In a globalizing economy territories –most of all large cities and urban regions– find themselves in competition with other cities and regions. Very obviously, cities which are ranked highest are challenged to become a metropolis competing with other metropolises on –at least- the European level. This means, high ranking cities should attract not only general economic functions on the interregional and national level but more specific functions like decision centres of multinational firms, international strategic and controlling institutions (private or public) in the political, economic and cultural sphere (Krätke, 1995). Besides others, specific challenges of governance emerge for strategic efforts on the urban-regional level in order to secure and increase the competitiveness of such territories. From a theoretical point, absolute advantages provided through strategic efforts on the urban-regional level, are predominantly responsible for the strengthening of its competitiveness. (Camagni, 2002; 2008) Anyhow, in this paper we concentrate on two topics: First, we discuss selected metropolitan functions and relevant impacts on spatial development. Second, we concentrate on specific strategic efforts which aim on the attraction and strengthening of metropolitan functions and competitiveness. Dealing with these topics empirically, we describe the process of metropolisation of Barcelona and Vienna and try to assess relevant strategic efforts in a comparative way.

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