Author Description

Thanks to reality and the stubborn resistance of history to accommodate urban planning, often cities of about the same size wind up fairly close to each other and, although they do not merge or in other ways behave as one entity, they become co-dependent either formally or informally in terms of identity if not its services. Meijers presents here his doctoral dissertation, which was undertaken with the support of an urban research project in The Netherlands. He describes polycentric urban regions and their nearly universal quest for synergy, the division of labor of one set of cities in the Randstad, Flemish Diamond and RheinRuhr areas, moving from a "central places" theory too a network model, realizing the potential of a polycentric urban region, abandoning the idea that adding up small cities makes a metropolis, and synthesizing theoretical and case study information.