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French
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Abstract
While the spotlight remains on the world’s very large metropolitan areas, Patrick Le Galès analyses how, in European cities, actors, groups and organisations are involved in designing integration processes, strengthening urban societies and organising modes of governance in which elected representatives and urban government play an important role. An original long-term phenomenon, European cities form a dense network of agglomerations of between 200 000 and 2 or 3 million inhabitants that are constantly reinvented. Faced with conflicting pressures — mobility, social tensions, poverty, immigration, globalisation of companies, entanglement of public authorities and policies that lead to fragmentation — they continue to grow by developing collective strategies. This second edition with an unprecedented preface confirms the robustness of the model of European cities, the reality of their investment in sustainable development issues and their political mobilisation to recreate cohesion in fragmented cities; but also, unfortunately, their greatest difficulty, in a context of crisis, to finance their projects and to play a leading role in the invention of less national European societies. Classic of urban research, in France and internationally, this book received the ‘Stein Rokkan’ (ECPR/ISSC) prize for comparative research in 2002 and the ‘Bologna Il Mondo/Il Mulino’ prize in its Italian version published in 2005. (Editor summary)