ABSTRACT
In recent decades, leading researchers have identified a plethora of structural transformations in the developed economies as well as emerging new patterns in global city regions that are in place, ongoing and/or just beginning. In the flow of contributions to this discussion, we find “creativity – the future of large cities”, “city of bits”, “the network society”, “a post-urban world”, “the rise of the creative class”, “the concept of global cities”, “the triumph of the city” and “the well-tempered city”.
Since urbanization has been a fundamental characteristic of human history, we might ask ourselves if this is the first time that the urban system goes through such a fundamental transformation or if there are other such examples? Moreover, if so, we might ask if there exist some general drivers behind such transformations? To answer these questions is important, because to know where we are heading we must know where we stand and from where we came. However, it is not enough to know the answers to these questions to understand how global city regions are transforming and renewing themselves and what actors are involved, if we accept the claim that these regions have gone through fundamental structural transformations in recent decades. Neither do the answers to these two questions help us to understand how these structural transformations have changed the relationships between the global city regions themselves as well as between the global city regions and the cities, the towns and the countryside that make up the rest of the world.
In this chapter, we discuss the issues raised above with the purpose to get a better understanding of innovative transformations in global city regions of the post-urban world.
