By virtue of their size, large cities act as centers that service the needs of adjacent territories and, at the same time, as junctions of diverse networks, or hubs. This significance extends far beyond the limits of their territories. While the former function deals with the local characteristics of urban centers, the latter has a bearing on their external properties, including involvement in globalization processes. The duality of these cities’ nature provides them with the necessary stability and adaptability. The local element plays the role of a stabilizer of development, while the global element stimulates it.

Proponents of globalization believe that Russia’s largest cities must follow in the footsteps of the ‘global cities’ and compete for command positions in the global economy, using the geopolitical and geo-economic advantages of their Eurasian location and Soviet-era heritage.

As good as all of this might sound, it does not seem very realistic, and the crux of the matter is bigger than just Russia’s backwardness or the lack of readiness of its major cities to take on commanding functions on a planetary scale. In the Western countries, truly ‘global cities’ are few in number, too, and they have somewhat specific functions. Anthony Giddens (2000) says they help form the institutional structure of the global economy and global society instead of merely redistributing the spheres of economic influence.

The last ten years have shown that the conscientious separation of local and hub functions, which could possibly set the whole mechanism of economic growth into motion by the push of just one button, does not produce the desired effect. In spite of the belief that development requires firm reliance on one’s own strength, only a fraction of the cities with a population between 300,000 to 500,000 people, and located near export-oriented manufacturing giants, have been able to improve their position thanks to support in the form of local resources. These are the centers of resource production and/or primary processing, like Surgut in West Siberia, Cherepovets in the upper reaches of the Volga, Magnitogorsk in the Urals, Lipetsk in the south of western Russia, and some others. A slightly bigger group of large cities have managed to use their location at the crossroads of financial, commodity and human resource flows as a lever for radical economic transformation. This group embraces the capitals of Russia’s constituent national republics, the central cities of seven federal districts that service the state governance system, the few resort places, some seaports, and towns located along the state border, since they act as gates to the outside world. The fact that some large cities, including historical inter-regional centers with a population of over a million people, have fallen off of this list testifies to the importance of searching for a new paradigm of development.

THE CRISIS OF THE LOCAL: OLD SOLUTIONS TO NEW CHALLENGES

The winds of change have introduced the opportunity of independent action to the governmental authorities of all levels, and simultaneously vested in them responsibility for the decisions they make. However, neither government agencies nor the people proved capable of making such decisions in a situation where open markets and dependence on global processes poured down like rain out of a clear blue sky. Only the city of Moscow, which concentrated its financial and human resources, succeeded in efficiently exploiting its status as a national capital. It successfully transformed its monopoly over command and administrative functions into big economic advantages. All of the other large cities needed almost a decade to adapt to the changes. A clear trend toward economic growth with attendant improvements in incomes, as well as quality and standards of living, came to replace the steady degradation of the urban environment and economic decline only in 2001-2002. Evidence of this change was found in many polls, which exposed the growth of Russia’s urban middle class (see Graph 1).

Source: Sotsium Foundation, Yekaterinburg, 2004

Almost all regional capitals and largest cities have drafted their own strategic development plans. By 2005, six out of Russia’s eleven cities where the population exceeds a million people had designed and endorsed those strategy documents. They are St. Petersburg (1997), Novosibirsk (2002), Yekaterinburg (2003), Omsk (2002), Rostov-on-Don (2004), and Kazan (2003). Other major cities incorporated the key concepts of the strategic development in program documents, setting out the social and economic guidelines for the coming years. Most typically, such documents resemble a declaration of intentions – they mention objectives without specifying the techniques for achieving them. They combine far-fetched prospects with very detailed programs, but provide little cohesion between them.

The basic reason why those strategic plans are largely declarative is due to the difficulty of identifying a city’s place in the system of political, social and economic relationships. Their authors proceed from the assumption that the municipal administration of those urban areas enjoys considerable freedom in choosing the strategies of development, together with the methods of attaining the chosen strategic objectives. Yet the real situation shows that a huge number of external and internal factors influencing a city’s development are beyond the control of the local authorities.

