The recent urban dynamics of industrialised countries show the rise of a new spatial order, which simplifies 'vertical' relationships between the cities and complicates, instead, the 'horizontal' inter-urban patterns. Some northern Italian regions, such as Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna,...

The aim of the paper is to present a critical view of theoretical works on city size. We begin with the consideration that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the question of optimal city size tended to be expressed in a misleading way. The real issue is not 'optimal city size' but 'efficient size',...

In a globalising economy, territories and not just firms increasingly find themselves in competition with each other. In fact, unlike countries, cities and regions compete, in single currency areas, on the basis of an absolute advantage principle and not a comparative advantage principle. This...