In a preceding paper (Louvain Economic Review), we define city globalization as the process by which a city gains the ability to coordinate complex economic activities at a global scale. The resulting "global cities" carry out the functions of design, decision and control in the global economy....

Cities include half of the world?s population and economic power more than proportionally. What can the economic argument about their formation, structure and evolution say? How can the contemporary economics of cities reflect the economy of contemporary cities? Over the passed years, the city...

This paper revisits the relation between proximity and interactions, in the light of new thoughts on the concepts of proximity. We start from the idea that proximity, in the most general sense, reflects the easiness to interact. It results that: (1) proximity can be expressed in terms of costs;...

History of population and employment suburbanization, mainly in the United States, suggests three characteristics of the phenomenon. 1/ Suburbanization results in urban sprawl in such a way that population and employment increase more rapidly in the periphery than in the center. 2/...

Metropolization is not a new phenomenon : metropolises have been around for centuries. The prime and permanent function of a metropolis is the coordination of economiec activities at a world scale. This function has been applied to different activities in history, depending on technological...

<marquage typemarq="gras"/> Metropolization is not a new phenomenon : metropolises have been around for centuries. The prime and permanent function of a metropolis is the coordination of economic activities at a world scale. This function has been applied to different activities in history, depending on technological...

Von Thünen’s monocentric model is considered as one of the foundations of spatial economics. Most of its assumptions have been transfered from agricultural to urban space by New Urban Economics. This transposition gave new impetus both to the monocentric model and urban economics. Yet the...

Though the region is a multiform or even omniform concept, the concrete region is the privileged framework of spatial thought and action. Now half of the human beings in the world, and more than three quarters of Europeans live in cities. Cities produce more than proportionally to their...