Cities as development hubs in Italy an analytical approach

Italy, the country where the modern cities were born, suffer from the early ’90 of past century for a lack of vision and political address in terms of adoption of its urban agenda. The public debate about cities is focused only on administrative and insti aspects; not enough attention is dedicated to the problems of the Italian cities as development hubs. As a result, the law of 2014 that introduced the formal regulation of new metropolitan authorities lies unapplied. The paper gives some evidence about the economic specialization of the most important Italian metropolitan cities and about their relative room for innovation, using an hirschmanian index