high and low density, and the regional disparities found. High accessibility values do not necessarily mean greater territorial cohesion. Contributions to the development of national planning policies that respond to cohesion challenges are also debated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of cities around the world have taken advantage of their green image of the purpose of place branding. In the research literature, it is suggested that these practices are motivated by place-based competition over financial and social capital, combined with more holistic motives of sustainable urban development. However, although an increasing number of green cities are engaged in place branding, few studies have researched the impact of place branding on environmental policy-making in a city, building up to the question: how is local environmental policy-making affected by green place branding? Addressing this issue, this paper critically investigates how the continuity of local environmental policy-making is affected by place-branding practices. To tackle this task, the paper firstly develops an analytical framework aiming to understand how green cities emerge and become famous based on their policy-making. Secondly, using that framework, this paper present an in-depth case study of a city branding itself as the 'Greenest City in Europe'. Drawing on the growing body of work on green cities, this paper investigates the 'understudied' practice of using policy for the purpose of place branding as well as the impact of place branding 'on the environment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to define a set of smartness and sustainability indicators applicable to European cities and to assess their outcome in an ex ante perspective with regard to the implementation of Europe 2020 strategy. Following the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, State, Impact, Response) model, we select a bundle of indicators for three relevant sustainability domains (environmental, social and cultural), which are proper to the smart city definition. Then we define groups of homogeneous cities for each domain by using a two-step cluster analysis. Results show the existence of heterogeneous groups of cities that are likely to become smart in the cultural domain, side by side with groups of more developed urban areas that have acquired a substantial advantage in the environmental and social dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a couple of decades now revitalization of historic urban quarters has become popular throughout the world especially in many European cities. In some cases the positive transformation of these valuable places has not been achieved. However, there have been some success stories. The aim of this paper is to question the background of these differences and try to reach a proposal of a model for the determination of the most appropriate strategic approach for their revitalization. The method, which is employed in this paper, rests upon a thorough literature survey, which has conveyed an understanding of the revitalization rationale. The validity of the proposed model has been examined on many different examples of revitalization projects in European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second-tier cities have been experiencing renewed interest within policy and research contexts, which is reversing a tradition of relative neglect due to the long-standing focus on large cities and capitals. This paper compares European second-tier and first-tier cities with regard to the presence of urban functions and how these are spread over their urban regions. The analysis shows the existence of a substantial ‘first city bonus’: a surplus of urban functions in first-tier cities which cannot be explained by their size or network embeddedness. We also show that second-tier cities are better served with urban functions in the absence of a dominant capital. In first-tier urban regions, the core municipality exploits the critical mass of the urban region to support its own functions, leaving that region functionally underserved. Second-tier cities lack this absorptive capacity, and their urban regions are endowed with more urban functions. These functional differences mean that second-tier cities demand a differentiated research and policy approach, in which city-regional integration becomes an important territorial development strategy. Rather than the dispersion process in first-tier cities leading to a ‘regionalization of the city’, integration in second-tier urban regions may be seen as a process of ‘citification of the region’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a land-use change analysis of five Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We utilize CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land-Cover and Urban Audit data for two distinct time periods: 1990–2000 and 2000–2006 aggregated at urban, suburban and non-metropolitan geographies. The literature on post-socialist cities suggests that urbanization rates and patterns in the post-socialist period are quite variable and divergent, both “inter”nationally and “intra”-nationally, and we expect to find both spatial and temporal differences. We compare and contrast urbanization patterns at the national scale, using cities and their functional urban regions as the unit of comparative analysis. Our results show that unlike other eastern European countries, metropolitan areas in the former German Democratic Republic began sprawling (defined as a decline in urban density) in the 1990s. Similar changes only became visible in other CEE countries later during the 2000s. We also demonstrate that larger cities which were better connected to the political elite and more economically integrated with global investment patterns experienced more extensive urban