Shedding Light or Casting Shadows? Relations between Primary and Secondary Cities

Abstract

Multicentric urban regions have become the dominant mode of urbanisation in Europe, yet urbanists lack a framework to capture and describe the unfolding spatial organisation in the process of metropolitan integration. This chapter builds on the concepts of ‘borrowed size’ and ‘agglomeration shadows’ to investigate the new interactions and interdependencies between the cities making up multicentric urban regions, with particular emphasis on the benefits and the costs of this integration and patterns of uneven development. It has remained unclear why one city profits from metropolitan integration in the sense of borrowing size, whereas another may face the agglomeration shadows of nearby cities. This chapter explores and empirically substantiates this novel framework of borrowed size/agglomeration shadows by examining cities in the Randstad Holland, identifying factors with which positions in the ‘agglomeration shadow’ or positions of ‘borrowing size’ are associated.