Introduction to a Debate on City‐Regions: New Geographies of Governance, Democracy and Social Reproduction

Abstract

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..

Urban Development Policy Challenges in East-Central Europe: Governance, City Regions and Financialisation

“…Savitch, Vogel 2000). Into the forefront of scientific debates joining 'city regions' and 'city regionalism' came terms like 're-scaling', or 're-territorialisation' (see for example Brenner 2004;Jonas 2012;Jonas, Ward 2007;Tosics 2007). In this 'package' of conceptual innovations, the city region perspective is among the most accepted.…”

“…Taking into account the existing scientific discourse on urban development policy (e.g. Pierre 1999;Jonas, Ward 2007;Rodríguez-Pose 2008;Weber 2010;Miller, Lee 2011;McGuirk 2012;Christopherson et al 2013;Sokol 2013;Rodgers et al 2014), what we can consider as the most relevant challenges concerning cities in ECE are governance (in brief -the involvement of many actors outside local government in managing local affairs), city/ metropolitan regions (an integrated perception of a city with its hinterland), and financialisation (a growing role of financial issues, financial institutions, financial markets and financial élites).…”

Functions of sustainability: exploring what urban sustainability policy discourse “does” in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

“…We use the discourse-coalition approach (Hajer 1997(Hajer , 2005) and a mode of transdisciplinary co-production methodology to unfold and interpret the case of a metropolitan governance process, and an infrastructural plan for sustainable growth in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area (GMA) to illustrate how urban sustainability discourse increases cohesion and mobilises capacities to rescale governance arrangements. Sustainability discourse serves to render the unruly city region governable for the advancement of infrastructural development in transport and housing with a market-oriented, economic-growth-first rationale (Jonas and Ward 2007, Krueger and Savage 2007, McCann 2007, Brenner 2009). In the GMA, sustainability is a "fix" (Jonas 2015) to "get things done" for a coalition of actors powerful enough to mobilise others.…”

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