# Chapter 3: From the urban crisis to the ‘triumph of the city’
## Cities as actors in a globalising economy
* The role of cities in transforming from feudalism to capitalist (**as autonomous entities**) 👇
* city corporations and craft guilds played a critical role in wresting power away from aristocratic landowners by creating the foundations of trading.
* That was an era where cities played an important role in international affair.

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* But after a while these limited liability companies expended their tradings beyond border of cities and "gradually dissolved the close links that had once existed between city elites, city-based institutions, the local ownership and organisation of production, the urban market for goods and services, and locally generated urban investments".

* In the political sphere, the autonomy of urban institutions declined in parallel with the development of nation states and more centralised, national systems of governance.
* Process of **nation-building** (from autonomous cities tonational urban hiearchy):
> From Wikipedia: Nation-building is constructing or structuring a national identity using the power of the state.

* Note: That's why studying the cities in the 20th century has become less critical than studying national geography.

* But again: that the course of history has moved against nations and nationally based systems of economic and social management and towards arrangements in which what happens, economically and politically, at both **supranational and subnational level** is assuming greater importance.

* In Europe studying regions became popular.

* However nations still have a great influence on subnational levels.
* Now we are talking about 'urban regions' and national economics are constellations of regional economies (emergence of global city-regions).

* Some concepts:
* Entrepreneurial cities
* new urban politics
* new localism
* competitive cities

* An analogy:
* " A firm, for example, can be seen as competitive in the former sense if it has a substantial or growing market share and produces high-quality and popular goods or services more efficiently than its rivals. But it is also competitive if, irrespective of its current trading performance, it seeks out competition with others, for example by producing for new markets and/or acquiring and rationalising firms active in its own or other sectors."

* urban competitiveness:
* economically: successful producers and can offer the sort of environment
* politically: key interests active within a city

* The core distinction, then, is between the city as competitive and as competitor: Whilst being competitive should help the competitor in whatever field he/she competes, it is also theoretically possible for the relatively uncompetitive ‘player’ to choose, or be compelled, to compete.

* urban renaissance: the competitive role of cities after urban decline.

Then first we need to know about urban decline.