Space, scale and state strategy: rethinking urban and regional governance

Abstract

The last decade has seen a proliferation of theoretical approaches, which have sought to uncover the changing form and governance of cities and regions following the dissolution of the Fordist ‘sociospatial fix’. This article provides a critical review of some of the more influential of these debates that have sought to analyse: the central–local relations of government; the growing influence of ‘regimes’ and ‘growth coalitions’ in energizing urban economies; and the rise of the ‘learning’ or ‘institutionally thick’ region. The authors argue that, although providing valuable insights, these theories suffer from: 1) a failure to integrate analytically into their inquiries a relational account of the state, and thereby to neglect the state's influence in actively shaping the urban and regional fabric; and 2) a similar failure to problematize the issue of scale, often taking for granted the spatial context of their own particular inquiry. Thus, terms like urban regimes, urban coalitions and learning regions are deployed as if they were ontological and epistemological givens. Drawing on neo-Gramscian state theory and recent work on the ‘politics of scale’, this article seeks to open up urban and regional research towards a multiscaled analysis, and to consider political economic activity as a series of situated, context-specific and politically constructed processes. These arguments are then briefly deployed to demonstrate the multifarious and multiscalar changes that characterize London's governance in the late 1990s.