The list of factors that interfere with the social and economic decision-making process includes political problems, covert conflicts between mayors of regional capitals and governors of those same regions, and competition between geographically divergent centers of administration and centers of economic growth. An administrative center is rarely the center of economic growth in, or a financial donor for, a particular region. Not infrequently, it deprives the revenues earned by the region’s second or third largest cities. The examples of such couples or triads of cities are many: Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil, Samara and Togliatti, Khanty-Mansiisk and Surgut/Nizhnevartovsk, Krasnodar and Novorossiisk/Sochi, to name just a few. And yet, even if one ignores the list of above factors, the cities will still have to overcome managerial obstacles and revise the guidelines for social and economic growth.

Postindustrial economies show in bold relief that the places where money is consumed have greater chances for advancement than the places of production. This means that the sector of material production has reached a certain level of efficiency and scale, beyond which a quantitative buildup of output no longer brings the desired results. Apart from trading in energy resources, the tertiary sector of the economy – most importantly, the information industry, as it offers better wages and consumes increasingly more labor resources – becomes the main tool for generating super-profits.

In the meantime, a strategy of development requiring a redistribution of resources in favor of the innovative and tertiary sectors of the economy does not fit the logic of routine decision-making at local administrations. No one can resist the temptation to spend the money coming today, even though this may have negative consequences for the future. St. Petersburg offered a good illustration when it struggled to win a Toyota factory on its territory against the city of Perm. St. Petersburg’s authorities are touting their city as a Russian Detroit, as they attempt to arrange the placement of Renault and Nissan factories there as well. But the sizable investment of $770 million to $950 million, which may breathe some oxygen into the city’s construction industry and provide an impetus to the economy through the creation of new jobs, will bring more problems tomorrow since the factories will need  a large workforce, and the workers will need housing and social services. Also, different business sectors will begin to compete for placing their own facilities in one of the country’s crucial postindustrial centers. Yet the experience of the biggest Europeans cities – which eventually had to relocate automobile factories from their territories – proves that the abovementioned problems are unavoidable. Moscow is now following in Europe’s footsteps and has announced plans to move AZLK, the manufacturer of small cars, from overly expensive city property.

Postindustrial trends in the economy have predetermined shifts in the nature of interconnection between population settlement and location of most efficient economic activities. It is not the population that moves to newly developed zones where relocated industrial facilities will be situated; rather, the new branches of the economy emerge in the places where the population possesses the appropriate qualities.

Society’s moral guidelines and values have changed, too. While industrial society struggled to rid itself of poverty and ‘spongers’ (recall the campaigns on ‘parasites’ in the former Soviet Union), the postindustrial society looks at these things differently. It does not generate money with sweat running down the spine anymore, as the amount of consumption becomes excessive in many ways. This society, the backbone of which consists of the middle class, does not struggle with economic misfortunes – it simply fences itself off from poverty. High-standard comforts, exclusivity and quality of life replace the ownership of an apartment, an automobile or a country house as the main criteria of success and prosperity. Spare time also becomes a crucial value.

A changing configuration of the relationship between the center and provinces is the third hallmark of postindustrial society. These relations become more complex and do not boil down to a simple formula under which the capital exists as a pump for sucking the provinces dry. Instead, the system of territorial governance receives an overhaul. An open economy that has little restraint on communications and transcends administrative borders demands that equal importance be given to vertical and horizontal relations. It also demands that the coordination of interests replace subordination. The coordination of plans increases, pushing competition aside, and is substituted by external investment and external demand, on the one hand, and the redistribution of roles and exchange of services, on the other.

THE CITY’S HUB FUNCTIONS AND SOCIAL STABILITY

Anyone who defines the strategy of a city’s development as a ‘network junction’ has to admit that the city is embedded in several dimensional systems at any given time. Therefore, the goals of strategic development differ in each case, requiring a diversity of political instruments and concrete steps. The process of globalization has vastly expanded the dimensional relationships and opportunities of the urban areas, and increased the variety of options for development that provide for variable degrees of participation in global and local processes. An intertwining of these two concepts means that the old forms of governmental mobilization based on the monopoly-concentration-competition triad, which used to secure economic growth, have become far less efficient in terms of practicality, although they have not lost their significance altogether.

In light of the dominant role that the junction functions of large cities play (with economic concentration and competition as guidelines), all the flows are drawn into the most powerful focal points of the economic space. The policy of territorial administration based on these principles resembles a casting to a club of select personalities, and the local elites are fighting with all their might to gain membership. Yet the artificial selection of “the most powerful” centers slashes the number of centers that are capable of structuring a space around themselves and ensuring regional integration. Thus, wealthy centers emerge – “dissociated islands… surrounded by impoverished lumpenplanet” (Riccardo Petrella, 1995). This policy has a side effect in the form of a gradual decay of the once united space of the country, and signs of this process are visible already now.

