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“Economic and technological transformations have physically and functionally integrated spaces, up to the point that economic activities and urban ways of life have spread over the totality of the territory.” (Nello, 2001: 18; my translation)
The polysemic notion of the ‘urban’ and its qualifiers illustrate no more than “the dominant mode in which each society territorialises” (Domingues, 2008: 1). Like other cities, second-tier cities produce and are embedded in much broader urbanised regions and virtually all of them have now turned into large interconnected functional areas of some kind. ‘Extensive urbanisation’ is a synthetic image – and an umbrella term – used here for the processes of reconfiguration of large territories in which different forms of urbanisation penetrate urbanised as well as formerly rural or natural spaces, loosening hierarchical relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, transferring specialised activities to emerging and often remote nodes, and dispersing people, jobs, activities and built-up space throughout the urbanised region. This is not only a one-way process of
‘urbanisation of the rural’ but rather a convergence of the meaning of both urban and rural, as formerly compact cities and suburbs are also heavily reconfigured by spatial diffusion and functional decentralisation. In any case, these processes have overridden once accepted divisions and replaced the ‘city’ as a coherent and bounded entity by a notion of an omnipresent and diffuse ‘urban landscape’, dense and consolidated in some regions, less so in others, but inhabited overall as potentially urban space. The ubiquity of the urban, which is not only the bounded space of the built environment but also the unbounded space of lifestyles, flows of people, goods, information and economic activity, has given rise to proposals for an “urban theory without an outside” (Brenner, 2014: 15), based on Lefebvre’s early argument of a fully urbanised society: “In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric.” (Lefebvre, cited in Brenner, 2014: 38). Since the 1970s, this emergent vision has turned into an everyday reality, supported by the ubiquitous presence of physical and immaterial infrastructure enabling urban-like activity almost everywhere.
To address this proposition further, this chapter reviews a wide range of theories on the extensive urbanisation theme. Section 3.1 starts with a discussion of competing definitions of the ‘urban region’, namely regarding incompatible forms of delimitation, conflicting planning options and conceptual inaccuracies. Accepting the limitations of existing definitions, section 3.2 goes on to distil four distinctive features of the often imprecise and over-generalised concept of extensive urbanisation – the ubiquity of centrality, the inner imbalances within the apparent territorial isotropy caused by the progression of the ‘urban’, the resulting dispersion of population and built-up space, and finally the difficulties in governing unbounded and poorly defined urban regions. They help frame the empirical work that follows, in the sense that the aspects that may best illustrate the specificity of second-tier urban regions can be seen as manifestations of these features. The next question is what perspective on the integration of urban regions best describes the processes happening in territories characterised by such forms of extensive urbanisation. Section 3.3 introduces the concept of metropolisation, discussed as an appropriate interpretative lens for this purpose, and shown to describe both a territorial process of spatial, functional and institutional integration of urban regions and a development strategy harnessing that objective. The genealogy and distinctive features of this concept are evaluated, namely the shift from a core-periphery notion of cities dispersing into urban regions to an integrative view of urban regions consolidating into
‘extensive cities’. Finally, the link between metropolisation as a way to describe and envision integration processes and the features of second-tier urban regions will be explored in the concluding section 3.4, elaborating on the concepts discussed in the introduction. The theoretical framework thus built by chapters 2 and 3 supports the elaboration of the research design in chapter 4.
3.1 Framing and defining extensive urbanisation
"It is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year 2000 A.D. may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb [...] the country will take to itself many of the qualities of the city. The old antithesis will indeed cease, the boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely a question of more or less populous." (Wells, 2008 [1902]: 774-775)
"The plain looks bleak as its stubble and barns / And the farms whose pine trees are rotten / The plain looks bleak and tired and fights no more / The plain looks bleak and dead - the city devours it." (Verhaeren [1895], cited in Nello, 2001: 17, my translation)
"The province [northwest Portugal] is the smallest in the land but has been growing the most in terms of population: […]. It has no more than three cities and twenty-five towns; however, the villages and hamlets are so numerous, that it looks like a continuous city […]. The town of Guimarães has four parishes, counting five thousand souls, but its territory spreads over ninety-six parishes with thirty thousand people." (Silveira, 1995 [1789]: 50-51, my translation)
The phenomenon of urbanisation spreading throughout whole geographical territories, giving rise to a coalescence of the meanings of ‘city’ and ‘region’ is not new at all. The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of a growing set of literature describing the end of cities as bounded and discernible entities and the generalisation of unbounded, fragmented and dispersed urbanisation processes of territorial scale, shifting the matter of concern of urban studies from the ‘city’ to the city-region, city-territory, urban region, urban landscape, and a plethora of neologisms trying to define the new entities taking shape (Gottmann, 1961; Friedmann, 1978; Sudjic, 1992; Ascher, 1995;
Sieverts, 1997; Soja, 2000; Nello, 2001; Hall and Pain, 2006; Schmid, 2006; Katz and Bradley, 2013; Brenner, 2014). Hall (2009) pinpoints the first reference to the ‘city region’ as a physical concept in Patrick Geddes’ Cities in Evolution (1915) – urban centres coming together into larger conurbations. Earlier than that, H. G. Wells’
Anticipations in the UK, Verhaeren’s poetry in Belgium, or Silveira’s 18th century description of the disperse settlement patterns in Northwest Portugal as a continuous city, all highlighted the observation that the presence of urban patterns and ways of life on the territory was becoming more and more dominant. Admittedly, the scale and scope of urbanisation has changed in the last 50 years from a ‘pointillist’ and diffuse fabric of buildings and localised connections to a heavier system based on large infrastructural axes and functional concentrations. But in many cases, like the ones illustrated by the
quotes above, the seeds of erratic and fragmented urbanisation processes gradually humanising places, creating landmarks and overriding clear urban-rural divisions were in place both in ‘cities’ and ‘non-cities’ at an earlier stage than much urban literature has acknowledged. Such loose and localised processes of in situ urbanisation were often countered, and sometimes totally obliterated, by the large-scale expansion of dominant core cities, but how much they could be constrained, and how much their traces have disappeared, is related to the scale and speed of expansion of core cities and their impact on the development of the surrounding urban region. This insight may signal an important difference between the spatial development history of urban regions with or without dominant primate cities and will be further explored in chapter 8.
Intensive and extensive urbanisation
‘Extensive urbanisation’, a term typically used in European research and policy (Font, 2004; Portas et al., 2007, 2012; European Parliament, 2009; Grosjean, 2010) is suggested in opposition to ‘intensive’ urbanisation processes, characterised by notions of physical expansion of core cities into dense built-up agglomerations over a relatively non-problematised void (the ‘empty’ hinterland). This was driven by heavy infrastructure and comprehensive planning, following a somewhat linear chronology of urbanisation, suburbanisation and dis-urbanisation (Berg et al. 1982) and stabilising into a spatially selective and socially differentiated configuration, famously represented by the models of the Chicago School. By contrast, the ‘extensive’ is mostly polycentric, undirected and fragmented (Schmid, 2006), allows simultaneous contrary trends rather than a life-cycle of successive stages, grows by pervasively colonising existing infrastructure (Secchi, 1989), and is often erratically induced by the polarising effect of large functional concentrations rather than any plan-based expansion (Sudjic, 1992).
The term ‘extensive’ also denotes the ubiquitous coverage of the urban as something that is there, rather than incrementally ‘extending’ from an assumed centre: a pervasive condition rather than a gradual process. A slightly different sense is contained in the term ‘extended urbanisation’ as proposed by Brenner (2013; 2014) and widely used in literature to denote contemporary urbanisation. While Brenner’s notion of ‘planetary
urbanisation’ is consistent with the implications of the term ‘extensive’ – despite its more problematic idea of a global fully urban landscape - his use of ‘extended’ suggests something made larger, stretching across space; the antonym would be ‘reduced’ or
‘narrowed down’. As such, ‘extended’ denotes a process in-the-making, small-to-large, evolving in time. By contrast, ‘extensive’ denotes the ubiquity of urbanisation and will be used henceforth as it provides a more precise description of the reality at hand.
The transition to extensive urbanisation is captured, among others, by Ascher (1995) in his description of the metapolis replacing the metropolis, and by Soja’s Exopolis, shifting from metropolitan to regional modes of urbanisation (2000; 2011). This shift is characterised by a convergence of the nature of formerly dissimilar concepts, such as city, suburb and rural (ibid.), and a fast pace of change, with planning tools trying to keep up rather than prepare the ground for urban development (Sieverts, 1997). This is visible in the way these territories both demand and resist joint planning (institutional, infrastructural, etc.): they become part of a large and networked urban landscape, but at smaller scales still reflect local rhythms and lifestyles, especially if they have retained older and functionally self-contained urban fragments. People shift between a localized lifestyle, with short, door-to-door mobility needs and tight social connections with family and neighbours, and a detached way of life based on leaping (by car) across different activity nodes (Muñoz, 2002). Economic and technological changes, such as the lesser importance of proximity for socio-economic interaction and the ubiquitous presence of infrastructure allowing activity everywhere (assuming there is a fair distribution and easy access to that infrastructure, which is often not the case, as shown by Graham and Marvin, 2001), tend to stabilise this condition in present times.
Several studies have looked into extensive urbanisation in Europe, often from the bleak perspective of ‘sprawl’ and its problems (EEA, 2006) but also through a less spatially selective lens illustrated by the ‘Rural-Urban Region’ (RUR), a spatial correlate of the ‘functional urban region’ (ESPON, 2005; 2007) developed by the PLUREL project (Piorr et al., 2011). The RUR acknowledges conventional urban, peri-urban and rural areas as fully urbanised, multi-functional territories and proposes an urban policy agenda that engages with this “new kind of space” (ibid.: 19). Urban, peri-urban areas and rural are distinguished according to their morphology, population density and main functions
not their intrinsic nature. Engaging with this territory as a whole is important because the PLUREL project estimates that only 50% of the European population defined as living in cities actually lives in areas defined as ‘urban’, with the other half equally distributed between the peri-urban and the rural within the RUR (ibid.: 27).
There is little point is establishing an urban vs. non-urban distinction when this population has access to transport, infrastructure and urban amenities and can be equally committed to an ‘urban’ lifestyle (Scott, 2011); when natural areas have been landscaped, planned or infrastructured and are part of the available consumer amenities; and when agriculture, the ‘rural’ activity by definition, has ‘de-ruralised’ (Domingues, 2012a) and is now an industrialised, corporate-organised market activity, supported by professional management and technological innovation, competing in global markets and embedded in quality control, distribution and trading processes whose components lie indifferently in ‘urban’, ‘rural’ or even ‘virtual’ spaces. All of this presents new problems of definition for the city, the urban as a whole, and, when considering the usefulness of policy arenas and research methods, for the boundaries of the ‘urban region’13.
3.1.1 Problems of definition
As a general and encompassing process, the concept of extensive urbanisation cannot be captured by a single piece of theory – many dimensions of the phenomena exist, as we can see from the immense set of neologisms invented to describe it14, and different theorists have looked at specific aspects, from the morphological processes first detected by Geddes to the functional approach refined for Europe by Hall and Hay (1980) and others. Relevant aspects can be social, technological, economic, spatial or political, and tracing the genealogy of all those strands of theory is outside the scope of this study. In fact, if we look for research conceptually grasping all these themes, we will mainly find
13 Among the many neologisms that describe the contemporary urban condition, ‘urban region’ is the simplest and most encompassing, as it is not constrained by the more policy-oriented sense of
‘city region’ in the UK context or the more particular terms proposed by the interpretation of specific scholars. As such, this is the term to be used henceforth.
14 Rufi (2003) provides a lexicon of newly created words and concepts to explain contemporary urban forms, covering technological, social, and formal perspectives on extensive urbanisation.
Interestingly, such a territory charged with so many classifications and names, is also defined as the nameless and formless realm of ‘non-place’ (Augé, 1995).
local syntheses, rather than grand theoretical generalisations, and what is lost in translation between them is perhaps one of the fragilities of the theoretical framework supporting the theme: specific observations of extensive urbanisation, each with their particular nomenclature have been put forward by Portas et al. (2007) and Domingues (2008) in Portugal; Nello (2001) and Font (2004) in Spain; Ascher (1995) and Choay (1994) in France; Indovina (1990) and Dematteis (2003) in Italy; Schmid (2006) and Corboz (1994) in Switzerland; Sieverts (1997) in Germany; and Meulder (2008) in Belgium, only to name a few. In English-speaking countries, the term ‘city region’ has been widely used (Ravetz, 2000; Scott, 2001; Hall and Pain, 2006), either addressing spatial-morphological features closer to the continental Europe perspectives above, or defining the space of economic and governance structures. A wide-ranging summary of these contributions can be found in Neuman and Hull (2009).
