Secondary Cities

Abstract

This book introduces and explores the concept of ‘secondary cities’—cities that fuel, compete with, and are otherwise relationally connected to larger and dynamic neighbouring cities. Emphasizing the significance of intra-regional relationality to contemporary urban conditions and challenging common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’, this book advances a research agenda that centres uneven urban development concerns and opens space for reimaging urban and regional development. While most scholarly engagements with ‘regions’ and ‘city-regions’ and processes of ‘metropolisation’ proceed from the perspective of the regional core-city, this book takes as the starting point the secondary city perspective. Doing so emphasizes the subordinate status of secondary cities relative to their dominant neighbours and considers how the regional distribution of power and resources shape urban conditions. Gathering leading international scholars, and drawing from case studies in Europe, Australia, and North America, the book illustrates the secondary city experience and situates it within urban development theory and practice. In a moment when welcome attention is being brought to ‘ordinary’ cities, small cities, shrinking cities, legacy cities, and cities otherwise understood to fall outside the usual emphasis on global winners, the secondary city concept highlights the importance of scale and relationality to understanding contemporary urban conditions. The book seeks to understand the complex political and economic dynamics that characterize the relationships between secondary cities and regional core-cities, raising new questions about urban and regional development in the Global North and reimagining the subordinate status of secondary cities to showcase their full potential.