New economic poles in the periphery of European metropolitan areas

The dispersal of population, commerce and industry to the outer edges of cities is, in quantitative terms, the most important development in urban areas in west-ern industrial societies in the last half century. The processes of peripheral growth have for a long time been observed and interpreted in the context of what might be called a 'discourse of dissolution of urban structures'. Key items of the discourse are terms like 'urban sprawl' or 'dispersal' and a rhetoric of a vanishing of the (traditional) 'European City'. In the last decade the discourse has been partly replaced by a perspective that focuses more on the newly emerging spatial structures on the urban fringe itself. The new discourse on urban reorganisation in the periphery is based on various sources: - Edge Cities and other associated forms of suburban centres have become ever more important elements of metropolitan regions in North America. - New theoretical approaches, like Regulation Theory, put emphasis on develop-ments in the urban periphery in search for 'post-Fordist' urban structures. The paper examines the question what types of new spatial clusters of economic activities can be identified in the periphery of European metropolitan areas. Empirical results of a cross section of case studies are presented. The case studies focus on metropolitan areas of European importance (Berlin, Budapest, Madrid, Moscow and Paris). Two levels of economic poles are identified: - New economic poles: concentration areas of economic activities that emerge in the last decades and have and employment size of at least 5000. - New economic nodes: activity centres of a minimum employment size of at least 1000. The results show that very few of these new economic poles bear resemblance to American Edge Cities.