Gordon MacLeod

Beyond soft institutionalism: accumulation, regulation, and their geographical fixes

This author offers a circumspect appraisal of the recent controversies surrounding an ‘institutional turn’ in economic geography and urban and regional studies. He contends that, although the prevailing institutionalist perspectives undoubtedly yield many welcome innovations and useful departures, they are also beset by certain conceptual difficulties. These include, first, a thin political economy most discernible in the failure to appreciate fully the crucial role of the state in shaping the urban – regional process, and a related weakness in examining the asymmetries of power which enframe the governance of space economies. Second, there is a danger of drifting towards a soft institutionalism: a tautological trap that could invite researchers and policymakers mistakenly to envisage the presence or otherwise of a regional ‘institutional thickness’ or a local ‘social capital’ as an adequate explanation of uneven economic development. It is then contended that one relatively mature but continually evolving institutionalist political – economic framework, the Regulation Approach, might help to redress these deficits and to illuminate further our understanding of urban – regional economic change. Recent contributions examining the shifting geographies of accumulation and the rescaling of regulation are viewed to be particularly germane in this regard.

Urban Politics Reconsidered

Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power, urban managerialist and collective consumption debates, this ‘new urban politics’ has appeared conspicuously absorbed with analysing a purported consensus around economic growth alongside a proliferation of entrepreneurially oriented governing regimes. More recent contributions, acknowledging the role of the state and governmentalities of criminal justice, uncover how downtown renaissance is inscribed through significant land privatisations and associated institutionalised expressions like Business Improvement Districts and other ‘primary definers’ of ‘public benefit’: all choreographed around an implicit consensus to ‘police’ the circumspect city, while presenting as ultra-politics anything that might disturb the strict ethics of consumerist citizenship. Beyond downtown, a range of shadow governments, secessionary place-makings and privatisms are remaking the political landscape of post-suburbia. It is contended that the cumulative effect of such metropolitan splintering may well be overextending our established interpretations of urban landscapes and city politics, prompting non-trivial questions about the precise manner in which political representation, democracy and substantive citizenship are being negotiated across metropolitan regions, from downtown streetscape to suburban doorstep. This paper suggests that recent theorisations on post-democracy and the post-political may help to decode the contemporary landscape of urban politics beyond governance, perhaps in turn facilitating a better investigation of crucial questions over distributional justice and metropolitan integrity.

Renewing the geography of regions.

Recent academic discourses pertaining to a ‘new regionalism’ in economic development and territorial representation, in parallel with the constitutional restructuring of certain nation-states, have done much to revive a widespread debate about regional change. Although cautiously welcoming this, the authors raise a concern that much contemporary reasoning has a tendency to conceal fundamental questions relating to political struggle and the contested social and cultural practices through which societies assume their regional shape. They contend that the geohistorical approach of Anssi Paasi, a distinguished proponent of the ‘new regional geography’, can help to unravel the culturally embedded institutionalisation of regions and thereby advance a meaningful understanding of regional change. Paasis reconstructed geography of regions is then deployed to analyse a series of struggles to construct ‘the North’ as a fully institutionalised territory within the political and cultural landscape of Britain. The paper concludes with some thoughts on how to practice a renewed geography of regions in the hope of sparking a more imaginative regional cultural politics.

Spaces of utopia and dystopia: landscaping the contemporary city

Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so–called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner–city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None–the–less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized ‘public’ spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment ‘out there’. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a ‘fortified’ or ‘revanchist’ urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork–quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do.

The learning region in an age of austerity: capitalizing on knowledge, entrepreneurialism, and reflexive capitalism

Abstract A recent round of academic analyses (e.g., Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford) are emphasizing the effective production and translation of knowledge as a critical factor in establishing a sustainable post-Fordist regime. A notable inference of these accounts is that such productions and translations appear to be gravitating towards certain regions. In an emerging regional political economy, illustrious regions in Western Europe and the United States are being hailed as exemplars in terms of convening economic reflexivity, capitalizing on knowledge, and socializing risk. In turn, those less illustrious regions are being summoned to activate interactive learning, reflexive knowledge networks, innovation, and social capital. The author reviews and critically assesses this new regionalist thought in economic geography. He then draws on this to analyze Lowland Scotland’s ongoing policy endeavor to establish a new form of ‘reflexive capitalism’. In undertaking this he make two claims. First, much of the new regionalist thinking has paid insufficient attention to the intricate social relations between the recent regional renaissance and the restructuring of the state. Second, many of the policy innovations associated with the new regionalism should be seen as running parallel alongside a deeper political effort to ‘manage’ the erosion of the Keynesian welfarist institutional settlement. In a concluding section drawing on the work of Ulrich Beck, he argues that these emerging social geographies of reflexive capitalism require to be highlighted to the extent that they constitute an important sociopolitical backdrop with which to locate the more specific imprint of risk in economic development.

