Nick Parsons

In Search of a European Edge Urban Identity Trans-European Networking among Edge Urban Municipalities

Transnational networking has come to the fore as a strategy for coping with the increasingly stringent fiscal climate in which European municipalities have had to operate in the last two to three decades. New funding streams for policy development and implementation have emerged with the Commission’s financing of trans-European local authority networks. In this paper we consider the formation of a shared European identity and the nature and content of interauthority networking activities, drawing upon the example of one newly formed network - the edge cities network. Here we make use of original empirical material drawn from three case-study edge city municipalities - Croydon, Getafe and Noisy-le-Grand. We find that a weak form of shared European edge urban identity has developed to date, and that the direct and indirect benefits of networking are not all that they might be. There is some evidence that longstanding national traditions of interorganizational working and administrative arrangements have exerted an influence on the networking activities of at least one of these edge urban municipalities. In this respect, transnational networking meshes with aspects of local entrepreneurial coalition building which are often imbued with a sense of interlocality competition for private and public investment.

Legitimizing Illegal Protest: The Permissive Ideational Environment and ‘Bossnappings’ in France

In France, in 2009–2010, on several occasions, managers announcing redundancies were held hostage by workers. Public opinion polls show widespread support for the ‘bossnappers’, while the State did not taken action against them. Employing the insights of new institutionalism and social movement theory, this article explains the legitimization of such radical, illegal action through the notion of a permissive ideational environment resulting from a tradition of trade union militancy, pre-existing concerns over globalization and more recent fears of, and government and trade union responses to, globalization and the current economic crisis.

In Search of a European Edge Urban Identity

Transnational networking has come to the fore as a strategy for coping with the increasingly stringent fiscal climate in which European municipalities have had to operate in the last two to three decades. New funding streams for policy development and implementation have emerged with the Commission’s financing of trans-European local authority networks. In this paper we consider the formation of a shared European identity and the nature and content of interauthority networking activities, drawing upon the example of one newly formed network - the edge cities network. Here we make use of original empirical material drawn from three case-study edge city municipalities - Croydon, Getafe and Noisy-le-Grand. We find that a weak form of shared European edge urban identity has developed to date, and that the direct and indirect benefits of networking are not all that they might be. There is some evidence that longstanding national traditions of interorganizational working and administrative arrangements have exerted an influence on the networking activities of at least one of these edge urban municipalities. In this respect, transnational networking meshes with aspects of local entrepreneurial coalition building which are often imbued with a sense of interlocality competition for private and public investment.

Kifissia: Playground of the Athenians?

In ‘How Eden lost it’s garden’, Mike Davis (1996) recounts the destruction of southern California’s natural landscape in the inexorable expansion of Los Angeles — a destruction that saw mountains and the Los Angeles river both built on and water drawn by aqueduct from the San Bernadino mountains to supply an ever growing population. At first glance, the parallels to be drawn with the expansion of Athens and the place of Kifissia within the greater Athens urban fabric and processes of development therein may appear to be few. Yet, the partial parallels, albeit that they exist at a micro-scale, are nevertheless there in more ways than simply the eclipse of the natural by the man-made environment but in the very agents involved in and processes by which the latter has been created.

Perspectives on the future of work in France

Commissariat general du Plan, Le travail dans vingt ans: Rapport de la commission presidee par Jean Boissonnat (Odile Jacob/La Documentation francaise, 1995), 373 pp., 80F., ISBN 2 7381 0350 2 Aznar, G., Emploi: la grande mutation (Hachette, 1996), 139 pp., 59F., ISBN 2 01 235185 9. Schnapper, D., Contre la fin du travail (Textuel, 1997), 111 pp., 79F., ISBN 2 909317 30 7

The Croydonisation of South London

Well over one hundred years before Iain Sinclair detected his creature of the depths, commentators had been aware, it seems, of the ‘Croydonisation of South London’. By the 1890s and with the new London County Council barely installed, the general trend of population growth in the outer rings of Britain’s major cities including London could be observed. In 1891 the implications for London already seemed clear to Low (quoted in Young and Garside, 1982: 107): ‘It will be a London of suburbs… Not one but a dozen Croydons will form a circle of detached forts around the central stronghold’ with the people of London dwelling in ‘the depths of the Home Counties’.

Closer to the Edge: Function and Form in Post-Suburban Europe

The term ‘edge city’ (Garreau, 1991) is something that academics, along with Tom Wolfe’s developer hero Charlie Croker in the opening quotation, have come to use with no little anxiety. As Soja notes ‘for much of the world, the Edge City maxim, that every American city is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles has become much more of a foreboding than a hopeful promise’ (2000: 401). Moreover, while the term ‘edge city’ takes its place in a welter of terminology deployed to help chart the complexity of modern forms of urbanisation, its precise relevance in the European setting is highly questionable (Ghent Urban Studies Team, 1999; Lambert et al., n.d.). It will come as no surprise, then, that we avoid the term ‘edge city’ or any explicit attempt to define the ‘European edge city’. And as we will see in the next chapter, no definition of an edge city in the European setting has been forthcoming from the European network of self-styled edge cities. Rather, in keeping with the diversity of experiences of urbanisation in Europe, and in keeping with the diverse empirical cases reported later in this chapter, we use the term ‘post-suburbia’ to capture a profusion of terminology relating to a nascent urban form and over which there is only partial consensus.

Espoo: California Dreaming?

Many of the most salient features and some of the emerging contradictions of, and inequalities associated with, the very rapid and very recent urbanisation that has taken place in Finland are distilled in the urban politics surrounding the growth of the municipality of Espoo which stands to the immediate west of Helsinki (Figure 7.1). Castells and Himanen (2002) have recounted the story of one apparently paradoxical progeny of Finland’s strong welfare state system — namely its coexistence with a highly internationally competitive information technology industry (Van den Berg et al., 2001). The story of the growth of Espoo, itself now one of the major concentrations of the information technology industry in Finland, reveals another paradox — namely the coexistence of localised American-style processes of urban development with a strong national welfare state framework.

Noisy-le-Grand: Grand State Vision or Noise about Nowhere?

Local government and the public sector more generally play an important role in the development of each of our case-study edge municipalities, in a way they do not in the North American setting. However, nowhere is the influence of non-local State institutions and constructions more apparent than in Noisy-le-Grand whose edge identity, or lack thereof, has been produced by its entanglement in a complicated and overlapping set of administrative arrangements.

Getafe: Capital of the Gran Sur

In contrast to Noisy-le-Grand, although a post-suburban space imposed by the central state, from an early point in this process, local institutions and more importantly significant individuals such as the local mayor have been able to construct Getafe as a distinct post-suburban place — a place with distinctive social and political concerns from which to enlarge their spaces of engagement within the wider metropolitan area. The stanza from Benedetti’s poem above is one that the mayor of Getafe himself has been fond of quoting and indicates something of the agency that has seen Getafe emerge as an invented space from the disadvantaged south to challenge Madrid.