Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe, 1960–2000

Abstract

While many analyses of globalization and the changing state have focused on the construction of new supranational political regimes, such as the European Union, this chapter argues that the subnational scales of major urban regions represent strategic institutional arenas in which far-reaching transformations of state spatiality are unfolding. I suggest, in particular, that processes of urban governance represent a key mechanism for the rescaling of (western European) state space. First, managerial-welfarist forms of urban governance are shown to have played a major role in the consolidation and eventual crisis of nationalized state spaces between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. Second, the entrepreneurial, growth-oriented approaches to urban governance that have proliferated during the post-1970s period are interpreted as significant expressions and catalysts of a fundamental rescaling of inherited national state spaces. In contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states, contemporary “urban locational policies” promote the formation of Rescaled Competition State Regimes (RCSRs) in which (a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to subnational institutional levels; and (b) major socio-economic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts.