Theme issue: International strategies of cities: explaining divergence and convergence

In the research carried out by the European Science Foundation «CITTA» (Cities as International and Transnational Actors) network, whose main results are presented here, attempts are made to analyse not just one specific type, goal, or form of city international activity, but a wide-ranging repertoire of actions. The key aspects addressed, concern the internal features of a city's international agency and, more precisely, the ways in which related issues enter and are processed in urban agendas. No fewer than ten cities were studied: Amsterdam, Birmingham, Budapest, Madrid, Manchester, Montreal, Paris, Rome, Vilnius, and Zurich. A consistent and controlled comparison was carried out drawing on a similar set of independent variables. Following up on the debate regarding the nature of the impact of the globalisation process on urban areas, our research does not give support to the `convergence theory' approach, as the international activities carried out by cities and the orientation of their strategies tend to follow different paths based on their own `digestion' of global change. Once identified a prevailing international strategy, three main orientations in which an adequate amount of internal coherence was found were identified: economic, political, and social. The existence, the orientation, and the convergence or divergence of a city's international strategy may be explained by a group of independent variables. In particilar, a set of six variable clusters enabled to respond to the questions mentioned above: (i) city market conditions, (ii) urban society, (iii) the nature of intergovernmental relations, (iv) the type of political system, (v) the geopolitical dimension, and (vi) the city's international history.