There are nonetheless some exceptions to this trend for rather self-contained and empirical approaches, with efforts to unify the linguistic and conceptual complexity of the phenomenon into a coherent theorisation for urban research. Soja’s work on Los Angeles (2000; 2011) is relevant, as well as Sudjic’s 100 Mile City (1992), an early effort to explain the forces driving urbanisation in major cities. An important theoretical endeavour is currently being undertaken by Brenner, in collaboration with Christian and other contributors (Brenner and Schmid, 2011). Their ongoing project on ‘planetary urbanisation’ has recently offered a collection of perspectives on the foundations, experiences, histories and ideologies of the phenomenon, that provide a radical, though not highly debatable (Storper and Scott, 2016), framework for urban theory.
“Please, draw me a region”15
What many of these descriptions have in common is the fact that the distinguishing features of ‘the city’ have been dissolved and, because of that, its actual delimitation – as something opposed to other types of space - is increasingly difficult. In his view of Switzerland as a fully urbanised territory, Schmid argues that indicators traditionally
15 Seymour Morsy, councillor at Val d’Oise department, France, in his contribution to the Metropolisation Community of Competence of the INTA Association (no date provided).
used to distinguish cities, such as size, density and heterogeneity, “no longer provide fruitful criteria in analysing the urban reality of today” (Diener et al., 2006: 173) – size (as well as boundary) is indeterminable, density variations occur with little respect for centre-periphery hierarchies and change over time (e.g. through daily commuting), and heterogeneity (in the sense of mixture of functions, social interactions and built forms) is so spread across urban landscapes that it is no longer distinctive for particular places16. Soja (2011) adds empirical evidence to this by resorting to changes in population density patterns – while formerly a clear gradient line could be seen between central areas and remote peripheries in most metropolitan areas, now that gradient has mostly flattened and density peaks can be found anywhere in the urban region17.
Problems of definition and precision emerge immediately regarding the actual boundaries of such regions and the ways to delimitate them for statistical, analytic or policy purposes. Cheshire and Gornostaeva point out that “one of the peculiarities of the EU is that each country has its own idea of what a ‘city’ is.” (2002: 17), an issue partially mitigated by the delimitation efforts of institutions such as ESPON (2005; 2007), the BBSR (2011) or the OECD (2012b). Nello (2001) sums up the main difficulties brought by these efforts: administrative definitions may help to gather official statistical data and understand political dynamics but, as a rule, functional interactions and urban forms transverse administrative boundaries. Spatial approaches based on built-up space obscure functional relations happening between physically disconnected locations. Functional definitions based on commuting or communication flows privilege certain activities (e.g.
work-residence relations), overrate their material impact on urban space and populations (the same view is held by Brenner, 2001) and mask the importance of other activities due to lack of data. Lifestyle and social specificities are dissolved by the convergence of
16 In fact, the debate about whether the city is a specific object of research in social sciences emerged from this idea of ubiquity of the urban. Saunders (1986) provides an account of what several schools said about the subject and how they tried to find specificity in the urban realm, often to see their constructions disputed, under the general argument that if the urban is everything, then maybe it is nothing distinctive – the object of social science will unfold in the city, its constraints emerge from the city, but it is not specifically of the city.
17 In line with the refusal of this centre-periphery duality, Vaughan et al. (2009) rhetorically ask
“whether the suburbs exist”. Their answer is that they do exist but are victims of a simplifying vocabulary that merely opposes them, as something ‘other’, lacking history or form, to fixed representations of the city.
general ways of life with ‘urban’ ways of life and do not provide precise limits. Finally, assessing the presence of urban functions depends on the chosen functional sectors and their respective accessibility tends to cover the greater part of the territory.
This study accepts the limitations of the different definitions and will resort to them either for conceptual reasons related to the motivations of the research or practical reasons related to the availability of data. The approach based on urban functions will be used, but with added care to use a sufficiently broad functional spectrum; the administrative definition will be used when it is necessary to comply with the scope of datasets. But a stable definition of the urban region across all chapters is not the purpose here: each boundary leaves a different footprint, suggesting an urban region working in
‘variable geometry’ according to needs at a given moment, whose definition is always temporary (MacLeod and Jones, 2007). As such, the study accepts the argument that bounding an urban region can only be usefully done in reference to its “specific patterns of flows or specific institutional structures.” (Nelles, 2013: 1352). How the boundaries change and what triggers that change is in itself a relevant research problem.
‘variable geometry’ according to needs at a given moment, whose definition is always temporary (MacLeod and Jones, 2007). As such, the study accepts the argument that bounding an urban region can only be usefully done in reference to its “specific patterns of flows or specific institutional structures.” (Nelles, 2013: 1352). How the boundaries change and what triggers that change is in itself a relevant research problem.