Fluid Spatial Imaginaries: Evolving Estuarial City-regional Spaces

This article looks at successive attempts to create new spatial imaginaries around three estuary-based city regions in England: the London–Thames Gateway, the Atlantic Gateway/Mersey Belt (Manchester and Liverpool), and Hull and the Humber ports. We develop a framework of analysis for new planning and regeneration spaces that takes forward debates on relational and territorial geographies, spatial imaginaries and the creation of new regional identities as governance objects. Specifically, we adopt a long-term and comparative perspective that allows an examination of how successive efforts at regional building are both path-dependent and context-specific, as new approaches reflect emerging ideas about how best to construct successful regions in a changing global economy.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.1221

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

Taking City Regions Seriously? Response to Debate on 'City-Regions: New Geographies of Governance, Democracy and Social Reproduction'

This article takes up the invitation extended by the co-editors of the recent IJURR debate on city-regions for others to join them in 'a wider dialogue over the constitutive role of politics in the brave new world of 'city-regions'. It begins by considering the extent to which the collection was successful in describing this 'brave new world' and in populating it with the variety of social and environmental concerns which, the co-editors claimed, have so far been neglected in recent debates about the significance of city-regions. Adjudging the debate to have been only partially successful in these respects, the article goes on to argue that the goal the co-editors strove for - effectively to liberate 'city-regionalism' from its ostensible captors - is unlikely to be achieved unless and until its critics (1) engage more explicitly and seriously with claims that are made for the significance of changes in the material circumstances of city-regions, and (2) recognize that there is nothing inherently 'neoliberal' or regressive about the concept of the city-region or the way it is used. These arguments are illustrated with reference to the economics of city-regions and the politics of city-regionalism in England. Copyright (c) 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.