In the meantime, the abovementioned process is not inevitable and it can be channeled to a different direction by leveling off disparities between territories. This will be possible if city development strategies revolve around a different triad, namely, mobility-coordination-specialization.

Mobility implies that interdependence becomes prevalent over geographic proximity and administrative subordination, and accessibility turns into a key parameter for development. These factors reduce the levels of centralization in a natural way and help make the population’s living standards more equal across the board. Coordination is impossible without an openness of information and a search for a balance of interests. Competition and competitive advantages must not hamper a neighbor in this case but, rather, bring benefits to society. Finally, specialization means not so much a buildup of competitive advantages but rather a complementary relationship amidst high levels of development of a particular branch of the economy in each city, given its importance for society as a whole. Apart from a growing autonomy in the decision-making process of each urban area, the tapping of a city’s identity implies the importance of coordinated actions, the redistribution of functions. Furthermore, it implies the responsibility among the centers of various levels, together with an intensified exchange of services.

In other words, the currently predominant logic of ‘power and money concentration’ runs into a systemic contradiction with the logic of ‘concerted effort,’ which emphasizes the relations of partnership, as opposed to the command-and-administrative methods.

Illustrative in this context are classic examples of the global cities concept as regards the driving forces of development. Although many Russian cities can scarcely hope to achieve such a status, many of the approaches to the global cities concept have relevance for us, too. Peter Taylor, for example, believes that the transformation of cities into hubs of the global economy arises from multinational companies, which demand financial services, high-speed transportation, marketing, consumer options, etc. Hierarchic relations emerging in networks of cities and, consequently, the central roles they play are derivatives of the companies’ business strategies. The presence – or absence – of a major corporate headquarters, the proliferation of globally acclaimed brands, and a high rate of international flights are all indicators that a particular city falls into the category of ‘global.’ Add to this the institutional element of globalization and the role in the global political processes that cities have inherited.

Manuel Castells offers a somewhat different approach when he suggests that the role of manufacturing is subjugated to that of information and knowledge in today’s world. The cities engaged in the exchange of information, capitals and state power grow into “relatively freestanding ‘nodal points’ of global flows” and augment their centralizing functions regardless of their size and geographic position. All other cities are heading for diminished status and will be eventually pushed to the periphery of major processes.

Olaf Hunners, the author of a third approach, addresses the human as opposed to the economic dimension of the city, since global cities, above all, are centers of human flows, and only then are they flows of state power, finance, and information. Hunners’ concept appeals to the city’s focusing role in the global cultural process. He asks why it happens that only a handful of cities become the centers of production of a new culture and draw in huge numbers of people from around the world – and not just from nearby regions. Hunners shows that cultural productivity is transitory and that the creativity of cities dies out and re-emerges again. He perceives the cultural process in a broad format and views the city as the marketplace of culture, claiming that four very different categories of people – business executives (and especially expatriates), tourists, migrants and artistic professionals, including actors, artists and designers – give shape to that market today. All of these contemporary nomads are united by the brevity of their sojourns in a city, where they actualize their careers and creative ambitions, while maintaining close ties with their past or future residence.

It follows from all three approaches that a global city is a center generating and accepting human flows, and its internal life depends solely on its ability to adjust to the preferences of the nomads of globalization. Sustainable development of a global city demands its unending variability and its status as transit point is the most productive form of its existence, determining to a great degree its image, ability for innovations, centralizing role and its engagement in global processes. It is not accidental that the ‘global city’ concept is developing in step with the concept of a ‘dual city’ which is a city of double standards or, to use the French interpretation, a city with differing rates of progress.

If one takes a look at Russian cities through the prism of Western theory, the overlapping of many tendencies and risks becomes so apparent that it will not require any special evidence. Quite obviously, Russia’s largest regional centers have a very tentative access to the redistribution of global wealth and get dividends from mediating in the export of natural resources. This does not mean, however, that they do not witness the problems typical of global cities. The domestic Russian market is big enough, to say nothing of the country’s size, and that is why it is the internal and not external impulses that play a key role in the ongoing processes. As the largest cities stay inside a general flow of economic, social and cultural change, they gradually begin to act as partners, not subordinates, of the national capital, taking part to one degree or another in the economic, information and cultural exchanges. They are drawn into inter-regional and international relationships and eventually get independence on the global markets.