Grappling with Smart City Politics in an Era of Market Triumphalism

New ‘sustainable’ urban imaginaries are increasingly taking root in cities and regions around the world. Some notable representative examples of these include: new urbanism (Calthorpe, 1993), compact urban development (Urban Task Force, 2005) and smart growth (Flint, 2006). Proponents of these approaches argue that they are ostensibly built around a new consensus between the planning organisations at various scales, private developers, environmentalists and other relevant non-governmental interests, such as affordable housing advocates. In some sense, then, it might plausibly be argued that these new urban imaginaries transcend the parochial interests that ordinarily punctuate traditional urban and regional politics. Why might this be the case? Proponents of these imaginaries would contend that it is partly due to the fact that smart growth and new urbanist developments are designed to incorporate the tripartite vision of urban sustainability—economic prosperity, ecological integrity and social equity. Moreover, these approaches not only rely on grand visions of future urban utopias; they also incorporate the rhetoric of ‘practical’ visions and plain ‘common sense’ language, in the process broadening their appeal to contemporary policy agendas across the global landscape. And yet at the same time as governments, planners, environmentalists and private interests are actively calling for these new urban development imaginaries— which can be viewed to encourage a revitalised role for more comprehensive and ‘collaborative’ planning—a discourse of market triumphalism has been continuing to sweep its way through different spatial scales of government. States—local, regional and national—seem to be rolling back their own authority and rolling out market-based approaches to urban development—what (Peck, 2004) has referred to as ‘stateauthored market fundamentalism’. Some of the most notable impacts of this neoliberal

New Urbanism/Smart Growth in the Scottish Highlands: Mobile Policies and Post-politics in Local Development Planning

The paper draws on recent theorising on policy mobility and post-politics to investigate the planning of a New Urbanist settlement, Tornagrain, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and designed by Andres Duany. It details Duanys role as an influential ‘persuasive guru’ of New Urbanism and his signatory charrette as a participatory method for engaging local citizens into the New Urbanist model of place-making. Nonetheless, the Tornagrain case raises non-trivial questions about this model, not least the faith being placed in a globally mobile policy evangelist becoming, in effect, a doctrinal conduit for convening local democracy. The paper then contributes to recent debate on post-political planning, particularly in terms of how latent expressions of dissent in local planning processes often appear to be deamplified through endeavours to forge a post-political consensus, in part to masquerade rent hikes and profiteering on behalf of powerful landowners, glitzy architects, consultants and other associates.

Negotiating the contemporary city: Introduction

It is near customary to reason that throughout the past 25 years or so, urban spaces across the ‘advanced’ economies have undergone dramatic transformations in their physical appearance, economic base, social composition, governance, topographical shape and cultural vernacular. In making such an assertion, however, it is nonetheless necessary to be ever-mindful of: overemphasising the extent and novelty of such change; and, neglecting how movement, restlessness and dynamic transformation represent essential qualities of the urban experience (see Engels, 1867; Wirth, 1938; Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1996). Nonetheless, all three present Editors subscribe to a view that recent years have witnessed a gradual decomposition of the Fordist/industrial model of development, alongside the slow erosion of key institutions enshrined in the welfare state and a major crisis in the legitimacy of modernist-inspired urban planning. The upshot of all this is that, over the past two to three decades, cities in the global North have become significantly different arenas within which to live and work and to engage in leisure or politically motivated activities. Thus, just as mid to late 20th century societal expectations relating to employment and welfare entitlement have been fatally compromised, so modernist assumptions about urbanisation and the socialisation of production and consumption have also been immensely disrupted (Castells, 1977; Harvey, 1989a; Gough, 2002). On the one hand, it would seem that the symptoms of these creatively destructive moments of urban structuration are most easily distinguishable by contrasting experiences between different cities (Brenner and Theodore, 2002a). Consider, for example, how the traumatic deindustrialisation of certain west European and North American conurbations—exemplified in the discussions here of Chicago, Essen and Glasgow (Theodore; and Belina and Helms)—was unfolding just as the growth dynamic of notable sunbelt spaces began to catch fire (Markusen et al., 1986). Examples of these latter new urban and exurban regions of prosperity include Orange County in California and Houston, Texas (Scott and Soja, 1996), alongside more modest localities like Reading (Raco, this Issue), situated on the M4 Corridor, the UK’s main artery of prosperity running westwards from London through to Cardiff in Wales. Similarly, cities like Manchester and Detroit, whose initial sources of affluence were deeply intertwined

Editorial: New Times, Shifting Places

This issue marks the handover of Regional Studies to a new editorial team. Taking over the reins appeared somewhat less daunting because the journal is in robust health with a generous stock of papers and special issues in the pipeline. Special thanks go to Arnoud Lagendijk who led a group of highly committed editors and ensured a smooth transition to the new team. Arnoud has kindly agreed to remain as an editor so the journal will continue to benefit from his experience. The new team will maintain the successful policies and practices we inherited, including a commitment to publish the highest quality research, encourage diversity, ensure ethical integrity, provide constructive feedback to authors, share decision-making among editors, commission special issues, and support special sessions in international conferences. We want the journal to be a vital and valued forum for discussion of the most significant ideas and knowledge about cities and regions, and to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. As a more dispersed editorial team, we will operate differently and seek to streamline administrative arrangements to manage the rising volume of submissions. After sketching the rationale for Regional Studies, we set out the changing context for regional research and then introduce our first issue.

Enhancing urban autonomy: Towards a new political project for cities:

As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that towns and cities might have in shaping their economic, environmental, social and cultural geography. This paper aims to examine this question. Starting with the premise that the degree of autonomy any particular town or city has is inherently an empirical question – one which can only be conceptualised in relational terms vis-à-vis the distributed, networked and territorialised responsibilities and powers of the city and the nation-state and other zones of connection – we examine four different contexts where debates over autonomy have intensified in recent history (Brazil, UK, India and South Africa). Drawing on recent respective histories, we identify key elements and enablers in the making of urban autonomy: a characteristic that exists in a variety of guises and forms and creates a patchwork landscape of differentially powerful fragments. We reveal how, beyond its characteristic as a political ideal, autonomy surfaces as a practice that emerges from within specific sectors of particular societies and through their relationship with national and regional politics. Four alternative forms of urban autonomy are delineated: fragmented, coerced (or enclave), distributed and networked. We contend that the spatial templates for autonomy are not predetermined but can be enhanced in multiple different sites and forms of political space within the city. This enhancement appears essential for the integration and strengthening of capacities for sustainable and just forms of development throughout the urban.