Rethinking City-regionalism as the Production of New Non-State Spatial Strategies: The Case of Peel Holdings Atlantic Gateway Strategy

This article was published in the journal, Urban Studies [© Sage]. The publisher's website is at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/19/0042098013493481City-regions are widely recognised as key to economic and social revitalization. Hardly surprising then is how policy elites have sought to position their own city-regions strategically within international circuits of capital accumulation. Typically this geopolitics of city-regionalism has been seen to represent a new governmentalised remapping of state space conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy of neoliberal state spatial restructuring. Through a case study of the Atlantic Gateway Strategy, this paper provides a lens on to an alternative vision for city-region development. The brainchild of a private investment group, Peel Holdings, the Atlantic Gateway is important because it points toward the production of new non-state spatial strategies. Examining Peel’s motives for invoking the city-region concept, the paper goes on to explore the tensions which currently surround the strategy to further identify the potential and scope for non-state spatial strategies. Connecting this to emerging debates around the key role of asset ownership and the privatisation of local democracy and the democratic state, the paper concludes by suggesting the key question arising is can and will the state maintain its degree of governmental control over capital investment in major urban regions in an era where persistent under-provision of investment in urban economic infrastructure behoves institutions of the state to become ever more reliant on private investment groups to deliver the deliver the jobs, growth and regeneration of the future

Assemblages of State Power: Topological Shifts in the Organization of Government and Politics

Multi-scalar or multi-site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors 'lodged' within the region, not acting 'above', 'below' or 'alongside' it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with 'jumping scale' or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a 'centralized' politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways

Developing a sub-regional growth strategy: reflections on recent English experience

This article critically reviews the experience of a major sub-regional strategy which sought to bring housing and economic development together, under the aegis of the Sustainable Communities Plan. It draws on evidence from a current ESRC-funded project focused on Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire, the northern part of the growth area of Milton Keynes and the South Midlands identified in the Sustainable Communities Plan

Exploring the regional politics of 'sustainability': making up sustainable communities in the South East of England

This paper sets to explore and clarify the nature of the politics associated with the institutional shift from government to governance, in the context of the rise of sustainability and sustainable communities as governance discourses. After critically considering the extent to which this represents a move to some sort of post-political settlement, it turns to reflect on the notion of assemblage as a means of interpreting emergent forms of politics and governance and exploring the ways in which different priorities may be negotiated in practice. It highlights the processes by which new political realities are assembled around particular concerns without necessarily ever being fully integrated into some overarching unified set of understandings. And it highlights continued tensions and divisions around sustainability and its implications, which undermine attempts to build a governing (or post-political) consensus. These issues are informed by a review of some aspects of the 'sustainable communities plan' and its implementation, with a particular focus on the South-East of England