The European Dimension of Metropolitan Policies

Abstract

A first step to understanding the European dimension of metropolitan policies is to review selected contributions to the scholarly debate on metropolitan regions as well as research on the role of subnational entities in EU policymaking. Thereby, this chapter brings together two streams of academic reasoning that, with few exceptions, developed fairly separately. By reviewing the central definitions and approaches of these two fields of research, this chapter fulfils two functions. First, the chapter explicates the influence of previous academic accounts of the research object and contributes to the positioning of the envisaged study in scholarly debates. Second, the chapter develops preliminary definitions and thereby grounds the central concepts for the subsequent analysis.