Europe is a diversified territory made of towns, cities, agglomerations, conurbations and regional networks. The very notion of a ‘European city’ might seem obsolete with respect to the kaleidoscopic and undefined urban structure of Europe. The fuzzy boundaries of urban areas in the EU have been politically defined, and statistically homogenised in the past decades in order to set the stage for a common European urban policy framework. The past programmes of urban restructuring and regional growth (URBAN I-II, TEN-T etc.) have been largely tailored to a clear identification of a European urban-regional network made of nodes and corridors. The European city has no particular perimeter or recognisable morphological physiognomy. What characterises the European city is a way of governing, a particular form of governability, a tradition of policymaking and a multi-scalar organisation of governance. It is not a spatial character per se. The main problem of today's urban policies is the misconception, certainly inherited from two decades of urban policymaking, that ‘urban’ is synonymous with ‘city’, and that an urban policy is a policy that targets to the ‘city’. Urbanity is not exclusively a feature of what we imagine as fully fledged cities. Today's urban areas are instead increasingly characterised by polycentric organisation of functional and lived space, which often combines historically consolidated cores with emerging postmodern zones of social and economic dynamism.

The hundreds of thousands of commuters from the hinterlands of Milan, Paris, Athens or London, as well as the mass of people that every morning move across regional clusters of activities, aptly demonstrate this new polycentrism. European citizens are highly mobile and distributed. The wealthy Brianza in the Lombardy region, as well as the widespread urbanisation between Cologne and Bonn, are less ‘urban’ than the inner quarters of any European historical city. Yet, it is there that important sectors of the urban economy and population of the EU are today located, from chemical companies to clusters of high-level scientific research and large residential areas. Yet non-urban (i.e. suburban spaces) are also areas of marginalisation and exclusion. The large pockets of poverty in East London districts, as well as the housing estates of the fringes of Budapest, still seem to suffer a submissive position towards their urban cores, and to the economic and governmental headquarters of Europe.