Compared to the burgeoning literature discussing the importance of agglomeration externalities for development, limited attention has been given to network externalities. This is largely due to limited data availability. We propose a general measure to proxy city network externalities based on toponym co-occurrences that indicate the relatedness between cities. This paper extracts intercity relationships based on the co-occurrence of Chinese place names on 2.5 billion webpages. We calculate and map absolute and relative network positions, which we use to explain urban labour productivity. We found that a stronger embeddedness in networks of cities is significantly and positively associated with urban productivity. Smaller cities benefit comparatively more from being well embedded in city networks, suggesting that these relations can compensate for a lack of agglomeration externalities. We also compare the importance for urban performance of city network externalities vis-à-vis agglomeration externalities. City network externalities turn out to be more important in explaining urban performance than agglomeration externalities. This calls for new theorizing on a relational approach to urban and regional development. Rather than stimulating further concentration of urbanization, our findings suggest that fostering relationships between cities is a viable alternative urban development strategy. We conclude with suggestions for a research agenda that delves deeper into city network externalities.

This paper enacts a dialogue between planning literature on polycentric urban regions (PUR) and port geography literature on multi-port gateways. The main proposition is that polycentric systems are the emergent outcome of the interactions between three dimensions of polycentricity: morphological, functional and institutional. The focus is on the Dutch–Belgian Amsterdam–Rotterdam–Antwerp (ARA) port–industrial region: one of the world’s largest concentrations of oil refining and petrochemical activity. The central question is to what extent is the ARA region a polycentric system and what explains this observed polycentricity? Our analyses demonstrate a high degree of morphological and functional polycentricity with each of the constituent (firms located in) ports connected through flows and specialization in processing and trading oil (products). However, this is not the intended result of formalized spatial planning, nor did the ARA ever became a frame of reference among planning agencies. Rather, it is the result of self-organization in the oil industry that has culminated in the emergence of the ARA as an internationally recognized spot market, later institutionally formalized in delivery contracts (oil futures) traded on international commodity exchanges. We conclude that polycentric systems could be understood as emergent systems that obtained generative capacities, in turn influencing its different constituting dimensions.

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.

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 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’.

Eeuwenlang is er gestreden om de controle over de Westerschelde. Van groot geopolitiek belang als toegangspoort tot de havensteden Antwerpen, Gent en het Europese achterland, en andersom, als verbinding met de wereld. De landsgrens die dwars door het Scheldebekken loopt, heeft lange tijd de ontwikkeling van dit gebied belemmerd. De grens zorgt aan Vlaamse zijde voor een blijvende afhankelijkheid van Nederlandse medewerking aan bijvoorbeeld de uitdieping van de Schelde, de vergroting van de zeesluizen in Terneuzen en de vestiging van achterlandverbindingen (zoals bijvoorbeeld de ‘IJzeren Rijn’). Andersom weet Zeeland maar zeer beperkt te profiteren van de welvarende Vlaamse steden. Ondanks de nabijheid van Antwerpen, Gent en Brugge is Zeeuws-Vlaanderen een krimpende, en binnen de Nederlandse context volstrekt gemarginaliseerde grensregio. Maar daar lijkt verandering in te komen. In plaats van met de ruggen naar elkaar toe te staan, zien beide zijden van de grens steeds meer een gezamenlijke nieuwe toekomst. Met name de recente fusie van de havenschappen van Vlissingen/Terneuzen en Gent springt in het oog. In deze bijdrage belichten we deze unieke gebeurtenis – vanuit ruimtelijk, historisch, geopolitiek én bestuurskundig perspectief –, en we bespreken de betekenis ervan voor het bredere proces van grensoverschrijdende integratie in het Scheldebekken.

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.

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of having long term data for the study of cities, but such sources are relatively scarce. This is especially the case for data about relations between cities, which is a crucial aspect of urban dynamics. Over the last two decades, many efforts have been made to digitalize texts, including books and newspapers, which are primary sources on most of our societies. Researchers have shown that these massive digital archives can be used to identify macroscopic trends related to historical and cultural changes. The wealth of geographic information in such digital archives has not been used much, while they are very valuable for the study of cities. In this paper, we present DIGGER, a newly developed dataset that we built on Delpher, the digital archive of historical newspapers of the National Library of the Netherlands, by extracting geographical information from a selection of 102 million of news items. This dataset allowed us to study the spatial diffusion of information on and between the Dutch cities from a corpus of 81 newspapers published in 29 different cities between 1869 and 1994. This paper presents the method developed to build the dataset as well as the validation steps for the accuracy of the place name recognition. This dataset can be used to study the evolution of the Dutch urban system as well as aspects related to the spatial diffusion of information and geographical bias in media coverage.