The basic transforming role in the largest cities in Russia, as in all industrialized countries, is taken by the banking sector, big corporations and main distributing networks that locate their headquarters and/or offices there.

The second crucial player that stimulates urban transits is government that invests certain cities with power-wielding functions. Russia has a well-tested and original technique of raising a city’s status and wellbeing, and this is to enlarge an administrative and territorial entity where it is located or to create a new territorial entity and give it additional administrating powers. Take the city of Tyumen, for example, which has gained much from a partial reinstatement of its former administrative duties, which gave it the functions of a capital of three territorial units at a time – the Tyumen Region proper, the oil-rich Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area and the natural gas-rich Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area. The city – that once received a meager three-percent regional investment – has regained the role as distributor of tax money raised in the country’s most affluent territories. One reaction to Tyumen’s growing administrative importance was population growth that began in 2001, together with increasing costs of living. Tyumen’s prices for housing are 15 percent higher than in Yekaterinburg, 25 percent higher than in Novosibirsk, and 30 percent higher than in Omsk. This is happening at a time when wages in Tyumen are 60 percent less than in the neghboring oil-and-gas producing areas, and only 1,500 rubles to 2,000 rubles higher than in nearby regional centers of the Urals and West Siberia. Nonetheless, the expanding financial opportunities and the imported demand for housing gave an impetus to the city’s development.

Yekaterinburg, the biggest city in the Urals, is implementing a similar but somewhat different scenario. The city is the administrative center of a federal district that does not enjoy the status of a constituent territory of the Russian Federation and, consequently, does not have the necessary taxation base. Yet the authorities position Yekaterinburg as the capital of the Greater Urals and Russia’s “capital number three,” uniting around itself the regional and industrial centers like Tyumen, Ufa, Izhevsk, Salekhard, Orenburg, Magnitogorsk, Surgut, Khanty-Mansiisk, Chelyabinsk, Sterlitamak, Kurgan, Neftekamsk, Nefteyugansk, Nizhny Tagil, and – with some reservations – Perm. The provisory boundaries of the Greater Urals encompass a territory much broader than the geographical Ural Mountains area and even broader than the Urals Federal District. Thus, Yekaterinburg, enjoying its new status and traditional closeness to the regions of West Siberia and the Southern Urals, has not only maintained its leading position but has also expanded its influence.

The story of Rostov-on-Don, the “capital of Russia’s South,” looks less successful by comparison and transformation processes there are developing along a different scenario. The provisory Greater South is more multifaceted than the Greater Urals, given the presence of the North Caucasus and regions in the lower reaches of the Volga. The ethnic and cultural divergence there is so great and the transport infrastructure is so insufficient that people living in Volgograd or Astrakhan do not view Rostov as a mini-capital of some kind. This means that “South Russia” is reduced to the North Caucasus and that Rostov’s zone of influence is much smaller than the territory of the Southern Federal District.

The third important factor for cities as transit points is migrants and ramified channels of communication (traditional transportation, as well as mobile, satellite and Internet communications) together with the uninterrupted flow of human relations and contacts. An acquaintance in Chelyabinsk I spoke to commented with sadness: “German businessmen and their investments settle in the cities Lufthansa flies to and that’s why we lose to Yekaterinburg a priori.”

Russia’s migrant milieu is heterogeneous, as the new arrivals have diverse social and proprietary status. These people include top managers, actors and guest workers, for example, who travel to Russia for very different purposes – business, search for subsistence, tourism or performing. But they all exert strong influence on the life of each city and bring in new standards, opportunities, fashions, assessments, demands for services and lifestyles.

Take dilapidated St. Petersburg, whose feeble beauty and inherent air of decadence is now considered in vogue among Moscow’s artistic glitterati, who travel and live there; they enjoy the juxtaposition of the cultural intensity of ‘Northern Palmira’ to the businesslike bustle of overcrowded Moscow. Now, business people have started making treks to St. Petersburg  in the footsteps of the arts professionals. This has pushed housing prices there sky-high and kicked off the mushrooming of elitist apartment blocks, especially on the city’s famous Vassilyevsky Island. The factor of cultural reproduction plays an important role in the image of Kazan, the capital of the constituent Republic of Tatarstan, now going through a period of ethnic and cultural revival; it is found in Yekaterinburg, which has evolved into a capital of non-conformist arts and rock culture; and in Perm, which was named the cultural capital of the Volga area in 2006.

