Studies of metropolitan development: An overview

This short paper highlights certain findings from some recent studies concerning metropolitan development in the industrialized world. Two particular aspects are stressed: (1) a shift in thinking from city systems conceived as subnational hierarchies of centres to city systems conceived as elemental nodes in various international networks facilitating logistical processes of exchange, and (2) the need to enhance our primitive understanding of interacting metropolitan change processes which are operating at significantly different speeds. These two issues are briefly addressed amidst some introductory remarks about the six related papers which follow in this special issue.