Integrating the city

Abstract

Cities entered a transformative logic since the nineteeneighties. The main reason for this transformation was the industrial crisis that took place between the late seventies and early eighties. The current economic crisis is also altering the context of cities dramatically and will provoke a great impact on their future. Cities are going through a profound metamorphosis, a transformation of their productive systems, crystallised in physical and symbolic space. In the logic of competitiveness and economic growth, understood as a synonym of social progress, this metamorphosis is often led by the implementation of urban strategic plans. Here strategic plans are understood as defined by Borja and Castells (1998) as ‘a city project that unifies diagnoses, specifies public and private actions and establishes a coherent framework mobilising the cooperation of urban social actors’.