LIFE AFTER REGIONS? THE EVOLUTION OF CITY-REGIONALISM IN ENGLAND

John William Harrison (1)

1 Department of Geography [Loughborough]

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. Supported by an emerging consensus that economic competitiveness is contingent on 'successful' city-regions, 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. 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 of the paper relates these findings to wider debates on state rescaling and speculates on the future role of transition models in sociospatial theory.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

John William Harrison. LIFE AFTER REGIONS? THE EVOLUTION OF CITY-REGIONALISM IN ENGLAND. Regional Studies, 2010, pp.1. ⟨10.1080/00343404.2010.521148⟩. ⟨hal-00648531⟩