Contrasts between first-tier and second-tier cities in Europe: a functional perspective

ABSTRACT

Second-tier cities have been experiencing renewed interest within policy and research contexts, which is reversing a tradition of relative neglect due to the long-standing focus on large cities and capitals. This paper compares European second-tier and first-tier cities with regard to the presence of urban functions and how these are spread over their urban regions. The analysis shows the existence of a substantial ‘first city bonus’: a surplus of urban functions in first-tier cities which cannot be explained by their size or network embeddedness. We also show that second-tier cities are better served with urban functions in the absence of a dominant capital. In first-tier urban regions, the core municipality exploits the critical mass of the urban region to support its own functions, leaving that region functionally underserved. Second-tier cities lack this absorptive capacity, and their urban regions are endowed with more urban functions. These functional differences mean that second-tier cities demand a differentiated research and policy approach, in which city-regional integration becomes an important territorial development strategy. Rather than the dispersion process in first-tier cities leading to a ‘regionalization of the city’, integration in second-tier urban regions may be seen as a process of ‘citification of the region’.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban regions
• urban functions
• second-tier cities
• metropolitan integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The BBSR database focuses on a selection of ‘top-level’ metropolitan functions in five categories: politics, economy, science, transport and culture. See Section 3 for a more detailed description of the data sources.

2. Markusen et al. (1999) write about the specific spatial arrangements of firms in second-tier urban regions, but do not provide a comparison with first-tier cities and do not attempt to typify a contrast.

3. This is still different from Champion's third typology, the ‘fusion’ mode, in which previously independent centres of similar size merge together as a result of their separate growth and improved linkages. Our perception is that the more mixed and ambiguous incorporation mode, halfway between the centrifugal and fusion types, is often disregarded in face of the polarizing debates between the other two.

Additional information

Funding

Rodrigo Cardoso would like to thank Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) for financial support through the grant SFRH/BD/80157/2011. Evert Meijers would like to thank the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for financially supporting his work.