Reconsidering medium-sized cities

Abstract

This study aims to make a contribution to the debate on the new opportunities that now seem to be arising for cities that in population terms are medium-sized. The first chapter gives a systematic presentation of the ideas prevailing in the sixties regarding both the criteria for defining this kind of city and the role that was assigned to them as far as regional development policy was concerned. The second chapter concentrates on how the new social and economic climate of the seventies and the spread of new ways of looking at cities and urban systems seem to offer the chance of a more active and effective role for medium-sized cites to play by breaking the determinist relationship between population size and importance. Finally, the third chapter sketches out the new strategies to be developed in order to let medium-sized cities take advantage of the changes identified in the previous chapter.