Urbanizing the nation-state? Notes on the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions

This article suggests that the developments during the past few decades indicate a qualitative shift in the city/state relation, and conceptualizes this shift as the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions. Originally a state-orchestrated process, today this is manifested in the attempts of major cities and city-regions, in particular, to demand a stronger national and international political role even as claims are made for urban separatism. This process is connected to a geopolitical reasoning of the heightened role of cities in inter-state competition during the age of post-Fordist capitalism. Furthermore, the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions is partly constituted in academic theories and expert knowledges that combine certain type of urbanism, economic growth, and political success, and which in so doing destabilize state-centered geopolitical imaginations.     

Metropolitics in Motion: The Dynamics of Transportation and State Reterritorialization in the Chicago and Toronto City-Regions

Abstract

The global economic crisis exposed the instability of financialized urban governance at precisely the moment when governing coalitions have launched ambitious, expensive plans to reimagine urban transportation infrastructure, driven by the imperatives of restoring accumulation amid intensifying economic and regional competition. In Chicago and Toronto, processes of urban restructuring and state reterritorialization disclose contradictory tendencies in the city-regions’ modes of urbanization. Tracing the contingent path-dependencies of transportation crises highlights tensions between, and within, preexisting metropolitan dynamics and an ascendant neoliberal city-regionalism. The mobilization of collective regional agency appears necessary to overcome the inertia of divisive metropolitan politics, yet the specific political–economic contexts of the case city-regions significantly condition the structural capacity of actors producing, and the potential articulation of, emergent city-regional governance.     

MIGRATION,SENSE OF PLACE,AND NONMETROPOLITAN VITALITY

Across Europe there is a lively policy and academic debate on what the essential conditions are for the development of new economic activities in city-regions. The focus is on knowledge-intensive and creative industries. Different theories (glocalization, clustering, embeddedness, path dependence, "hard" and "soft" location factors) identify the essential factors. In this article, we review debates and theories on these conditions and specifically focus on the different pathways city-regions follow. This results in a set of hypotheses, which are evaluated with empirical evidence from three city-regions: Amsterdam, Birmingham, and Budapest. In each of these city-regions factors can be identified that inhibit the growth of knowledge-intensive and creative industries as well as enable such development. Rather than moving toward a common type of city-region, it is likely that distinctive economic outcomes will be generated due to strengths and assets inherited from the past.