Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Secondary Cities: Introduction to a Research Agenda
- 2 Shedding Light or Casting Shadows? Relations between Primary and Secondary Cities
- 3 Small and Medium-Sized Towns as Secondary Cities: The Case of Switzerland
- 4 From Sleepy Hollow to Winning from Second: Identity, Autonomy and Borrowed Size in an Australian Urban Region
- 5 Metropolization Processes and Intra-Regional Contrasts: The Uneven Fortunes of English Secondary Cities
- 6 Situating the Secondary City: Uneven Development and Regional Gentrification in Tacoma, WA
- 7 Borrowed Social Performance: Labour and Community Organizations in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California
- 8 Intra-Regional Relationality and Green City-Regionalism: Placing the Role of ‘Secondary Cities’
- 9 Conclusion: Advancing the Secondary City Perspective
- Index
5 - Metropolization Processes and Intra-Regional Contrasts: The Uneven Fortunes of English Secondary Cities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Secondary Cities: Introduction to a Research Agenda
- 2 Shedding Light or Casting Shadows? Relations between Primary and Secondary Cities
- 3 Small and Medium-Sized Towns as Secondary Cities: The Case of Switzerland
- 4 From Sleepy Hollow to Winning from Second: Identity, Autonomy and Borrowed Size in an Australian Urban Region
- 5 Metropolization Processes and Intra-Regional Contrasts: The Uneven Fortunes of English Secondary Cities
- 6 Situating the Secondary City: Uneven Development and Regional Gentrification in Tacoma, WA
- 7 Borrowed Social Performance: Labour and Community Organizations in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California
- 8 Intra-Regional Relationality and Green City-Regionalism: Placing the Role of ‘Secondary Cities’
- 9 Conclusion: Advancing the Secondary City Perspective
- Index
Summary
Secondary cities in European urban regions: integration and antagonism
The attention given to secondary cities by scholars, policy-makers and businesses has been steadily increasing in recent years (OECD, 2012; Dijkstra, 2013; Camagni et al, 2015; Parkinson et al, 2015; Cardoso and Meijers, 2017; Meili and Mayer, 2017). This is a welcome development that expands debates beyond the dominant interest in the spectacular successes and failures of the largest cities, popularized by ideas about how we now live in an ‘urban age’. Secondary cities can be defined both at national and regional scales. In Europe, national secondary cities are those lacking the economic weight, political voice and attractive pull of primate cities (generally capitals) but still important enough to play a relevant role in national and international contexts (ESPON, 2012). Regional secondary cities, the focus of this chapter, are small and medium-sized cities that are part of an interdependent urban region and often lie in the sphere of influence of a larger core city, fuelling its economy, cooperating and competing with it for population, activities and resources, and interacting with it through various flows (Chapter 1, this volume).
While both types of city may share similar problems – policy neglect in comparison with more ‘successful’ cities, emptying out of functions, population or activities due to the dominance of a larger competitor, incapacity to profit from synergies with other cities nearby (Hodos, 2011; Cardoso, 2016a) – the existing literature on regional secondary cities is thinner on the ground. Although urban regions are recognized as relevant arenas of economic activity, institutional cooperation and functional interaction, the small and medium-sized cities that constitute them are often seen as a rather indistinct, semi-dependent hinterland of the core city (Servillo et al, 2017). This is a remarkable oversight, particularly in Europe, built around a patchwork of cities and towns in close proximity, many of which, with centuries-old development paths, do not necessarily emanate from the influence of a centre. Rather than a downscaling of the large city theme, the historical trajectories, features and challenges of secondary cities represent a conceptually distinct problem and deserve a dedicated research agenda (Lorentzen and Van Heur, 2012; Kresl and Ietri, 2016).
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- Secondary CitiesExploring Uneven Development in Dynamic Urban Regions of the Global North, pp. 103 - 132Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021