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This paper reappraises the two papers of Manuel Castells published in this journal in 1993 and 2002. This appraisal considers the context of his academic career and formidable body of work, the historical period in which the papers appeared and the general discussion on the transformation of cities and societies in academia. Although his legacy is now strongly coloured by Castells' later shift to information and communication, his contributions to cities should not be neglected. Commonalities and differences between the two papers at issue here are summarised. Despite shifts in personal positions of the author and socio‐economic positions of the studied cities, commonalities largely prevail. Their footprint in the academic literature is indicated by a discussion of cities and the world economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of both internal and external co‐inventor networks in regional diversification. The impact of co‐inventor networks on regional technological diversification is tested for a data set containing 1,495,699 patents in 643 technologies in 290 European regions at the NUTS‐2 level, between 1987 and 2016. Our results show that both internal co‐inventor network connectivity and external co‐inventor network linkages could benefit regional technology entry and prevent regional technology exit. However, too inwardly oriented or outwardly connected co‐inventor networks would hamper patent production. Regarding regional diversification, we find that both internal and external co‐inventor networks could facilitate the entry of related technologies and restrain the exit of complex technologies. This paper contributes to the literature by initiating the integration of the complexity dimension into analysing the role of co‐inventor networks in regional diversification. This research bears significant policy implications for the advancement of Smart Specialization Strategy in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to the understanding of socio-spatial trends and urban systems in Europe, with a specific focus on smaller settlements. First, a morphological delimitation of urban settlements as geographical base is used to identify the different settlement structures that characterise regions across Europe. Secondly, an analysis of population and GDP performances of NUTS 3 regions for the 29 countries of the European space (growth rates in 2001-2011) provides evidence of the variety of territorial phenomena that characterise smaller-settlement regions across Europe. Finally, the paper highlights the diversity and complexity of urbanisation structures in Europe and how general trends observed at larger scale are articulated locally according to prevailing structures of urbanisation. It shows the character of 'embeddedness' of smaller settlements within urban systems and territorial structures and how the socio-economic performances of smaller-settlement regions are defined by a combination of macro trends, national contextualisation, local dynamics and regional path dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unique contribution of this paper is to empirically compare and contrast demographic change in settlements with a population between 5,000 and under 50,000 (defined as towns) across different national urban systems in Europe with common definitions for the first time. The analysis uses a new data set based on harmonised small area data and harmonised morphological definitions of what a town is. The paper hypothesises first that a general model of demographic growth can be applied across national urban systems and secondly that regional demographic change is a significant predictor of demographic change in towns nested within those regions within this generalised model. A fixed effect multi-level regression analysis tests the importance of town-level and regional factors among towns from five national systems but also within two individual national urban systems. The findings suggest that national context still matters and within some national systems, regional context also strongly predicts demographic change in towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the fantasy of the Russian online bride and its striking contamination with geopolitical language. Drawing on critical geopolitics and psychoanalysis, it explores the economy of desire and anxiety that accompanies British men's quest for sexually available 'traditional' housewives that are still untouched by 'modern' feminism. The paper argues that these men desire the slippery substance of Easternness - an ideal object of desire which is too elusive to be conquered or held. The paper thereby inverts existing accounts of the sexualised nature of the geopolitical gaze to expose the traces of geopolitics in sexual fantasies themselves. In doing so, it formulates the basis for a triadic understanding of otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shapes and identifies the varieties and dynamics of service economies in the EU 25. By adopting a neo-Schumpeterian and evolutionary approach it contributes to enrich previous research dealing with national disparities from the perspective of services economic structures. Communalities across countries and time are detected and discussed at different levels of analysis. A wide set of models across the European region is found from an aggregated perspective. Moreover, the paper analyses the key dimensions explaining the different service models at sectoral level: structural change, knowledge and innovation, internationalisation and competition restrictions. The main result shows that structural composition of countries plays a prominent role, while heterogeneity is driven by dissimilarities in knowledge bases and innovative efforts