EUROPEAN CITIES, THE INFORMATIONAL SOCIETY, AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

In this article the main structural-trends are discussed, that together and in their interaction, provide the framework of social, economic, and political life for European cities in this particular historical period. The informational technological revolution is the backbone of all other major structural trends. It produces a new social structure, the informational society, depending on the capacity to retrieve, store, process, and generate information of a global economy. Finally, there is the ineluctable process of European integration. From these trends stem some spatial transformations. First, the national-international business centres, made up of an infrastructure of telecommunications, urban services, and office space, are the engines of the informational-global economy. Secondly, the cities are becoming socially and functionally more diversified spaces. The new elites are locating in rehabilitated areas of the central city, also the locus for the ghettoes of new immigrants. In these dual cities, urban policy has to meet the articulation of the globally oriented economic functions of the city with the locally rooted society.