This paper presents a critique of city-centric approaches in health and wellbeing planning and offers a conceptual and operational shift towards a territorially grounded paradigm. It argues that focusing on individual cities limits the systemic and relational understanding of health and wellbeing and undermines effective planning responses. We identify three flaws in city-centric planning: spatial-scalar mismatches that obscure where challenges unfold and interventions are needed; urban biases that sideline small, rural, and peripheral places; and functional fragmentation that reinforces siloed, sectoral approaches. In response, we propose what we call ‘Territories of Wellbeing’, a conceptualization that operates across interdependent regional systems. Using the Rhine watershed as a paradigmatic case, we demonstrate how this ‘natural planning region’ offers a productive arena for testing such a framework due to its polycentric structure through its shared river geography, long-standing transboundary governance institutions, and socio-ecological interdependencies. By considering the difficulties in moving beyond city-centric models and the challenges of the territorial approach, we explore and introduce three corrective pathways for planning, Comparability and Transferability, Contextual Sensitivity and Satisfier Differentiation, and Adaptability and Participation. These are practical orientations to make planning frameworks responsive to spatial diversity, dynamic interdependencies, and participatory governance across complex territories.

Media representations of cities shape public perception of them. However, the extent to which these media-driven perceptions subsequently influence individual decisions about where to live has remained underexplored. This study leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to capture media coverage of crime and compare it to actual reported crime. We show that variations in media attention to crime across U.S. cities help explain local house price dynamics. Media portrayal of crime explains house price dynamics better than FBI crime rates, although both measures nonetheless complement each other. Our results call for more attention to behavioral and cognitive explanations of urban growth and decline and, methodologically, our approach contributes to the development of “digital urban studies” scholarship.

This paper develops a typology of European regions according to their role in knowledge exchange networks. Knowledge flows are critical economic assets, but it is essential to qualify as well as to quantify them to understand how they reflect regional inequalities and regional roles in networks. Using Horizon 2020 partnership data, we perform a cluster analysis of European NUTS-2 regions using multiple flow indicators and derive five types of engagement in knowledge flows. We then explore the resulting regional ‘flow profiles’ and clarify the drivers and barriers to becoming a high-performing knowledge region, providing valuable insights for regional policymakers and planners.

The mega-regional unevenness, namely the development gap between cores and smaller cities, has increasingly become a key obstacle for inter-city coordination in China. Scholars tend to focus more on the leading role of the cores in responding to this problem. When the smaller cities are mentioned, their endogenous characteristics and weaknesses are often highlighted, rather than being valued as important nodes embedded in the regional network and the inter-city relations. This paper conceptualizes these smaller players in mega-regional system as “secondary cities” to emphasize their interconnectedness to the cores and embeddedness in the inter-city relations. Based on this, we firstly examine the (trans)formation trends of the core-secondary relations in Chinese mega-regionalization. In this way, we focus on the role of secondary cities by exploring the functional and political positioning in the dynamic regional system. Building on such conceptualization of secondary cities, we construct an indicator system to measure changes of core-secondary unevenness from 2006 to 2023. We find that although mega-regionalization aims to rebalance inter-city relations, secondary cities are still facing challenges of polarization and peripheralization. Finally, we conduct a clustering analysis based on the differences between core and secondary cities regarding economic structure, aiming to explore the differentiated vulnerabilities of various types of secondary cities when confronted with polarization and peripheralization. This paper expands the theoretical scope of secondary cities to provide an innovative analytical perspective for understanding the mega-regional unevenness problems in China. Meanwhile, we also emphasize the potential and value of core-secondary relations in addressing the challenges of secondary cities with the expectation of more targeted policy and planning actions.

