While small and medium-sized towns are profoundly rooted in the national territorial narrative (Delpirou, 2013), their role and position in France are not clearly identified, either in terms of territorial planning policy or in the field of academic research. And yet these "intermediate" spaces...

This study aims at analyzing the impacts of administrative problems resulting from the two level form of urban government whose framework is outlined in the Law for Metropolitan Municipalities, over the notion of integrated planning. It is suggested that it would be impossible to mention a...

Historically Switzerland is characterized by numerous small towns. During the twentieth century, the image of Swiss cities has changed: the expansion of the city has reached the limits of administrative urban borders, penetrating in peripheral locations. The main reasons concern not only the...

The paper uses the consolidation of municipalities brought about by the Fascist dictatorship in Italy during the 1920s to gauge the role of the size of local jurisdictions for economic development. It finds that the consolidation was associated with relevant net welfare gains for the communities...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...