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Abstract
This paper examines the urban structure of the Alpine region and the surrounding lowland belt from the perspective of applying the Lisbon and Gothenburg strategies to the urban and regional development of the region. Throughout history the central position of the Alps in Europe has favored the formation of a polycentric urban structure which, from the functional and political-administrative point of view, can be divided into three large zones: an inner core with a more specifically Alpine identity, a border belt whose towns depend mainly on contiguous outside urbanization, and a metropolitan outer belt where we find some major European cities. The paper argues that to achieve a relatively autonomous development the cities of the Alpine core must participate in the global knowledge economy and at the same time draw on the specific resources (natural, historical-cultural, cognitive and institutional) of the Alpine territory. Taking into account the already existing geographic conditions, the transportation network, functional gravitations and cooperation networks, it is argued that this goal can be achieved by a small number of large cross-border potential polycentric urban regions networking the cities of the Alpine core with the metropolises of the foreland.
Notes
1. The exact boundary of the Alpine region is controversial. There is an institutional boundary corresponding to the 5954 municipalities covered in the Convention of the Alps (see later in this paragraph). According to the third CIPRA report (Citation2007), from this calculation should be excluded the 155 municipalities outside the Alpine arch. Bätzing (Citation2003) instead includes 6124 municipalities in the Alpine region, also covering those situated along the Alpine margin, including many cities. He therefore calculates a population of about 14.3 million, while the CIPRA boundary includes two million less.
3. The Dax and Parvex calculations do not include four projects selected in the 2006 last call for proposals.
11. The Ligurian Alps are not included, whereas the small parts of the Apennines belonging to the Regions of Piedmont and Lombardy have been included.
12. According to the research of the author (Dematteis Citation1975), based on the presence of central functions, there are 234. According to Perlik (Citation2001), who combines population and extra-agricultural work places, there are 239 urban centers, grouped into 189 ‘urbanization areas’.
13. They are: Grenoble, Klagenfurt-Villach, Annecy-Chambéry, the Austro-Swiss Rheintal, Innsbruck, Trento, Lugano-Bellinzona-Locarno, Bolzano and Leoben (Bätzing Citation2003).
17. The demographics have been updated according to the latest national censuses.
18. The table is based on the first results of a research project on the Alpine Centres of Innovation carried out at the DITER Department (Polytechnic and University of Turin), with the collaboration of Federica Corrado and Alberto Di Gioia.