All Rights ReservedLeboreiro Amaro, Alberto2024-04-192024-04-192013978-83-7493-877-8https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1608Strategies For the Post-Speculative City : Proceedings of the 4th AESOP European Urban Summer School, Madrid, Spain, September 2013The urban reality of Europe is metropolitan, and good governance of Europe’s metropolitan regions is crucial for the future wellbeing and prosperity of Europe. The total population of the European Union is estimated at about 533 millions inhabitants, with 73% living in urban areas. The Urban Audit of Eurostat identifies 127 Larger Urban Zones with populations of over half a million. These are Europe’s metropolitan regions and areas. A Metropolitan Region is defined by at least 50,000 inhabitants in its core city and 500,000 inhabitants in the entire region (BBR, 2005; DATAR, 2004). From an economic point of view, deregulation policies are applied to the liberalised markets of metropolitan areas. In the global context, competition is emerging between all the cities and globalising cities require internal restructuring based on the information revolution. In the new information society there is a need to modify the spatial network which is concentrating people and activities in cities and financial centres, but dispersing activities in their peripheries. The Metropolitan areas are the engine of European development, the centres of economic, political and cultural life. They are also the centres of political and economic management, expressed in a highly developed infrastructure of specialised services. Acting as external challenge the globalised economy is characterised by the flow of people, goods, capital, services, ideas and information, as well as relationships between organisation and interaction. Metropolitan regions face serious structural transformations, economically, politically and territorially. (Blotevogel 2005a, OECD 2001, Sassen 1991). It is necessary to reconsider the process of evolution of both core cities and the periphery, the urban environment and rural space.EnglishopenAccessconferencePaper32-41