Evolution of urban hierarchies under globalisation in Western and Eastern Europe

European cities may be regarded as having formed a system of well-interconnected entities over many centuries. The peculiarities of their hierarchical functional organization and territorial patterns have been extensively analysed. This study details a few contributions from the science of complex systems meant to formalize this knowledge. This includes a representation of the metropolisation process occurring within a system of cities with the help of scaling laws and network analysis. We define the metropolisation process - not at the local level of one metropolitan area but at a macro-geographical level - as the ability of larger cities to capture the activities related to innovation waves and to be the first to benefit from these in terms of population growth. A series of urban attributes are used to quantify, through exponents of scaling laws the differentiated behaviour of urban hierarchies when opening up to the global networks that characterize the most recent wave of innovation. Network analysis provides another type of formalism that helps us construct a better understanding of how globalization processes, especially the spread of multinational firms, have diffused in the Eastern part of the European urban system.