Networks and the Metropolis

Cities are part of a number of national and international networks with a wide variety of purposes. A city’s inclusion or exclusion from a network or its position in it, affects its prosperity. The networks may be where the power resides but there is an interdependency between them and their nodes, which are the cities. Metropolitan structures that have emerged in the past thirty years in France, Britain and Germany play an important role in the global economy and concentrate power as nodes in the networks they are part of. Both networks and nodes compete for dominant positions and their powers are in constant flux. It could be argued that the search for an ideal model of metropolis is the result of trying to resolve the tensions between efficiency and positioning in the global networks on the one hand, and the successful functioning of internal networks which require the involvement and participation of the citizenship on the other. Additional issues are the relationship between the metropolis and its hinterland and the emergence of counter powers that challenge the existing hegemons and the networks themselves.