Les Villes mediterranéennes dans la structuration du système des villes européennes

Abstract

This article presents a study on the position of the European cities within general urban system of Europe in 2000 with the purpose of assessing its level and capacity of supranational integration, and more precisely to explore the specific position of Mediterranean cities in this context. The competitiveness of different territories today is integrated in the logic of urban networks, in which cities have a fundamental paper. In this paper, the position of 180 urban areas of more than 200,000 inhabitants of the European Union of the 15; along with Norway and Switzerland is analyzed using fifteen different indicators of the population, culture, tourism and finances. From the resulting classification some conclusions are obtained: 1) the importance of the urban and national structures in the concentration of international functions; 2) the cooperation and association between cities in different space scales and the importance that this ?interurban competition? for the development of these networks has, and 3) the absence of homogeneity of the European Mediterranean cities from the perspective of its international position.