Agglomeration is in the eye of the beholder: the changing governance of polycentrism

Abstract

ABSTRACT With a focus on evolving governance configurations, this paper traces attempts at promoting polycentrism. The paper steers attention to the policy approaches that seek to develop and promote a polycentric urban region (PUR), whether that polycentric economic system is actual now or something only faintly sketched out now but aspired to in the future. Tracking policy shifts concerning a perceived Glasgow–Edinburgh economy over a period of two decades, the paper explores why different projects, strategies and initiatives have come and gone. In doing this, the paper operationalizes the territory, place, scale, network (TPSN) framework, showing how polycentrism inserts through structuring principles to try to shape existing fields of socio-spatial relations and organization (notably concerns for city-regionalism). In this framing, agglomeration is presented as a malleable and seductive notion that helps to secure views on why certain forms of subnational development should take priority.