The governmental initiative of high-quality development (HQD) marks a shift in the Chinese development paradigm from prioritizing speed to prioritizing quality towards comprehensive goals of economic growth, social vitality, innovation capacity, industrial upgrading, regional cooperation, and green transformation. This initiative is increasingly discussed within the framework of mega-regions, with prior studies demonstrating that they are critical arenas for promoting HQD visions. However, unevenness within mega-regions has become an important limitation to this vision. Namely, significant disparities exist between mega-regional core cities and the smaller neighboring cities in most HQD indicators. This paper conceptualizes these smaller players as secondary cities. Based on this, this paper aims to understand and differentiate the specific challenges of secondary cities facing intra-regional unevenness in the context of HQD. We build an evaluation framework and employ the TOPSIS method to evaluate 34 core cities and 180 secondary cities. Then, we introduce typological thinking to develop a meaningful classification of secondary cities based on the results of these evaluations. K-means clustering analysis identifies five secondary city types with similar profiles. The analysis supports the discussion of the characteristics and challenges of each type and may contribute to policy recommendations for a balanced HQD in mega-regional secondary cities.

Mega-regional planning in China is expected to tackle intra-regional unevenness, namely the development gap between regional core cities and the surrounding secondary cities. However, mega-regionalization processes seem to further increase the centrality of cores and push secondary cities towards greater polarization and peripheralization, as they lose socioeconomic vitality, industrial capacity, and political voice. To reflect on why mega-regions are not fulfilling their role of rebalancing regional urban systems, we conceptualize mega-regionalization as a mechanism to coordinate spatial relations within a territory and build a novel framework to analyze the relations between core and secondary cities. First, we show that visions of mega-regional planning regarding core-secondary relations pursue goals of morphological polycentricity, flow multi-directionality, and functional complementarity. Then, we use thematic analysis to evaluate the policy orientations of mega-regional planning to achieve these goals and extract three policy themes governing core-secondary spatial relations - coexistence, connectivity, and cooperation. These can systematically redefine mega-regional planning mechanisms by giving a central role to the spatial relations between core and secondary cities. Emphasizing spatial relations to conceptualize mega-regional governance allows a novel reflection on the challenges of unevenness grounded in the perspective of secondary cities. This deepens our understanding of governance mismatches that keep ideal visions and policy orientations misaligned when seen from secondary cities. Place, priority, and actor mismatches limit the potential of mega-regionalization to respond to their challenges. This research provides a relational understanding of mega-regions, calling for more attention to secondary cities, and the development of more balanced and sustainable mega-regions.

International and prestigious universities located in small cities are growing at a rate beyond the spatial capacity of their host city. Due to this, the presence of students and student housing in these cities has exponentially grown and resulted in a myriad of social, cultural, economic, and spatial impacts. This is known as ‘studentification’ which affects the co-existence and tolerance between the university community and the local community, particularly between students and local residents who lead entirely different and clashing lifestyles. Existing research on campus-city relationships has primarily focused on the economic benefits of large universities in small cities, whereas research on student housing in the Netherlands has primarily focused on the shortage for both incoming and existing students. However, much less attention has been given to the current conditions of student housing qualitatively and what student housing typologies mean for other residents in Delft that may have the potential to shift perspectives from student growth to limitation. As tensions are at an all-time high and further expansion growths have been announced by TU Delft, a need to understand the fundamental conditions that contribute to the negative consequences of studentification is needed more than ever to thoroughly understand the studentification process and recommend a long-term strategic plan towards co-existence. This policy brief highlights the effects of student housing in Delft and creates a strategic plan that is informed by practices of other European cities (Lund, Gottingen, and Loughborough) that is viewed through the political, spatial, and sociocultural lens of Delft to provide an evidence-based and comprehensive approach that transcends conventional practices. By proposing a pathway of policies, regulations, and strategies, a step-by-step process of mitigating the different conflicts and issues resulting from studenification may be mitigated.

