Metropolitan regions as contested spaces: the discursive construction of metropolitan space in comparative perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACTMetropolitan regions as contested spaces: the discursive construction of metropolitan space in comparative perspective. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper explores how metropolitan space as a spatial category of politics and policies is constructed discursively. It sheds a light on a variety of discursive, ideational or cognitive practices that contribute to the production of metropolitan scales. It understands metropolitan space as an outcome of political processes or of policies with a metropolitan scope. However, these discursive processes constructing metropolitan space are far from constituting a unitary phenomenon. Exploring the discursive construction of metropolitan space as a social-spatial phenomenon moves from the assumption that the object of analysis does not represent an ontologically given category, but is a socially and politically constructed reality. Our analysis is based on contrasting four heterogeneous cases in which a significant variety of definitions and understandings of metropolitan space is present: Berlin, New York, Paris and Rome. Therefore, our approach privileges an interpretive perspective on how political practices and policy discourses constitute multiple ontologies of metropolitan space, and on how their interplay, as the expression of power relations and patterns of influence, may define specific trajectories of rescaling and scale effects.