Yet a much greater share of influence on city life belongs to the migrating business class, whose representatives fill airliners and high-speed trains. Local sociological services in Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Rostov and Krasnoyarsk say businessmen make up about 80 percent of all inter-city and international passengers.

The growing transportation flows and booming housing markets are not the only indicators of intensifying activity and mobility of qualified personnel. The rate of use of the Internet is illustrative, too. A comparison of regular opinion polls, taken by the Public Opinion Fund, and Internet indices drawn up monthly by the Yandex search engine for Russia’s 50 leading cities, reveals a curious disparity between the levels of Internet accessibility and its real use (See Table 1).

Source: Data cited from a review of Yandex’s Internet index of cities (http://goroda.yandex.ru/ii_total.xml) for February 2006, and the Public Opinion Fund’s research Internet In Russia/Russia In Internet, vol. 13, autumn 2005 (http://bd.fom.ru/report/map/d051060).

The ‘dual city’ phenomenon, which underscores differences between the inhabitants of cities, highlights this disparity too. It implies that a person’s living standards are dependent on his or her ability to keep pace with ongoing changes. A large segment of urban dwellers live in a local world that moves slowly and has little opportunities. Then there is that part of the population that services the cities’ nodal functions and exists amid the powerful current of life. These are in essence two parallel worlds coexisting in a common geographic space but confined to different social spaces at the same time. They learn about each other’s problems mostly from TV.

This disunity has existed in all times, but it has become especially apparent today due to the intensifying rates of change, increasing social polarization, the transitory nature of the economy, increased significance of ties with the outside world, and differences in lifestyles.

There are few things that link together the local and global worlds today, but contact points still do exist. First, it is apparent in the ‘black labor’ market, the tentacles of which touch every section of society. Next come civil institutions, public associations and organizations, whose activities work for the benefit of local communities and are based on networking principles. Quite often these organizations are financed from the outside. Third, there is the Internet – not in the physical sense of infrastructure availability, but in the organizational and institutional sense.

In the past three years, regional markets of Internet services have matured into entities autonomous from the all-Russia web market. In an analogy with Ru-net (the national section of the Internet), some regional sections of the web have begun using self-names, like Novonet in Novosibirsk, Tonet in Tomsk, Irnet in Irkutsk, or Krasnet in Krasnoyarsk, etc. Almost every regional section of the Russian Internet has its own organizational structure, regional portals and news agencies. The Internet in this country is de facto made up of regional blocks that not only carry information or reflect globalization processes, but also serve as instruments for building numerous ties at the local level. They work toward strengthening the cities’ identities and making them more recognizable in other parts of the country.

It appears that the key strategic objective in the development of large urban centers is melting the advantages of the cities’ nodal location and networking activity into benefits for the majority of the population.

DO CITIES NEED UNIFIED DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES?

The nodal and centralizing functions of cities have changed places today. The center city begins to play a service role for the hub city, thus ensuring jobs where human labor can be applied, comfortable and attractive living conditions, as well as entertainment for new generations of urban nomads. Both functions are growing in equal importance and, more importantly, each dimension of city life loses its sense in the absence of the other. This situation never existed before.

Cities are acquiring new identities. They resemble one another less and less and each is seeking its own way to modernization and a unique place in the country and the world at large. But a closer examination of their strategies reveals a number of common approaches that turns their strategies – different in form and analytical content – into conceptual twins.

In the first place, those strategies idealize the future, in which everything must transform and acquire a new humanistic meaning. The program part of their strategies outline the methods of curing ailments of the past and overcoming the impact of economic decline, things which the authorities and the population are all too familiar with. These involve housing problems, the dismal quality of medical services, insignificant wages and pensions, covert and overt unemployment, the crisis-stricken education system, and the polluted and littered environment of some urban areas.