News travels fast and far, and the general idea is that the spatial extent of news coverage has increased over time. Information flows are always involved in systems of interdependent cities. This is the reason why George Zipf and Allan Pred, both pioneers of the urban systems literature, were eager to obtain data on these relations to understand urban system dynamics. However, because of limited resources in data acquisition, they restricted their studies to small samples of cities or short periods of time. By using novel computational social science techniques on a digital archive of historical newspapers, we could map and explore changes in the spatial extent of news coverage in the Netherlands at an unprecedented detailed scale for a period of 62 years. In this paper, we analyse 24 million news items mentioning 312 different cities and towns in a sample of 31 local newspapers. Thanks to this data, we were able to reconstruct the information field of urban readerships from different cities and how it changed over time. By analysing their evolution, we find evidence of space-time contraction with an increasing coverage of faraway places in the period ranging from 1869 to 1930. However, this coverage is not evenly distributed but is characterized by a hierarchical selection process. Coverage of the largest cities in the Randstad increased at the expense of information flows from intermediate provincial cities. More generally, this paper shows how computational social science approaches may offer new ways of looking at urban dynamics with large text corpora such as digital archives of historical newspapers.

Borrowed size refers to the idea that small cities near larger metropolitan centres can reap the advantages of large agglomerations, but without the costs of agglomeration. The study explores whether broadband internet helps such smaller cities to enjoy the labour market benefits of a larger city. Using Swedish micro-data from 2007 to 2015, together with unique data on broadband, suggestive evidence is found that broadband indeed allows smaller cities to reap such benefits. Borrowed size is primarily driven by the overall penetration of broadband in the place of residence, rather than by broadband availability at the residence.

Teleworking may increase the willingness to accept a longer commute. This paper presents new evidence of the effect of teleworking on the length of commutes. We use novel panel data from the Netherlands, for the years 2008-2018, and find stronger effects compared to studies that use older data. Between 2008 and 2018 however, the effect was remarkably stable: workers that started teleworking increased their commutes by 12 percent on average. We analyse heterogeneity in the effect of teleworking on commuting across different levels of urbanization and across occupations. This study stresses the effects of teleworking on the geographical scale of labour markets, and provides important inputs for policymakers that aim to promote teleworking.

A bourgeoning literature is stressing the crucial importance of agglomeration economies provided by large cities for personal, business and territorial development. One of the main reasons for the economic, demographic and social struggles of rural regions is exactly the lack of such agglomeration benefits. This paper explores the question of which broad strategies can make rural economies more competitive in the age of the ‘urban triumph’ by organising the presence of a higher level of agglomeration benefits in rural regions. Theoretically, three strategies are discerned: a) ‘borrowing size’ in infrastructural, transport and organisational networks to ‘tap into’ some of the benefits of surrounding or other metropolitan areas; b) urban concentration to develop a single, more attractive urban center in the rural region; and c) the formation of a strongly integrated network of complementary towns and cities in the rural region. The implementation of these strategies is often complicated, as we document for the rural province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. From an overarching perspective, it has been particularly internal fragmentation that has led to further marginalisation, peripheralisation and the missing of many opportunities to ‘borrow size’. The strategies defined here show that rural regions are not unfortunate victims of the tendencies leading to the ‘urban triumph’ but have the potential to reap the benefits of agglomeration themselves.

In this chapter, we discuss the use of gravity models in the study of spatial structure. Using the recent discussion on functional polycentricity as a background, we argue that the gravity model approach has one obvious advantage when examining spatial structure: it can simultaneously assess functional polycentricity and spatial interdependencies within one modelling framework. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methods that can be applied to estimate the gravity model.

