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

Configuring the New ‘Regional World’: On being Caught between Territory and Networks

This article was accepted for publication in the journal, Regional Studies [© Taylor & Francis].Recent years have witnessed a tremendous appeal in debating the relative decline in ‘territorially embedded’ conceptions of regions vis-à-vis the privileging of ‘relational and unbounded’ conceptions. Nevertheless, the most recent skirmishes see some scholars emphasise how it is not the privileging of one or other that is important, but recognising how it is increasingly different combinations of these elements that seem to be emerging in today’s new ‘regional world’. Here emphasis is being placed on a need to analyse how the different dimensions of socio-spatial relations (e.g. territory, place, network, scale) come together in different ways, at different times, and in different contexts to secure the overall coherence of capitalist, and other, social formations. The purpose of this paper is to make visible the politics of transformation in North West England, uncovering the role and strategies of individual and collective agents, organisations and institutions in orchestrating and steering regional economic development. For it is argued the unanswered question is not which sociospatial relations are dominant, emerging, or residual in any given space-time but understanding how and why they are dominant, emerging, or residual. The paper suggests the answer to this and other questions is to be found at the interface between emergent spatial strategies and inherited sociospatial configurations

Life after Regions? The Evolution of City-regionalism in England

This item was accepted for publication in the journal, Regional Studies [© Regional Studies Association]. The definitive version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2010.521148].This paper examines the evolving pattern of city-regional governance in England. Following the demise of English regional policy in 2004, city-regions have come to represent the in vogue spatial scale amongst policy elites. The result has been a proliferation of actual and proposed policies and institutions designed to operate at a, variously defined, city-regional scale in England. Nevertheless, attempts to build a city-regional tier of governance have been tentative and lacking coherence. Alongside this city-regions are to be found emerging alongside existing tiers of economic governance and spatial planning. Arguing that what we are witnessing is not ‘life after regions’ but life with (or alongside) regions, the analysis presented argues that to understand why contemporary state reorganisation results in a multiplication of the scales economic governance and spatial planning we must recognise how the state shapes policies in such a way as to protect its legitimacy for maintain regulatory control and management of the economy. The final section relates these findings to wider debates on state rescaling and speculates on the future role of transition models in sociospatial theory