across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A quarter of the European population lives in ‘polycentric urban regions’ (PURs): clusters of historically and administratively distinct but proximate and well‐connected cities of relatively similar size. This paper explores whether tighter integration can increase agglomeration benefits at the PUR‐level. We provide the first comprehensive list of European PURs (117 in total), establish their level of functional, institutional and cultural integration and measure whether this affects their performance. ‘Performance’ is defined as the extent to which urbanisation economies have developed, proxied by the presence of metropolitan functions. In this first‐ever cross‐sectional analysis of PURs we find that while there is evidence for all dimensions of integration having a positive effect, particularly functional integration has great significance. Regarding institutional integration, it appears that having some form of metropolitan co‐operation is more important than its exact shape. Theoretically, our results substantiate the assumption that networks may substitute for proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of national borders in the process of European integration and its destiny, border areas remain relatively misrecognised. This is particularly true as regards the contemporary geography of border cities across Europe. It is therefore difficult to assess what importance border cities and cross-border urban regions have and how they have evolved in parallel with the transformation of European borders. The aim of this paper is to highlight the urban dimension of border regions in Europe and, in particular, the diversity of configurations present. Through an original cartography of border cities, we hope to draw the attention of the research community interested in borders and border regions to an unfamiliar aspect of European borderlands and some of the issues and questions it raises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite that small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) have been, and continue to be, a central part of the history of Europe, these places have largely been neglected by urban research. The ESPON TOWN project, on which this Special Issue builds, sought to redress this neglect performing a comparative analysis of their position and role across Europe. In this introductory paper we discuss some of the theoretical and methodological challenges when it came to identifying, studying and analysing SMSTs and the theoretical framework developed to inform our understanding of SMSTs. In particular, three themes are discussed. The first one is about the ontological problem of defining a town. Administrative, morphological and functional perspectives are considered. The second one reflects on a wide array of interpretative approaches about the relationship between towns and their regional context. The third one is about the thematic and multi-scalar perspectives that can characterise the policy approach to towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, the French President called to war against the COVID‐19 which was followed by the launch of a military operation called Operation Resilience. This use of martial rhetoric initiated an effective mobilisation consisting in logistical assistance to the health sector. While armies are increasingly used to deal with environmental disasters, aside from their traditional role, this paper postulates that the geography of the French and international military engagement can be used to analyse both the institutional strategy of crisis management and the message governments send to their population. Military involvement differs in terms of missions given and of the amount of troops mobilised. It first questions the use of the military in the name of national resilience in the political discourse and the way it displays a symbolic message to the population, before analysing the role of armies in the crisis through the spatiality of their interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of food labelling schemes that claim to promote sustainable forms of food production. Viewed as a process of reterritorialisation or, more specifically, ecological localisation, such initiatives potentially provide constructive tools to re-address some of the environmental problems connected with agricultural restructuring and to re-organise production and consumption relations in the food system. This paper first examines the approaches and motives behind 24 food labelling schemes in selected European countries. It then uses this empirical material to conceptualise two development rationales: ‘territorial’ (place-based) and ‘critical’ (process-based). The rationales are explored through a comparative assessment of two Dutch case studies – Waterland and Milieukeur strawberries. The paper argues that producer involvement requires a clear economic incentive and that most food labelling schemes need significant institutional support if participation in more sustainable modes of production is to be fully realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the end of the Cold War the concepts of the geopolitical order of Europe have changed. Within this process the European Union plays a significant role. When the Iron Curtain came down, negotiations about the potential enlargement to the East started and the EU positioned itself differently regarding worldwide conflicts and wars. The influence of the new geopolitical situation on national long-term orientations and changes in the representations of the national representatives is the focal point of this paper. It analyses the current discourses on Europe, the European Union and its global role based on selected interviews with high ranking