CLUSTERING THE HETEROGENITY OF EU URBAN PERFORMANCES

Cities represent today the intrinsic socio-economic complexity of local systems. Looking at the performances of urban systems enable us to explaining the main factors of territorial development. By moving from the theory of "progressive systems", and assigning to the cities some of this theory's properties, it is possible to outline a methodological perspective to capture the emerging phenomena describing the cities' performances. Keeping this view in mind, the aim of the paper is facing the intrinsic socio-economic complexity and heterogeneity of cities within the EU integration policies.. In order to better qualify this issue, we provide a multidimensional scaling approach, as a quantitative method useful to compare the several urban performances by letting a cluster evidence among the EU cities emerge.