Europe is inconceivable without its cities. Ever since Venetian and Genoese merchants established east–west trade routes to do business with German and Flemish cloth merchants, since the bankers of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London and Florence invested large sums in business ventures and expeditions and in loans to the nobility and sovereigns of their time, since the corporations and guilds of master craftsmen and merchants acquired or purchased charters, since boroughs were formed throughout Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, cities have been the melting pot of Europe. Whether they developed within the ‘interstices of feudalism’ that were dominant in France and in England, or whether they were sufficiently powerful to marginalise the aristocracy, they nurtured new political ideas, capitalism in its nascent form, the bourgeoisie, the arts and culture, and individualism. Cities have shaped the imagination and the life of Europeans.

This may amount to mere nostalgia for the past: a remnant in our imaginations that is still remarkably alive but whose reality vanished with the end of the eighteenth century. After all, nation-states absorbed cities, and the building of national societies – never an easy process – was partly carried out in spite of cities by integrating them into a national whole. Furthermore, the explosion in information technology and telecommunications and the process of globalisation appear to invalidate standard individual representations of space and time. Beyond the mythical dissolution of cities under the impact of technology, the European concept of the city appears invalid. In the age of the metropolis, is the model of the European city itself obsolete?

Metropolis and cities

Urban research has reflected these changing viewpoints.