European Cities' Development Strategies and the EU's Territorial Agenda

Globalisation and territorial competition have generated an 'environment' to which European cities have necessarily to adapt to. The required 'adjustment processes', though, promise to be difficult for most of them with straightforward adverse territorial and macro-economic consequences. Constrained by the nature of the external shocks and the limit of their own adjustment capacity, European cities - whose strategic sovereignty has substantially increased in the past decade - may enter development trajectories that put in question both the 'European model of city' and the 'European model of territory' - and that may not be functional to meeting the long-term meta-objectives set in the 'Lisbon Agenda'. Against this background, the paper aims at contributing to the construction of conceptual framework to address the task of forecasting and regulating European cities' development trajectories.