City-regions and city-regionalism (original) (raw)
Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories
be better equipped to solve "global problems" than is the case for the nation state and subnational state governments (Barber 2013). Following a brief discussion of the global dimensions of city-region growth, we examine a range of academic interpretations of this phenomenon. We suggest that city-regions should not be understood as discrete spatial units that operate as "agents" or "actor-scales" in themselves. Nor should city-regions be considered as passive backdrops on which economy, politics or social reproduction simply happen. Rather city-regions may be conceptualized as dynamic sites of policy experimentation and political struggle, which are produced from various political processes operating within and around the national state and its institutions. Such processes highlight ongoing geopolitical tensions around capital accumulation, which take the form of struggles around social distribution, environment, culture, security, and suchlike. Our emphasis, therefore, is on exposing the geopolitics of city regionalism alongside contingently-manifested problems of social distribution, uneven development, and environmental sustainability; contingencies that nevertheless are important for understanding the social and political construction of city-regionalism in different geopolitical settings. City-region: the emergence of a concept The concept of the city-region first appeared in regional planning in the early twentieth century at a time when the rapid growth of metropolitan-scale urban centres posed a range of new societal challenges relating to housing, social provision,and nationally-balanced economic growth. It is often associated with the writings of influential regional planners and urban reformers, such as Patrick Geddes in the UK and Lewis Mumford in the USA, for
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2007
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A world-wide mosaic of large city-regions seems to be over-riding (though is not effacing entirely) an earlier core-periphery system of spatial organization. The economic dynamics of these city-regions are analyzed with particular emphasis on the ways in which they tend to generate increasing-returns effects and competitive advantages for local producers. The managerial tasks that these city-regions face raise many new issues about local economic development policy and institution building in the interests of social order. These issues lead on to further questions about democracy and citizenship in the new global mosaic of city-regions as well as in the new world system as a whole.
International Journal of Urban and Regional …, 2007
This article takes up the invitation extended by the co-editors of the recent IJURR debate on city-regions for others to join them in 'a wider dialogue over the constitutive role of politics in the brave new world of 'city-regions'. It begins by considering the extent to which the collection was successful in describing this 'brave new world' and in populating it with the variety of social and environmental concerns which, the co-editors claimed, have so far been neglected in recent debates about the significance of city-regions. Adjudging the debate to have been only partially successful in these respects, the article goes on to argue that the goal the co-editors strove for-effectively to liberate 'city-regionalism' from its ostensible captors-is unlikely to be achieved unless and until its critics (1) engage more explicitly and seriously with claims that are made for the significance of changes in the material circumstances of city-regions, and (2) recognize that there is nothing inherently 'neoliberal' or regressive about the concept of the city-region or the way it is used. These arguments are illustrated with reference to the economics of city-regions and the politics of city-regionalism in England.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2019
I seek to provide an overview of the historical and geographical emergence of city-regions and to reflect on some of the debates that have arisen in regard to the theoretical status of these phenomena. I briefly describe the growth and spread of city-regions in the world since the mid-1950s and I consider how contemporary capitalism and globalization have fostered the development of this distinctive urban form. The internal organization of city-regions is then examined, with special reference to four generic outcomes, namely (a) aestheticized land-use intensification, (b) gentrification, (c) social polarization and informality, and (d) postsuburban landscapes. Issues of governance and policy are scrutinized and basic dilemmas of political coordination in city-regions are described. The argument ends with an evaluative review of certain critiques of the city-region idea in the current academic literature.
Urbanizing the nation-state? Notes on the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions
Urban Geography, 2018
This article suggests that the developments during the past few decades indicate a qualitative shift in the city/state relation, and conceptualizes this shift as the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions. Originally a state-orchestrated process, today this is manifested in the attempts of major cities and city-regions, in particular, to demand a stronger national and international political role even as claims are made for urban separatism. This process is connected to a geopolitical reasoning of the heightened role of cities in interstate competition during the age of post-Fordist capitalism. Furthermore, the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions is partly constituted in academic theories and expert knowledges that combine certain type of urbanism, economic growth, and political success, and which in so doing destabilize state-centered geopolitical imaginations.
Mobilising Regions: Territorial Strategies for Growth, 2013
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City regionalism as geopolitical processes
Progress in Human Geography, 2016
This article sets out a new conceptual framework for investigating how city regionalism is constituted as a variegated set of geopolitical processes operating within and beyond the national state. Our approach highlights: (1) the different forms of territorial politics through which city regionalism is conjoined with broader visions of the national state; (2) the material and territorial arrangements which support such a conjuncture; and (3) the political actors enabling city regionalism and the national state to come together within a geopolitical frame of reference.
Global city-regions: trends, theory, policy
Area, 2003
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