politicians. The main issues are: how far does Europe extend and which part of Europe will form the EU? And which internal power relations will the EU develop in the future. A discourse analysis shows how the current problems are verbalised within the geopolitical representations and how they affect the political arena. In this paper the word discourse is used to describe a social process which can be called ‘inclination of sense’ or, in a more sophisticated manner, ‘genesis of meaning’. This meaning refers to (a) the processual character of political, social and territorial organisation, (b) its reflection in the mass media and its construction of what can be called ‘European’ or ‘familiar with Europe’ and (c) the influence of the semantic order on political decisions, which impose a specific structural order and social organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Knowledge-intensive services (KIS) are important activities for regional growth and considered to be located at the top of urban and regional hierarchies. However, the widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) may lead to a higher degree of decentralisation. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the geographical distribution of KIS across European regions, highlighting some important patterns. Our results confirm that the location of KIS remains linked to regions with a high international profile but, contrary to what some previous studies have suggested, the relative concentration of KIS is rather low. However, important differences exist depending on the type of KIS, the country analysed and the comparative statistical level. Recent trends also present uneven results, but show a higher concentration of business services-related KIS. The importance of tacit knowledge may play a role in explaining this result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to refine existing approaches for classifying nodes in spatial networks. Apart from generally used variables measuring (i) the total connectivity of a node and (ii) the spatial make-up of this total connectivity, we argue that a third indicator should be taken into account when describing the structure of a spatial network, namely, (iii) the degree of ‘polarisation’ in a node's connectivity configuration. We measure ‘polarisation’ by applying multiple linkage analysis, a technique that allows determining the number of meaningful connections for each node in the network. In this paper, we illustrate this approach by clustering 65 European cities based on their insertion in European air transport networks in 2005. The number of meaningful flows of a city is hereby considered alongside both traditional measures of connectivity. The results of the cluster analysis suggest that including a measure of polarisation may indeed lead to a more satisfying typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper investigates regional development dynamics in a sample of 254 NUTS 2 European Union regions over the period 2000-2010. To that end, we propose a new version of the regional Lisbon index containing changes with respect the index developed by Dijkstra. The regional Lisbon index includes employment, education and R&D indicators. Targets for these indicators are related to an action and economic development plan for the EU regions and have been incorporated into European Regional Policy programming. The analysis of regional development is based on the estimation of the spatial Durbin model, containing endogenous and exogenous interaction effects. We compare the performance of different specifications of the spatial weights matrix describing the spatial arrangement of the sample regions finding evidence in favour of an exponential-decay distance matrix. Using this matrix, we determine the extent to which a change in a covariate in a particular region affects development in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades professional service firms have increasingly expanded their activities beyond national borders and established international offices throughout the world. This paper describes and analyses spatial patterns of internationalisation within the engineering consulting sector. By mapping expansion biographies of European engineering consulting firms and conducting dynamic Cox regression models, external factors influencing international market selection are examined. It is shown that current spatial patterns are only partly shaped by the declining importance of cross-national distance. Instead, market seeking motivations and the exploitation of time-critical opportunities appear to be of more significance. Further, changing patterns of market selection are observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inherent tension between regional equality and economic growth (efficiency) is recently much debated in the context of place based development policy and agglomeration in the European Union. A general conclusion reached in the literature is that a policy targeted at regional equality may be harmful for economic growth. Such policy therefore should be transformed in such a way that it also promotes the mobility of both people and firms and hence facilitates the possibilities of increased agglomeration. Recent insights from economic theories suggest that agglomeration externalities are not taken into account in the migration decision of firms and people, causing the dynamic urbanisation processes to not necessarily result in a (social) welfare optimum. This is even more so if other welfare effects than GDP and product variety are taken into account. Regional economic development is not sustainable if the dynamic urbanisation processes stemming from agglomeration economies do not lead to a welfare optimum. In this paper we assess the possibility of a non-sustainable