Abstract
ABSTRACT Sub-national statecraft and scalecraft is touted as consequential antidote to the crisis of uneven development and democratic deficit. Interrogating this supposition with reference to city-regionalization in Finland, this paper explores how a neoliberal imaginary of city-regions has been institutionalized through entanglement of discursive practices of contractual planning and materiality of tramway construction in Tampere. We argue that Finland’s ‘city regionalism’ is best understood in terms of rescaling of power from local municipalities to upper tiers of governance, lubricating of entrepreneurial development projects, and shrinking of democratic spaces of political contestations. We conclude by calling for geographically sensitive theorisations of city-regionalization.
Highlights
On 7 November 2016, Tampere City Council made a decision on a majority vote to build a modern tramway system in two phases
The Tampere tramway project, and the developments which have been planned around it, is being promoted as a sound, sustainable urban development initiative justified on the basis of the need for carbon-reduction, urban densification, and improved mobility for a growing urban population (e.g. Tampereen kaupunkiseutu, 2014)
We argue that the materiality of the tramway along with the discursive practices of knowledge production and ‘contractual planning’ which have surrounded its development, has consolidated a neoliberal imaginary of Tampere cityregion which privileges the city and the economy (Davoudi & Brooks, 2021; Luukkonen & Sirviö, 2019)
Summary
On 7 November 2016, Tampere City Council made a decision on a majority vote to build a modern tramway system in two phases. The leading role played by the state in Finnish scalar fixing is evident in: (a) its mobilization of the MAL agreements and (b) its subsidization of major infrastructures, namely the Tampere tramway Together, this imbrication of discourse and materiality has essentialized the city-region as the ‘natural’ scale of planning and governance, leading to strong path dependencies (Moulaert et al, 2007; Puustinen et al, 2017). The upward rescaling from municipal to city-regional governance is consequential in terms of the statutory public participation required by the Finnish Land Use and Building Act (132/1999) for major planning and infrastructure projects such as Tampere tramway and its related construction projects (Bäcklund et al, 2014). On the contrary, ongoing processes of contestations by multiple actors and interests, and their alternative imaginaries, remain, leading to a compromised geometry of city-regions along the lines of deep seated jurisdictional/administrative boundaries (Luukkonen & Sirviö, 2019; Scott, 2019), and far from the conceived geographies of functional areas (Davoudi & Brooks, 2021)
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