Abstract
ABSTRACTThe concept of localism and spatial delineation of the ‘city region’ have seen a renaissance as the de facto spatial political units of governance for economic development. One articulation of this has seen the creation of Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) to potentially enhance Wales’s poor economic performance and secure democratic forms of social cohesion. City regions have been vaunted as the ‘spatial imaginary’ for engendering economic development, but there are considerable state spatial restructuring tensions. The paper discusses these by following the development of city-regionalism in Wales and specifically the unfolding of the ‘elite-led’ CCR City-Deal.
Highlights
As was stated Secretary of State for Wales, Ron Davies (1999), ‘devolution is a process, not an event’ – a sentiment deployed that expresses the dynamics and opportunities of devo-statecraft
City regions have been vaunted as the appropriate scale for economic growth (Storper, 2013) and this has informed the intentions of both the Welsh Government and the local authorities of Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) towards creating city regions
The analysis we present from the empirical material within this paper allows us to cover a current lacuna in the literature on devolution
Summary
As was stated Secretary of State for Wales, Ron Davies (1999), ‘devolution is a process, not an event’ – a sentiment deployed that expresses the dynamics and opportunities of devo-statecraft. We have highlighted how contesting the economic model was difficult and this section compounds this by the process of shifting the governance regime on economic development away from democratic accountability at the local level This intervention of state restructuring and the creation soft space institutions (Haughton, Allmendinger, & Oosterlynck, 2013) that hold power chimes with others observations with regard to how urban governance regimes seek to displace dissent away from their activities as they build towards a hegemonic consensus to create economic development As the above suggests, the terrain is shifting quickly and this is reshaping the very structure of civil society organizations and the way in which they will or will not have a role into the future with regard to the building CCR
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