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Cities represent today the intrinsic socio-economic complexity of local systems. Looking at the performances of urban systems enable us to explaining the main factors of territorial development. By moving from the theory of "progressive systems", and assigning to the cities some of this theory's properties, it is possible to outline a methodological perspective to capture the emerging phenomena describing the cities' performances. Keeping this view in mind, the aim of the paper is facing the intrinsic socio-economic complexity and heterogeneity of cities within the EU integration policies.. In order to better qualify this issue, we provide a multidimensional scaling approach, as a quantitative method useful to compare the several urban performances by letting a cluster evidence among the EU cities emerge.

This paper investigates the European economic integration within the frame work of the 2000 Lisbon Council with the aim of studying the dynamics affecting the social and economic life of European Countries. Such a descriptive investigation focuses on certain significant variables of the new theories highlighting the importance of technological innovation and human capital. To this end the multivariate statistic technique of Principal Component Analysis has been applied in order to classify Countries with regard to the investigated phenomenon.