regional development path. We conclude that strong additional negative externalities of growing large agglomerations are harder to prove than negative externalities of small agglomerations becoming smaller. Moreover, the size of short run negative effects that will stimulate the migration of people has not been adequately assessed. The European Union should therefore be careful in interpreting place-based costs and benefits of growing, large agglomerations at the detriment of small regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between internal migration rates at NUTS 2 level and economic developments. For five European countries, several hypotheses were tested on three groups of economic variables: general business cycle indicators, financial variables as well as variables reflecting more structural labour market developments. The empirical analysis is based on first differences of all variables. Although some support was found for all of the hypotheses tested but one, the main conclusion is that there is a stable relationship between GDP per capita and internal migration that is highly similar across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that there is a European‘system of cities’ or‘urban hierarchy’ has been an attractive idea, since it appears to provide a coherent subset of cities to study within a regional context. Under conditions of contemporary globalisation, however, the spatial order of European cities can only be properly understood as a‘porous Europe’. That is, it is impossible to sensibly discuss European intercity relations separate from an encompassing world city network. This paper therefore analyses 88 European cities in the context of a global urban analysis of 234 cities around the world. The main conclusion is that leading European world cities are specifically distinguished through their forming of global urban arenas. They should therefore not be thought of as being un-European, but as a special kind of world city that is highly cosmopolitan in its intercity relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One third of Europe's regions is confronted with a shrinking population: they are losing inhabitants due to ageing, low fertility and brain drain. To turn the tide, many local authorities invest in place marketing aimed at attracting new residents and firms. This paper deals with the question as to how useful place marketing to beat demographic shrinkage really is. Theoretical and empirical insights from geography (e.g. place fuzziness, sense of place and locational inertia), are used to argue that there are limits to place marketing to attract newcomers. To illustrate this argument, some examples and data from European territories are presented. We conclude that it is more useful for Europe's shrinking territories to focus on 'warm' marketing that tries to retain rather than to attract place customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the spatiality of transnationalism and meanings of borders as displayed in the tourism business sector operated by Chinese migrants in Europe. Drawing upon empirical research conducted from 1999 to 2002 and from 2006 to 2007, it will illustrate how Chinese migrants practise transnationalism and transculturality in their entrepreneurial activities. Instead of serving simply as a bridge between their two home economies, migrants engaged in the tourism sector are active and innovative agents in crossing and redrawing the borders of different geo-cultural spheres they are embedded in, producing modified tourism landscapes that suit the desire of their compatriot travellers. An examination of the spatiality of their business networks also suggests that transnationalism and diaspora studies should go beyond focusing only on ties between the sending and receiving societies. Furthermore, an analysis of the interactions among members of this business community from different places will exemplify the power of borders in the Chinese diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, many who are involved in the governance of urban development and housing plea for area-based strategies to tackle urban social problems. Various arguments may be given to legitimise that kind of policy intervention. In this paper the assumptions behind the policy application are evaluated. Recurrent discourses and ideas regarding the backgrounds of neighbourhood effects receive extra attention. That discussion will be followed by a critical evaluation of the views that are expressed, both in the literature and through interviews with key actors. Finally, the question will be raised whether it is a good idea to continue with area-based policies or whether it might be wiser to replace the area-based policies by domain or sector policies in order to achieve a more direct approach towards the problems that should be tackled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on the borderscape of a flat area situated at the southernmost tip of Gibraltar, at the edge of the European Continent, which is illustratively and interestingly named Europa Point. We will argue that, as an evoking geographical belvedere of cultural and continental interrelationships, Europa Point directs attention to the inherent sociospatial ambiguities of EUrope. Embodying a crucial topo within the European sociospatial b/ordering process, this borderscape stimulates to observe Europe's limits through a non-binary lens. The text aims at providing an unfrozen alternative visualisation of the symbolic and territorial margins of the EU. Echoing De Rougemont's conceptualisation of Europe's existence through its search for the infinite, it depicts Europa Point as a springboard and platform to the perpetual commencement of the European adventure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]