Based on the understanding of the built environment as result of competing claims on space that must be resolved via recognition, fair distribution of burdens and benefits of our human association, respect and care for the planet and just procedures to decide on those claims, Spatial Planning and Strategy is a chair in the Department of Urbanism within the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology, committed to helping create sustainability, resilience and spatial justice through the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement and the European New Deal, among other frameworks. This commitment is reflected in activities, events, and courses. We are concerned with knowledge about the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic and urban planning tools – visions, strategies, plans and programmes.

This paper asks whether meaningful differentiations between small and medium-sized cities – “regional second cities” – can be constructed based on their demographic composition, and how these cities differ among each other and from core cities. We investigate 64 regional second cities in eight British city-regions, based on the demographic groups developed from the 2011 census and mapped by the BODMAS/Datashine project. First, we conduct a cluster analysis to extract demography-based city typologies. Second, we look for regularities within and contrasts between clusters to test whether these typologies are meaningful. Third, we compare population diversity and the representation of specific demographic groups in second cities and core cities. The results confirm that it is possible to meaningfully differentiate among cities based on demographic profile, reveal systematic differences between core and second cities across the UK, identify challenges in specific second city types and discuss their positionality and engagement in city-regional dynamics.

This paper presents the concept of urban pandemic vulnerability as a crucial framework for understanding how COVID-19 affects cities and how they react to pandemics. We adapted existing social and environmental urban vulnerability frameworks to assess pandemic impacts and responses, identifying the appropriate components and spatial, environmental and socio-demographic variables of interest. Pandemic vulnerability depends on exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity features, which occur in different combinations in different parts of a city. The model was applied to the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA) to create a map of pandemic vulnerability. This map differentiates between affected areas according to the types of vulnerability they experience, and it accurately identified the most vulnerable areas in line with real-world data. The findings contribute to clarifying the challenges brought by COVID-19, identifying vulnerability thresholds and guiding planning towards pandemic resilience

This chapter introduces the concept of metropolisation, a framework to describe and understand the dynamics of territories undergoing extensive urbanisation. Metropolisation is defined as the transformation of fragmented urbanised areas into coherent and consolidated urban regions through the effects of long-term and intertwined processes of spatial, functional, institutional, and symbolic integration. The metropolisation story is told through ten theses formulated as open-ended discussion points. Individually, the theses aim to provoke debate and inspire further explorations in research and education. Together, they uncover the novel conceptual transformations, real-world mechanisms, and policy and planning implications of the processes of metropolitan integration.

This paper criticizes traditional models of urban–regional expansion, which depart from monocentric ideals of urban core and ring. The original spatial-cycle model (SCM) suggests repeating stages of urbanization, suburbanization, disurbanization and re-urbanization. We reconceptualize the relations between core(s) and ring(s) to test the formation of urban regions under mono-, multi- and polycentric trajectories. The analysis employs local population data in functional urban regions in Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with different urbanization patterns, for the period 1961–2011. Results suggest a ‘break of the cycle’ in polycentric regions and a shift towards a different period, which we call ‘syncurbanization’.

As urbanization spreads across territories, interdependencies between the cities composing a city-region fuel a process of functional and spatial integration labelled as metropolisation. This chapter discusses whether secondary cities can benefit from that process. Focusing on the case of England, the study assesses 64 secondary cities in eight city-regions on their potential to engage with metropolisation, situating them in four quadrants of a functional-demographic profile matrix. Results point to a variegated landscape of secondary cities with contrasting features regarding (1) the structure and size of the city-region; (2) local spatial-environmental factors; (3) demography; (4) functional performance; (5) population growth; and (6) transport connectivity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of incentives and deterrents to metropolisation typical of each quadrant to show the need for governance and planning to adopt a model of metropolitan development that stimulates integration in ways that serve the interests of secondary cities.

