Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper discusses the creation of a growth deal for North Wales (The North Wales Growth Deal – NWGD). North Wales is primarily a rural region within the UK, without a core-city or large metropolitan centre. The paper examines how this urban dynamic, fostered around a pushing of the agglomerative growth model out of the city-region, is being transferred largely across rural space and place in terms of how growth is envisioned and how policy is implemented. It contributes to regional studies knowledge by raising the importance of the non-metropolitan city-regional alternatives in the context of the (academic and policy) city-regional debate.
Highlights
This paper questions where rural regions are being placed within the context of neoliberal growth strategies that posit agglomerative accumulation, that is, policies to nurture value growth (primarily measured by gross value added (GVA) uplift), which is mainly aimed at the urban and more recently city-region spatial scale (Brenner & Schmid, 2011; Woods & Heley, 2017)
The question becomes does this approach lead to an even spreading of economic gains? As highlighted above and by others, such an approach potentially marginalizes the rural due to the dominance of metropolitan centres, creating further uneven growth for rural areas (Shucksmith, 2008). It fails to consider the ways in which areas external to the city-region are capable of creating different models of economic growth which do not rely on urban agglomeration (Harrison & Heley, 2015; Haughton, Deas, Hincks, & Ward, 2016)
For North Wales, we identify a series of key challenges facing the region which are: the above-mentioned regional imbalances; the lack of a Welsh ‘Mittelstand’ and supply chain capacity (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), 2015) (Figure 3); the potential impact of Brexit; a lack of quality employment opportunities and the related skills gap
Summary
This paper questions where rural regions are being placed within the context of neoliberal growth strategies that posit agglomerative accumulation, that is, policies to nurture value growth (primarily measured by gross value added (GVA) uplift), which is mainly aimed at the urban and more recently city-region spatial scale (Brenner & Schmid, 2011; Woods & Heley, 2017). Growth deals can be seen to be a new type of regionshaping, whereby North Wales and its subregional geographies are policy-squeezed into a hegemonic construct for the purposes of economic development, where there is perhaps minimal consideration to the specificity of place or differences between rural and urban areas (Harrison & Heley, 2015) All this raises several questions for predominantly rural areas and regions (such as North Wales) due to the type, nature and geographical focus of growth being aimed for, which is problematic to cities in a variety of ways (Jonas, 2012). Current developments fall well short with regards what was suggested by the Williams Commission, but highlight a direction of travel for the Welsh government It is within this climate of joint working between LAs that, in South Wales, two city-regions have been created via LA collaboration and this in turn has led to North Wales seeking a growth deal for itself. The NWGD, hopes to secure around £3.1 billion of private sector funding alongside this over the long term of the growth deal
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