Second, the analysts drawn into strategy development mostly rely on statistics that by virtue of their origin can only reflect inertial trends without pointing to any incipient processes. The space factor of ongoing processes, the interlinks among neighboring regions evidencing a growth or decline of their population, the economic rise or decline, the proximity of urban centers that are included in or excluded from the globalization processes – all these things are more likely to determine the future of the cities than the unified statistic data.

Third, development strategies are presented as forecast documents drafting a desirable future for the urban areas. They begin with defining the mission of a particular city and its major development objectives. These strategies are of very generalized character and repeat the priorities of social policies mapped out in the Russian president’s state-of-the-nation addresses. Local specifics glimmer through the polished verbal exterior of those documents. Following these preludes are the assessments of the city’s competitive advantages and the opportunities for using them. The descriptions of development resources (interpreted as the city’s wealth that is capable of generating dividends on condition that current problems – typically financial ones – are solved) occupy center stage. At the top of the strategies are specific measures – or programs – designed for reaching the targets.

For all their logic, these strategy declarations resemble bombastic reports to the top hierarchy, not programs of action, since they aim to mate local ambitions with available resources.

Documents of that kind usually fail to define the principles that a city would never surrender even if it got alluring offers. These principles should reaffirm the maintenance of identity and status of a center of decision-making with a sizable share of autonomy. Today, as the urban centers continue to retain slivers of independence and defend their place in the ongoing social and political processes, these principles are being attacked by the government. The future of some regional capitals is at stake now: the government’s idea of enlarging the regions (for example, the project of merging the Yaroslavl and Kostroma regions) puts them at risk of turning into towns of local-county, while the proposal to eliminate mayoral elections denies the people the opportunity to actively influence the life in their city. One more principle presumes transparency of decisions. Although all documents state the importance of dialog amongst the authorities, businesses and society, and ascertain civic partnership as the foundation on which to build and implement strategies, they do not mention anywhere how a greater openness in relations can be attained given the current levels of corruption.

A strategy must also provide for a realistic assessment of the city’s position with respect to its neighbors, partners and competitors. These assessments can never be univocal and are liable to brisk changes of vectors from positive to negative depending on the situation. St. Petersburg offers a bright instance of this. It claimed at the end of the 1990s that it was the main contact center in connections between the Baltic Sea littoral countries and northwest Russia. Today, however, it is trying to position itself from a totally different angle – as a reliable partner for Moscow that is capable of taking over from the capital some extra governmental functions. An urban metamorphosis is also evident in Nizhni Novgorod, which lost its former status as the country’s main site for economic and political experiments, and is now doing its best to break out of Moscow’s shadow.

The problem has another facet, however. A city’s advantageous position in the system of economic and political connections is a more valuable asset for new ideologies of development than the potential accumulated over years. Proof of this is found in the success of agrarian centers, such as Belgorod and Krasnodar. The two cities have never set the tune to the style of urban development in the past, but they have managed to transform the advantages of their nodal political position into economic growth. Their future is contingent not so much on the initial rate of development or underdevelopment as on a matching of local policy with federal or international interests, as well as on contacts with major corporations and federal authorities, in which regional and city administrations act as mediators.

Last but not least, a city’s development strategy must determine the degree of maneuverability of governance, that is, the observance of the balance between stability and liability to change, together with the necessary reforms and compensatory steps to cushion against their painful effects. In the meantime, no city strategy provides for protection against external reforming influences that might upset the balance of local forces and interests. Nor do they envision the establishment of a reform-friendly environment. For instance, no city is strategically ready to reform the public utilities sector, for example, or to enforce a law concerning the replacement of tax benefits with cash compensations. All decisions and steps in that sphere have been rather improvised.

City missions deserve a separate mentioning. Cities copy their strategies from corporate business strategies in many ways. Their internal documents position urban centers as isolated organisms, the missions of which boil down to self-development, the growing affluence of its residents, and integration into the global economy. These objectives are honorable but the actual sense of the cities’ existence and development is much broader. Cities have always had a mission to “gather lands” around them or, in other words, to consolidate the population, to integrate the country’s territory and to ensure national development, and not just to take care of their own petty needs. This mainly concerns large cities. The elimination of their territorial influence voids their existence of any sense, regardless of their dominating functions. It is thanks to large cities that regions of a country – one that is characterized by vast natural, climatic, social, economic and cultural diversity – form a coherent functional space. Ensuring this coherence – through the realization of common interests as opposed to pulling at administrative levers – is the basic mission of our cities.