During the 8th SP&S seminar Evert Meijers presented his recent research on polycentric metropolitan areas. He described ‘metropolisation’ as an upward development spiral to more welfare, more sustainability and, inevitably, more happiness. The beckoning perspective of metropolisation did not come as a surprise to the audience. The vocabulary he used to describe a pathway was unfamiliar tough.
In Evert’s definition polycentric metropolitan areas are collections of historically distinct and administratively and politically independent cities that are located in close proximity to each other. Consequently, in describing proximity, only few words fell about agglomeration benefits, external effects or the thickness of infrastructural networks. Instead he portrayed proximity as a state of awareness and metropolisation as a process in which cities weight their historic, administrative and political assumptions against the benefits of co-operations. The large and detailed datasets on European regions he acquired for his research will be set in for this purpose. We wish for good outcomes!