sprawl than their smaller and mid-sized counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 15 years, empirical evidence has emerged about the fact that European first-rank cities have not always led national economic performance, and when they did, the difference between first- and second-rank cities in explaining national growth has not been significant. A recent work [Dijkstra, L., Garcilazo, E. & McCann, P. (2013) The economic performance of European cities and city regions: Myths and realities, European Planning Studies,21(3), pp. 334–354] claims that second-rank cities have in fact outperformed first-rank cities, becoming the main driving forces in national economic performance. In the debate that emphasizes the role of second-rank cities in national growth, a simplified view of the role of agglomeration economies is provided; they are taken for granted in small- and medium-sized cities and only in large cities will the problem of a downturn in urban returns to scale emerge. In this paper, a more complex view is assumed, claiming that the oversimplified interpretation that urban economic performance simply depends on the exploitation of agglomeration economies and that these agglomeration economies merely depend on urban size alone should be abandoned. Some already existing theoretical frameworks in urban economics can help in recalling the role of possible bifurcations in the development path of cities, linked to the capability to attract or develop new and higher-order functions, increase internal efficiency and reach scale economies through cooperation networks with other cities (the city-network theory). All these elements work as conditions for fully exploiting agglomeration economies and ways to overcome urban decreasing returns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increased policy interest in geographical mobility necessitates a fuller understanding of the uneven spatial patterning of migration in Europe. This paper reports on research exploring the experience of cities and regions in respect of migration, and the socio-economic factors associated with disparities in net migration across sub-national areas. This involved modelling the relationship between net migration over the period 2001-2006 and the underlying socio-economic circumstances across European cities and regions, and generating an area typology that captured variable experiences with regard to migration. The results of multivariate analysis suggest that urban areas are more likely than other types of areas to have net in-migration levels which exceed those expected given their socio-economic characteristics, both for places with flourishing economies and unmet demand for labour as well as those whose economic fortunes are less buoyant. The results also suggest that the experience of cities and regions is polarized, with large urban areas featuring prominently among the best and worst performing areas in respect of net in-migration. The potential implication of this complex pattern is that bespoke, rather than blanket, policy interventions are required to address the variable experiences of cities and regions in relation to migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern cities in the open European space-economy are powerhouses of creative ideas, smart technologies, sustainable developments and socio-economic wealth. They play a pivotal role in the future of an urbanized Europe, but they are also confronted with grand challenges, notably far-reaching demographic transformations, environmental decay and climatological change, unequal social participation and ever-rising mobility trends. The challenges for urban environments may be turned into new opportunities, in particular, in such domains as advanced infrastructure and logistic systems, environmental and climate-neutral facilities, creative and knowledge-intensive strategies for socio-economic prosperity and well-being. Cities—and in particular metropolitan areas—may thus act as spearheads of sustainable economic growth for European countries. These observations call for appropriate long-range policy strategies for metropolitan areas—and networks of cities—in the highly diversified European space-economy. Such policy actions would need to be supported by solid, multidisciplinary and evidence-based research on the challenges and opportunities of urban environments in Europe. The main contribution of this paper lies in the systematic strategic approach to transform urban megatrends and challenges into research and policy concerns for Europe. The analytical framework employed to highlight and better understand such research and policy response in Europe from a typological perspective is built around four interconnected pillars (cornerstones) that form the focal points for identifying strategic future images that may be instrumental in mapping out the research and policy challenges for the “New Urban Europe”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys transnational city networks for sustainability to determine the substance of their work and the potentials for more efficient and successful implementation of sustainable development through networking. It also analyses the challenges and limits of sustainability-oriented networking, taking into account issues such as network organization, priorities, strategies, and communication methods as factors for success. A wide breadth of goals and means characterizes sustainability networks although most are organized and maintained in a very similar fashion. The large gap existing between regions active in networking and others and the fact smaller, more regionally-oriented cities play a dominant role in sustainability-related networks demonstrate the latent potential of such networking and the unique dynamics at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]