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

John Harrison

Regional Studies, 2012, vol. 46, issue 9, 1243-1259

Abstract: Harrison J. Life after regions? The evolution of city-regionalism in England, Regional Studies . 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 is being witnessed is not 'life after regions' but life with, or alongside, regions, the analysis presented argues that to understand why contemporary state reorganization results in a multiplication of the scales of economic governance and spatial planning, it must be recognized how the state shapes policies in such a way as to protect its legitimacy in maintaining 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.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2010.521148

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