Urban Systems as Growth Machines? Mayors’ Governing Networks against Global Indeterminacy

Abstract

Mayors’ behaviour reflects their personality, their background, their political attitudes; but also the urban system in which they act.1 By viewing them as actors within multifaceted social systems, one can obtain valuable insight into some constitutive features of a sociological object that stands at the forefront of current debate: the ‘European City’. The term ‘city’ will not, however, be used here with its traditional evocation of a distancing between two antithetic environments, the city versus the countryside, and the related concepts of the cultural milieu versus the landscape. Rather, given the coalescence of settlements (with the resulting new boundaries in service provision), the phrase ‘urban system’ will be preferred, thus allowing the analysis of local democracy to be interpreted within the framework of European territorial transformation.

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