Medium-sized cities, while they share much in common with larger ones, display specific characteristics as local societies. Even if the trend today is for markets and networks to expand on a national and increasingly a European scale, the distinguishing feature of medium-sized cities is still to be strongly rooted in a circumscribed and closely defined territory and so depend chiefly on local and regional networks. That is not to say that they are not attached to national or European groups, interests, markets and networks, but that their structure as local societies (with their political and economic actors, their history and traditions, their identity, their chief manifestations, their institutions, their urban fabric, etc.) remains a fundamental element of territory-based societal coherence – something that is increasingly elusive in large cities. These, by their sheer complexity, their internal diversity, their place in the global economy, the area they cover and their compartmentalisation, reveal themselves as very different urban societies in terms of overall coherence, visibility of social relations and social issues. Population settlement underlines the degree of contrast between the metropolis with its inflow of different cultures and races and its intermixing, and medium-sized cities which remain more homogeneous and more dependent on their surrounding regions. Similarly, the link that major cities establish with the global economy (financial markets, for instance) brings into being a whole range of activities themselves engendering professional occupations, new forms of labour organisation and new lifestyles which are felt less keenly in smaller urban communities.