SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED TOWNS IN EUROPE: CONCEPTUAL, METHODOLOGICAL AND POLICY ISSUES LORIS SERVILLO*, ROB ATKINSON** & ABDELILLAH HAMDOUCH*** * KU Leuven, Department of Architecture, Planning & Development research group, Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: loris.servillo@asro.kuleuven.be ** Department of Planning and Architecture, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. E-mail: abdel-illah.hamdouch@univ-tours.fr ***Franc¸ois Rabelais University of Tours,  Ecole Polytechnique and UMR CITERES, Tours, France. E-mail: Rob.Atkinson@uwe.ac.uk Received: January 2015; accepted May 2016 ABSTRACT Despite that small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) have been, and continue to be, a central part of the history of Europe, these places have largely been neglected by urban research. The ESPON TOWN project, on which this Special Issue builds, sought to redress this neglect performing a comparative analysis of their position and role across Europe. In this introductory paper we discuss some of the theoretical and methodological challenges when it came to identifying, studying and analysing SMSTs and the theoretical framework developed to inform our understanding of SMSTs. In particular, three themes are discussed. The first one is about the ontological problem of defining a town. Administrative, morphological and functional perspectives are considered. The second one reflects on a wide array of interpretative approaches about the relationship between towns and their regional context. The third one is about the thematic and multi-scalar perspectives that can characterise the policy approach to towns. Key words: town, Europe, urban studies, territorialist approach, urban agenda INTRODUCTION Mainstream discourses on the ‘urban age’ (see Brenner & Schmid 2013, for a critique) argue that a crucial transformation has taken place globally with regard to human settle- ment patterns whereby the majority of the global population now live in urban areas. Thus an EU report estimates that around 70 per cent of Europe’s population live in cities (cf. CEC 2011, p. 14). However, what is often less well acknowledged is that a significant percentage (around 56%; CEC 2011, p. 1) of this urban population live in small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs). The European pattern of settlements depends to a considerable degree on smaller-size urban areas (with populations between 5,000 and 100,000; CEC 2011), which are considered to play an important role in Europe’s polycen- tric urban structure and preserving the ‘uniqueness’ of urban life in Europe. Yet, these places have largely been ignored by academic research and policy-makers at national and European level. Ontological complexity, different institutional contexts and lack of comparative data have made them largely ‘invisible’ to the policy-making and academic research agenda, except few exceptions. Moreover, while there are some existing quantitative studies on towns within national Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2017, DOI:10.1111/tesg.12252, Vol. 00, No. 00, pp. 00–00. V C 2017 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG