Evolution of urban hierarchies under globalisation in Western and Eastern Europe

European cities may be regarded as having
formed a system of well-interconnected entities
over many centuries. The peculiarities of their
hierarchical functional organization and territorial patterns have been extensively analysed.
This study details a few contributions from the
science of complex systems meant to formalize
this knowledge. This includes a representation
of the metropolisation process occurring within
a system of cities with the help of scaling laws
and network analysis. We define the metropolisation process – not at the local level of one
metropolitan area but at a macro-geographical
level – as the ability of larger cities to capture
the activities related to innovation waves and to
be the first to benefit from these in terms of
population growth. A series of urban attributes
are used to quantify, through exponents of
scaling laws the differentiated behaviour of urban hierarchies when opening up to the global
networks that characterize the most recent
wave of innovation. Network analysis provides
another type of formalism that helps us construct a better understanding of how globalization processes, especially the spread of multinational firms, have diffused in the Eastern part
of the European urban system.