This article proposes moving beyond the tyranny of economic imperatives towards a human needs-based framework to assess cities and envision their development. Existing calls for such a transition lack a foundation able to capture the various dimensions of human life in cities, which can be provided by the concept of human needs. We ask whether cities deliver satisfiers that make them good places to cater for the full range of human needs in a similar way to how they cater for economic needs. The article develops a framework that allows us to address that question. We show how the main debates in human needs theory are illustrated by urban phenomena, and search for a human needs model which is able to advance those debates and tackle the problem specifically in cities. Then we highlight the specifically urban aspects of needs satisfaction processes and construct a table of indicators to assess how cities fare in that respect, ensuring global comparability as to whether, as well as local contextualisation as to how, needs are satisfied.

We aim to consolidate the concept of metropolisation as a lens to examine urban region integration in territories characterized by extensive urbanization. Metropolisation is defined as the process through which institutionally, functionally, and spatially fragmented urbanized regions become integrated as coherent metropolitan systems. This novel framework is captured by three notions: inversion, multiplexity, and convergence. Inversion changes the dominant perspective of cities dissolving into urban regions (the “regionalization of the city”) toward urban regions consolidating into extensive cities (the “citification of the region”). Multiplexity examines this process as a continuous interaction of intertwined spatial-functional, political-institutional, and cultural-symbolic facilitators and inhibitors of integration with overlapping effects. Convergence stresses the blurred distinctions between concepts that used to belong either to the “urban” or the “regional”. This editorial to the special issue explores the multilingual genealogy of metropolisation, discusses its ability to understand contemporary urbanization, and examines its implications for theory and policy.

This chapter presents the concept of metropolization, defined as the dynamics of interaction between spatial-functional, political-institutional and cultural-symbolic integration processes across city-regions, which transform these fragmented territories into coherent metropolitan systems. The authors first discuss the arguments in favour of metropolization as a strategic policy aim, as integrated city-regions become able to jointly reap the benefits of scale through mechanisms of borrowed size, and review some significant barriers. They then illustrate, through the case of the Dutch Randstad, the long-term process of interaction between the three dimensions of integration, operating in conjunction to become either barriers or incentives to a potentially virtuous cycle of city-regional integration. The metropolization concept contributes to debates on whether city-regional economies should be defined by agglomerations or networks, the importance of historical legacies at the city-region scale, and the role played by governance arrangements and identity-building efforts, alongside functions and infrastructure, in city-regional integration.

Despite the many uncertainties of life in cities, promises of economic prosperity, social mobility and happiness have fuelled the imagination of generations of urban migrants in search of a better life. Access to jobs, housing and amenities, and fewer restrictions of personal choices are some of the perceived advantages of cities, characterised here as ‘urban promises’. But while discourses celebrating the triumph of cities became increasingly common, urban rewards are not available everywhere and for everyone. Alongside opportunity, cities offer inequality, conflict and poor living conditions. Their narrative of promise has been persistent across different times and places, but the outcomes and experiences of urban life compare poorly with the overoptimistic expectations of many newcomers. And yet, millions still come and stay regardless of odds, raising the question why we have such positive and persistent expectations about cities. To examine this question, this paper considers the process of urban migration from the perspective of decision-making under uncertainty. It discusses how decisions and evaluations are based on imperfect information and offers a novel contribution by examining how the cognitive biases and heuristics which restrict human rationality shape our responses to urban promises. This approach may allow a better understanding of how people make decisions regarding urban migration, how they perceive their urban experiences and evaluate their life stories. We consider the prospects and limitations of the behavioural approach and discuss how biases favouring narratives of bright urban futures can be exploited by ‘triumphalist’ accounts of cities which neglect their embedded injustices.

This paper compares the emergence of urban regions around European second-tier cities based on population data between 1890 and 2011. It asks whether a characteristic trajectory of formation exists for those urban regions distinguishing them from the centrifugal growth typical of the early expansion stages of larger cities. The results are consistent with existing research and contribute to a spatial-historical characterisation of second-tier urban region formation. Their dominant long-term urbanisation mode lies somewhere between centrifugal and polycentric models of development, suggesting a more nuanced interpretation of urbanisation timelines and stressing the legacy of past urban growth in current urbanisation dynamics.