Following decades of urban decline in many European cities, there is now an abundant literature identifying a process of reurbanisation, which has now also reached many secondary cities, including those in post-industrialised regions. Reurbanisation is an umbrella concept involving several related but distinct processes, though has its roots in spatial cycle models that consider reurbanisation to be a specific stage in the development of urban regions. Most of the emerging reurbanisation debate, however, is primarily concerned with processes in and impacts on the urban core while suburbia (the ring) is notably absent from much of this discussion. This is all the more surprising since part and parcel of many definitions of reurbanisation is the relationship between the core and the ring. This paper seeks to fill this gap, looking at four highly developed countries in Northwest Europe from a comparative perspective: England, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Far from being uniform, reurbanisation differs substantially between the countries in terms of temporal and spatial patterns due to differences in policy responses in both the urban core and suburbia.

在许多欧洲城市经历了数十年的城市衰落之后，现在有大量文献确定了重新城市化的过程，这种过程现在也波及了许多二级城市，包括后工业化地区的城市。再城市化是一个总括性概念，涉及几个相关但不同的过程，但其根源在于空间循环模型，将再城市化视为城市地区发展的特定阶段。然而，大多数新兴的再城市化辩论主要关注城市核心的过程和对城市核心的影响，而郊区（环）在大部分讨论中明显缺席。这更加令人惊讶，因为重新城市化的许多定义的重要组成部分是核心和环之间的关系。本文旨在填补这一空白，从比较的角度看西北欧的四个高度发达的国家：英国、法国、德国和荷兰。由于城市核心和郊区的政策反应不同，各国的再城市化在时间和空间模式方面存在很大差异。