Both Belgium (Flemish Diamond) and The Netherlands (Randstad) are seen as standard examples of polycentric urban regions (PUR). In the first part of this paper, we examine quantitatively if this polycentricity also applies to the ports of these urban regions. Our results show that within Belgium and the Netherlands, the port geography is monocentric, while taking the whole delta, a polycentric port geography exists. These results are the starting point to assess its functional polycentricity. For this we use the European regional IO database on the one hand, and refine this for different production chains with HQ-subsidiary data on the other hand. Our results show that the Belgian-Dutch port region is at the same time functional monocentric and functional polycentric, depending on the networks taken into consideration. The port region is thus a multiplex mono- and polycentric region. The second part connects the quantitative results with the qualitative policy structures. While every port is governed by its own semi-independent port authority, at the same time, these and other involved authorities form partly overlapping policy structures. We will give an overview of these and critically assess their relevance. Our results show that while there are seven structures, only a few can be considered successful. In our discussion, we link this with the commodity networks the particular structures are based upon. As long as an (economic) win-win situation exists or is aimed for, the cross-border policy structure within and beyond national borders prevail. If not, structures dissolve and the age old individual port authorities enter a zero-sum game. As we will show, latter can be avoided if the policy structures become institutionalized and development and policy structures are streamlined. Because both policy collaboration as individualism exists at the same time in ever changing configurations, we conclude that the Belgian-Dutch port geography is a clear example of a dynamic international conculega geography.

This paper addresses the interaction between information technology (IT) and agglomeration. The literature distinguishes two types of interactions, namely a substitution effect and a complementarity effect. We conceptualise a third effect, namely a ‘spillover’ mechanism, by which IT allows places in close proximity of large cities to ‘borrow size’ and sustain greater product variety. We test these mechanisms using detailed data on restaurant cuisine variety in the Netherlands, and the IT dimension is measured through the use and penetration of online restaurant reviews. We find that IT complements cuisine variety in cities, and induces spillovers to smaller places near larger ones, allowing smaller places to sustain ‘rare’ cuisines that were traditionally only present in larger cities. As such, IT leads to the spread of agglomeration benefits such as local product variety over larger territories.

Over the past two decades, research in regional science has paid considerable attention to the benefits of urban density and proximity, even though there has been tremendous progress within the same period in technologies that ease the friction of distance (e.g. mobile communication, high-speed internet). Many scholars argue that in spite of falling transportation costs for tradable goods and the proliferation of information and communication technology cities will always have a vital edge in facilitating face-to-face communication. We argue that even if this is the case, there still remains a host of benefits that have come to rely less on urban density and this will have implications for the future of cities. In the current study we focus on one particular type of benefit associated with urban size and density – namely, the availability of a specialized array of urban amenities. More precisely, we use regional data on the distribution of restaurants in the Netherlands, and differentiate them according to their cuisine type. We explore how the presence of cuisine variety relates to population density and diversity, and whether these relationships vary across different city sizes. We find that the explanatory power of population density and diversity diminishes over time, especially in smaller cities. We argue that these trends support the hypothesis that a reduction of spatial information frictions reduces the need for urban density, as benefits associated with larger cities – such as cuisine variety – can be increasingly found in smaller cities.

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.

While there is consensus that network embeddedness of cities is of great importance for their development, the precise effect is difficult to assess because of a lack of consistent information on relations between cities. This paper presents, applies and evaluates a rather novel method to establish the strength of relationships between places, a method we refer to as ‘the toponym co-occurrence method’. This approach builds the urban system on the basis of co-occurrences of place names in a text corpus. We innovate by exploiting a so far unparalleled amount of data, namely the billions of web pages contained in the commoncrawl web archive, and by applying the method also to small places that tend to be ignored by other methods. The entire settlement system of the Netherlands is consequently explored. In addition, we innovatively apply machine learning techniques to classify these relations. Much attention is paid to solving biases deriving from place name disambiguation. Gravity modelling is employed to assess the resulting spatial organization of the Netherlands. It turns out that the gravity model fits very well with the pattern of relationships between places as found in digital space, which contributes to our assessment that the toponym co-occurrence method is a solid proxy for relationships in real space. Using the method, it is established that the relationships in the Randstad region, by many considered a coherent metropolitan entity, are actually somewhat less strong than expected. In contrast, historically important, but nowadays small cities in the periphery tend to have maintained their prominent position in the pattern of relationships. Suburban, relatively new places in the shadow of a larger city tend to be weakly related to other places. Several suggestions to further improve the method, in particular the classification of relationships, are discussed.