Inner City Europe: Socio-Economic Change and National Policy Responses

Abstract

To provide an initial orientation, a range of problems presenting in the inner city are reviewed in this introductory chapter, setting the context for discussion of the respective policy responses adopted in the last quarter of the past century in the five largest EU states. The countries examined include two ‘early instigators’ in the field (France and the UK), an ‘average initiator’ (Germany) and two countries where national innovation only gathered pace in the 1990s (Spain and Italy). For each country, a case study is selected: port cities having experienced what Dangschat and Ossenbrügge (1990) pithily termed the transformation ‘from the ship to the chip’ (Barcelona, Genoa, Hamburg, Liverpool and Marseilles).