Medium Sized Cities and Their Urban Areas: Challenges and Opportunities in the New Urban Agenda

Dear Colleagues,

According to World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision of the UN Population Division, there are only 1595 cities in the world with more than 300,000 inhabitants, which house 56% of the world urban population. However, most academic research and analyses by international institutions have focused on the world’s largest urban and metropolitan areas. This rather restrictive approach largely ignores and underestimates the huge diversity of urban phenomena. This Special Issue will focus on medium-sized cities and their capacity to organize external urban areas, which spatially express the tremendous urban diversity within each territorial context. In recent decades, there has been renewed interest in medium-sized and intermediate cities. The first reason for this is the capacity of these cities to promote greater territorial balance, as they often act as service centers and markets for the extensive areas that they structure. Secondly, this interest reflects the opportunities that networking offers to some of these centers through urban externalities. Thirdly, it could help to prevent climate change and promote greater sustainability in both the medium and the long term. Finally, due to their scale and size, these cities could contribute to the creation of new urban strategies for governability and encourage more participatory forms of urban management that are better able to meet the day-to-day needs of the population. This Special Issue seeks to collect comparative studies of groups of medium-sized cities, conducted at the regional, national, and continental scales in developed countries. Each work should first define and delimit the objectives of the study undertaken. Even so, it should also be possible to incorporate local case studies and specific examples that are of particular interest. The aim of this Special Issue is to identify relatively recent dynamics and the most sustainable processes of change and urban strategies, thereby confronting the challenges presented by the new urban agenda of the 21st century.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Cebrián-Abellán
Dr. Carmen Bellet Sanfeliu
Guest Editors

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• Urbanization
• medium-sized cities
• urban sprawl
• urban planning
• territorial and development policies