Europäische Metropolregion Zürich. Wirtschafts-Cluster oder auch institutioneller Raum?

European spatial development increasingly is conceived as a network of functional metropolitan regions. These spaces cross institutional borders and are highly populated with diversified urban economies and nodes of international network infrastructures. Our paper thus suggests in a first step a theoretical concept to analyse such a functional metropolitan region. The approach draws from the concept of the European metropolitan region (EMR) and uses three metafunctions to identify and assess the relative importance of an urban region: the gateway-, the innovation-, and the regulation-function. In a second step this approach is used to analyse the Zurich region and to determine its functional and economic outreach. We examine in more detail the innovation-function and develop a taxonomy for economic clusters, which leads to the identification of three important clusters and their spatial dimension. Special emphasis with regard to the EMRZ is put on the importance of the international financial place of Zurich. The paper concludes that the EMRZ has indeed the character of a polycentric metropolitan region.