Manchester's Bust Regime?

Abstract

political economy , city‐regional governance , financial crisis , Manchester ,

Secondary Yet Metropolitan? The Challenges of Metropolitan Integration for Second-Tier Cities

“…The attempt to reduce these contrasts via deeper integration of second-tier metropolitan regions has been championed in Britain, and is seen as one of the reasons why Manchester pioneered a devolution process before other city-regions (Harding, Harloe, & Rees, 2010). First, the integrated actor can advance its size as an argument for attention; its demographic and economic weight just makes it too big to ignore.…”

The search for territorial fixes in subnational governance: City-regions and the disputed emergence of post-political consensus in Manchester, England

“…Emphasis on agglomerative growth and the subordination of redistribution Harding et al (2010) characterise what they view as the striking reversal of the city-region's long-term economic decline as a 'Manchester miracle', highlighting as evidence marked growth in private producer and financial services employment, increasing levels of inward investment, inflated rental levels for prime office space, and growing levels of house-building, linked to a turnaround in long-term population loss and the reinvigorated attractiveness of the city as a place to live. This dramatic upswing, they argue, was the result not just of market trends during the 'great moderation' period of unbroken national economic growth in Britain from 1992 to 2008, but of the coherence of city-regional governance structures and related policy interventions, the stability of political leadership in the core city, the aptitude of its political elites in liaising with central government and attracting discretionary grant resources, and the improvement of the area's image to external investors and skilled labour.…”

Governing the new metropolis

“…Yet there are plenty of examples to suggest city-region governance can provide notable successes. Manchester, for instance, is commonly placed on a pedestal as an exemplar for how metropolitan fragmentation can, with time, be successfully managed and city-region alliances formed, maintained and developed -in Manchester's case to coordinate service delivery for economic development and skills, transport, planning and housing, crime, health, and the environment (Deas, 2013;Harding et al, 2010). Alongside this, metropolitan fragmentation can be seen to signal strength not weakness.…”

“…Regarded by many as a model of best practice, a point emphasised by reference to 'the Manchester miracle' in many urban and regional strategies worldwide (Harding et al, 2010), what emerges from the Manchester case is the importance of a scalar referent in any periodisation of city-regionalism. Unlike the national context in which it is situated -city-regionalism as a geopolitical project did not emerge in England until the early 2000s (see Harrison, 2010) -a 'uniquely Mancunian' form of cityregion governance has emerged to oversee the economic and social revitalisation of the Manchester metropolitan region (Harding et al, 2010). Responding to the fragmenting of metropolitan decision-making and increasing territorial politics and conflict caused by the abolition of the Greater Manchester Metropolitan Council in 1986, local policy elites have successfully consolidated institutional arrangements at the scale of the cityregion to coordinate economic development, regeneration and transport functions.…”

“…In the case of Manchester this response centred on the construction of a 'loose development coalition' between Manchester City Council, neighbouring local authorities, national government and non-departmental public bodies, only to become the more formalised set of arrangements we observe today when it was captured and brought under the umbrella of the state spatial programme of city-regionalism a decade ago (Deas, 2013;Harding et al, 2010). For this reason we suggest it is necessary in debates over periodisation to distinguish between coalitions of the willing vis-a`-vis coalitions of the obliged.…”