There is evidence that the politics of economic development in the post‐industrial city is increasingly bound up with the ability of urban elites to manage ecological impacts and environmental demands emanating from within and outside the urban area. More than simply a question of promoting quality of life in cities in response to interurban competition and pressures from local residents, the greening of the urban growth machine reflects changes in state rules and incentives structuring urban governance as part of an evolving geopolitics of nature and the environment. The adoption of principles and practices of ecological modernization potentially represents a dramatic shift in the social regulation of urban governance away from unconstrained neoliberalized modes. In this article we explore how different demands on and for urban environmental policy have played out vis‐à‐vis changing modes and practices of governance in two English post‐industrial cities. We explore differences in the ways that entrepreneurial urban regimes have sought to incorporate the green agenda (Leeds), or insulate themselves from ecological dissent (Manchester). We further attempt to conceptualize evolving urban economy‐environment relations in the UK in terms of an ensemble of governance practices, strategies, alliances and discourses that enables the local state to manage, though not necessarily resolve, seemingly conflicting economic, social and environmental demands at different scales of territoriality. Here we propose the notion of an ‘urban sustainability fix’ to describe the selective incorporation of ecological objectives in local territorial structures during an era of ecological modernization. Dans les villes post‐industrielles, la politique de développement économique semble liée de plus en plus étroitement à l'aptitude des élites urbaines à gérer les impacts écologiques et les exigences environnementales venus de l'intérieur et de l'extérieur. Au‐delà de la simple défense d'une qualité de vie en ville, répondant à la concurrence interurbaine et aux pressions des habitants, l'intégration de la cause Verte dans la machine de croissance urbaine reflète les nouvelles règles et mesures d'encouragement étatiques qui structurent la gouvernance des villes dans le cadre d'une géopolitique évolutive de la nature et de l'environnement. L'adoption de principes et pratiques de modernisation écologique pourrait traduire un revirement dans la régulation sociale de la gouvernance urbaine, en remplaçant la totale latitude des réponses néolibérales. L'article explore comment les demandes variées de et en politique urbaine d'environnement se sont exercées dans le contexte changeant des modalités et pratiques de gouvernance de deux villes post‐industrielles anglaises. Il s'intéresse aux différences de démarches qu'ont adoptées des régimes urbains ayant l'esprit d'entreprise pour incorporer le programme vert (Leeds) ou s'affranchir de la dissidence écologique (Manchester). De plus, il s'efforce de conceptualiser les relations évolutives économie‐e...

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio‐environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low‐carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low‐carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco‐state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.

This paper sets out a sympathetic critique of a series of writings that we refer to as new regionalist approaches to the city. We review the recent work on state restructuring/rescaling and the associated work on the new regionalism, on the one hand, and that on`global' city-regions, on the other. We identify key points of overlap and divergence between these two literatures and suggest that each understates the role of class interests, political alliance formation, and conflicts around the management of collective consumption and social reproduction. We proceed to outline the framework of an alternative and complementary approach in which causal emphasis is placed on the shaping of subnational state geographies by actually existing struggles and strategies developed around particular geographies of public and private investment and collective consumption, and their associated state fiscal, electoral, and regulatory arrangements. We argue that working from this position we are better able to understand why the city-region continues to constitute a strategically vital arena for managing conflict and struggle in contemporary capitalism.

In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city-regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city-regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The 'new' city-regionalism results in a reification of the city-region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city-regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re-territorialization around the city-region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city-region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city-region. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

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JONAS A. E. G. (1996) Local labour control regimes: uneven development and the social regulation of production, Reg. Studies 30, 323-338. The apparent demise of Fordist consensus-seeking institutions of labour regulation raises questions concerning which, if any, forms of labour market governance will dominate localities in the future. Without providing the answers for these questions, this paper addresses at a theoretical level the social need for capital to foster reciprocities between places of production and sites of consumption and labour reproduction in local labour markets. This need emerges from a contradiction between, on the one hand, capital's abstract interest in the global exchange of labour power and, on the other hand, the concrete interest of particular capitals in the local context of that exchange. A local labour control regime amounts to a stable local institutional framework for accumulation and labour regulation constructed around local labour market reciprocities. Different factions of capital are more or less dependent on local labour control regimes. The decision to restructure through space is contingent on the level of that dependence and assessment of the incorporation and adaptation costs of entering a new labour market environment. Locally dependent factions may choose to become more locally involved when local institutions of labour market governance are threatened. The paper discusses different community ideologies arising from the local involvement of capital factions and concludes by placing uneven development centre-stage in a theory of local labour regulation and control. JONAS A. E. G. (1996) Systemes de controle du travail locaux: developpement irregulier et regulation sociale de la production, Reg. Studies 30, 323-338. La disparition apparente des systemes de controle du travail du type Fordiste qui cherchent le consensus, met en doubte l'existence des systemes de controle du marche du travail susceptibles de dominer les regions a l'avenir. Sans fournir des reponses a ces questions-la, cet article aborde au niveau theorique le besoin social du capital pour promouvoir de la reciprocite entre les zones de production et de consommation et la reproduction du travail dans les bassins d'emploi locaux. Ce besoin releve d'une contradiction entre d'un cote l'interet abstrait du capital pour l'echange mondial du pouvoir de la main-d'oeuvre et de l'autre cote l'interet concret des capitaux particuliers pour le contexte local de cet echange-la. Un systeme de controle du travail d'envergure locale constitue un cadre institutionnel local stable quant a l'accumulation et la regulation du travail, construit autour des reciprocites des marches du travail locaux. Diverses factions du capital dependent plus ou moins des systemes de controle du travail locaux. La decision de reconstruire dans l'espace depend du niveau de cette dependance et de l'evaluation des couts d'incorporation et d'adaptation de l'entree dans un nouvel environnement du travail. Il se peut que les factions dont la dependance...

This paper 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.