Who drives the growth? Empirical evidences from real-estate market values of 12 italian metropolitan cities

In recent years, Italian government have established metropolitan cities with the aim of recognising the importance of certain territorial poles for national development. With Law 56/14 the national legislator has established ten metropolitan cities grew to 14 in 2015. A few years after their establishment, the development of metropolitan cities has not been the same, but some territories have grown more than others. The aim of the research is to study qualitative and quantitative aspects of urban development and to show an evident signal of different attractiveness of cities. it was investigated whether greater or lesser development of metropolitan cities could be attributed to the high concentration of major activities in some cities or whether the polycentric city model ensured more distributed growth. Real-estate market values have been analysed to validate the research question with the assumption that the change in urban rents was taken as a summary indicator of the different capacity of metropolitan cities to respond to the severe economic crisis between in 2008 and 2012. The results highlighted an important phenomenon of concentration of economic development in the city of Milan, the only one of the twelve cities examined to record a positive change in mean real estate values over the period considered.