Acceso usuarios
Nadja Kabisch 
, Dagmar Haase , Annegret Haase
Across Europe, there is a complex mosaic of urban population development.Characterized by great diversity and heterogeneity, this development does not follow acommon pattern and cannot be attributed to specific regional trends (e.g. Eastern orWestern European geographic location, or post-socialist, old industrial or developedcapitalist economic models). In this article, we show how this mosaic can be explained,relating it to various driving forces and overarching processes. Using a multilevelapproach and looking at the period 1991–2008, we identified various European citypopulation growth or decline clusters; these indicated that urban population developmentdoes not necessarily follow strictly national lines. Further, we argue that similar clustersof growing and declining cities may occur within European countries as diverse as Polandand the UK. Overarching driving forces such as demographic change interfere withnational specificity and the peculiarities of local settings. The most significant finding ofthis article is that overlapping driving forces currently lead in their interplay to divergingcourses of urban population development on different spatial scales (and will probablycontinue to do so in future).
