Montrouge:John Libbey Eurotext. STUDENTS MOBILITY, GENDER AND POLYCENTRISM IN EUROPE

The issues of territorial organisation in Europe is not something new, neither are cities interacting in networks. Study conducted over the last few years made it possible to develop several functional urban models that have interesting features. However, because they are always positioned within a logic of competition in interpreting territorial dynamics, the models are restricted to a hierarchy of “poles” in which only processes of wealth generation are taken into account. Indeed, the great majority of existing researches seeks to produce knowledge on the cities themselves, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and to estimate their growth rates. Consequently, this means that a large majority of studies constantly produce and reproduce urban typologies, reducing the patterns of territorial integration in Europe via city networks to two classic representation models, which are the centre-periphery model and the hierarchic network model for national urban systems. In these acceptations, the European space is seen in a dichotomous manner. In the first case there is a predominant centre to which dependent or isolated peripheral areas are more or less well connected; in the second, there are major poles which have secondary, less prominent or visible centres as satellites.