The role of medium-sized cities for regional development

The promotion of territorial competitiveness has been a focus of scientific and political debate in Europe for many years, and has become all the more urgent with the outbreak of crisis. More recently instead, an increasing attention has been turned to the role that cities can play in this direction, thanks to their vast array of high-specialized functions and their potential for innovation.
However, given the strong influence of empirical north-American economic literature, the concept of city is associated to huge urban agglomerations, thus following a settlement model that does not quite capture the specificities of the European context, characterized as it is by the presence of many medium-sized cities, often endowed with high-level functions and achieving a high standard of living quality.
This volume collects a series of essays that, using mutually helpful points of view, explore the contribution of medium-sized cities to regional development.

Published on Italian Journal of Regional Science