Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 1
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May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
25
end, new forms of cooperation among institutional actors and policies have been observed
(Harvey 1989, Sassen 2001). Moreover, the cuts in the national budgets have drastically
reduced the policy-options open to regional and local governments, which are often forced to
manage the resulting tensions at the local level. For instance, local and regional governments
have to learn how to face the reduction of the financial resources transferred to them from the
centre, and most of the time they can do so only by imposing new local taxes or by increasing
the existing ones. At the same time, they have to deal with the declining quality in the supply
of public services, or find ways – also drawing on resources from the private sector – to
finance activities and services aimed at improving the quality of urban life. In short, the line
of action of public intervention has increasingly moved toward the periphery of the
administrative systems. Regional and local governments have experienced an increasing
responsibility in trying to contrast the risk of fragmentation and marginality in local societies
(De Vivo and Sacco 2008). For these reasons, when the national governments lose their
capacity of steering and guiding the society, or see it eroded away, the cities gain a stronger
role as ‘collective actors’ compared to the past.
In an attempt to protect the local interests, the urban political élite try to adjust to
these processes by balancing economic and social demands; thus, policies aimed at economic
development are combined with redistributive measures. Where, acting in this way, the urban
political élite have succeeded in opening new opportunities for social mobility and for the
well-being of the citizens, they have gained in terms of their own image. Of course, this brief
outline of the new developments in urban studies does not make justice to the different
contributions offered by a great number of scholars (Borraz and Le Galès 2010; Jouve 2005;
Pardo and Prato eds 2012, Sassen 2008); there are, nevertheless, common points in the
literature which are worth emphasizing. One of these is that in view of the decline experience
by many cities, particularly in Europe, increasing attention has been paid to the revaluation
and possible exploitation of the city old centres, also in cultural terms (Vicari Haddock 2004).
More generally, emphasis has been put on the fact that cities are represented and perceived as
the places where the most relevant social and economic infrastructures for global
competitiveness are concentrated.
During the Fordism period, and under the influence of Keynesian policies, economic
development was entrusted to the ability of the cities to provide adequate conditions for
competitiveness: logistic spaces, structures for services, human resources and so on. For a
long time urban policies failed to attract much attention — due also to the influence of a
