Competitive City-Regionalism as a Politics of Space: A Critical Reinterpretation of the New Regionalism

Abstract

This paper sets out a sympathetic critique of a series of writings that we refer to as new regionalist approaches to the city. We review the recent work on state restructuring/rescaling and the associated work on the new regionalism, on the one hand, and that on ‘global’ city-regions, on the other. We identify key points of overlap and divergence between these two literatures and suggest that each understates the role of class interests, political alliance formation, and conflicts around the management of collective consumption and social reproduction. We proceed to outline the framework of an alternative and complementary approach in which causal emphasis is placed on the shaping of subnational state geographies by actually existing struggles and strategies developed around particular geographies of public and private investment and collective consumption, and their associated state fiscal, electoral, and regulatory arrangements. We argue that working from this position we are better able to understand why the city-region continues to constitute a strategically vital arena for managing conflict and struggle in contemporary capitalism.