State Spatial Restructuring Research Articles

The spatial hierarchies of a networked state: historical context and present-day imaginaries in Finland

ABSTRACT This article offers a new approach to the analysis of spatial hierarchies and selectivity within national politics. These hierarchies and related state spatial restructurings are approached by analysing spatial imaginaries of the political elites in Finland. This study places these present-day imaginaries and hierarchies in their historical context and analyses the qualitative shifts in Finnish spatial hierarchization. The paper illustrates how the institutionalized hierarchies of the 1960s and 1970s were used as a tool in the emerging Fordist welfare state, and how the hierarchies of today are built on a more competitively oriented basis. The current spatial imaginaries and hierarchies are approached through an extensive suite of elite interviews. These spatial hierarchies are revealing of the existing ways of reasoning and follow the more general spatial and economic rationalities. This paper argues that as the institutional status of the earlier spatial hierarchy has waned and been replaced with network-based spatial systems, hierarchies also exist, however, within the network-based spatial imaginaries and their associated policy practices. The new spatial hierarchies do not have institutional status, but their role in processes of state spatial restructuring is nevertheless important.

Democratic decentralization, microcredit, and the workings of local government in rural India

While democratic decentralization in India has commonly been studied as a project of deepening democracy, this article discusses decentralization as a form of state spatial restructuring in the epoch of market reforms. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the shift in the nature of elected local bodies and their retooling to deepen financial markets in rural India. The case of the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, the Indian state’s largest microcredit program, reveals the rise in the salience of local governments as the site of state spatial policy in the 21st century, and the restructuring of decentralized local governance to deepen financial institutions’ penetration in rural areas. Local governments called panchayats have emerged as state organizations of microgovernance as capital moves to new scales in search of value. Findings from Gujarat, India’s leading state of pro-market reforms, reveal panchayats’ role in metagovernance—the governance of government, and the ascendance of information and communication technologies in panchayat practice to annihilate spatio-temporal barriers for the circulation of financial and material capital.

Elite city-deals for economic growth? Problematizing the complexities of devolution, city-region building, and the (re)positioning of civil society

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.

State spatial restructuring, subnational politics and emerging spaces of engagement for collective action: Labour regimes in Tamil Nadu, southern India

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on state rescaling by examining how processes of restructuring in late transitioning countries like India shape spaces of collective action for labour. India’s subnational States, which have become increasingly critical scales for shaping processes of economic restructuring, face competing governance imperatives. On one hand, they must offer a business-friendly environment, including cheap labour, in order to attract private investments. On the other hand, in a democratic polity, they are compelled to secure political power through electoral appeal to labour. Through a study of labour regimes in the southern State of Tamil Nadu, I argue that subnational governments have responded to this challenge by enabling a scale of labour governance that undermines labour’s ability to engage with new spaces of collective action opened up by reforms and globalization. Rather, the State subsidizes labour through welfare provisioning in their residential spaces even as it draws upon inter-State migrant labour that wields less electoral power.

The Politics of Spatial Policy and Governance in Post-1990 Hungary: The Interplay Between European and National Discourses of Space

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.

Rethinking City-regionalism as the Production of New Non-State Spatial Strategies: The Case of Peel Holdings Atlantic Gateway Strategy

City-regions are widely recognised as key to economic and social revitalisation. Hardly surprising then is how policy elites have sought to position their own city-regions strategically within international circuits of capital accumulation. Typically this geopolitics of city-regionalism has been seen to represent a new governmentalised remapping of state space conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy of neoliberal state spatial restructuring. Through a case study of the Atlantic Gateway Strategy, this paper provides a lens on to an alternative vision for city-region development. The brainchild of a private investment group, Peel Holdings, the Atlantic Gateway is important because it points towards the production of new non-state spatial strategies. Examining Peel’s motives for invoking the city-region concept, the paper goes on to explore the tensions which currently surround the strategy to further identify the potential and scope for non-state spatial strategies. Connecting this to emerging debates around the key role of asset ownership and the privatisation of local democracy and the democratic state, the paper concludes by suggesting that the key question arising is can and will the state maintain its degree of governmental control over capital investment in major urban regions in an era where persistent underprovision of investment in urban economic infrastructure behoves institutions of the state to become ever more reliant on private investment groups to deliver the deliver the jobs, growth and regeneration of the future.

Development Regimes, Scales and State Spatial Restructuring: Change and Continuity in the Production of Urban Space in Metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

AbstractUsing the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle‐down effects, the national‐developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent ‘rolled‐out’ national‐developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio‐environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic‐relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro.

Neither spatial Keynesianism, nor competitive neolocalism: rescaling and restructuring the developmental state and the production of space in Brazil

This article is focused on the trajectory of productive and state spatial restructuring in Brazil since the technocratic-centralist developmental state of the mid-1960s. As compared to the restructuring of Atlantic Fordism, commonly described in terms of a shift of spatial Keynesianism toward a rescaled and competitive state spatial regime, it is claimed that the Brazilian experience has important specificities. Despite the changes in its developmental regime which have occurred over time, there are important continuities in the production of Brazilian urban and regional spaces. The technocratic-centralist national developmental regime has always privileged some spaces as opposed to others, while neglecting the dimensions of social-spatial and environmental sustainabilities. Moreover, the recent rolling out of the developmental state, after a destructive round of neoliberalization of state spaces in the 1990s, can be interpreted as a crisis-driven response, which has not structurally altered the production of urban and regional spaces.

Why Is Japan Neoliberalizing? Rescaling of the Japanese Developmental State and Ideology of State–Capital Fixing

ABSTRACT:This study examines Japan’s state spatial restructuring to explore the reasons behind it. By doing so, it investigates the grounds on which Japan is adopting neoliberalism. Since the early 2000s, Japan’s leaders have been pursuing a combination of state decentralization and selective urban revitalization. At the same time, leaders have abandoned Japan’s long-held goal of balanced spatial development. On the surface, this policy mix resembles the neoliberal state spatial restructuring observed in Western Europe. This study finds, however, that Japan’s state spatial restructuring has less to do with scalar adjustment to capital’s uneven spatial expansion and the supply-side economy for economic development. Rather, it has more to do with the political goal of addressing Japan’s collectivist culture and government failure. To reach this conclusion, the “locality as agent” approach to politics of scale proposed by Cox and Mair (1991) is applied to the historic analysis of the Japanese developmental state.

State spatial restructuring in Greece: forced rescaling, unresponsive localities

This paper discusses rescaling trajectories in the European Union (EU), focusing on Greece. Two consecutive state spatial restructuring waves are noted in Greece the 1980s and the 1990s, both resting upon, but failing to mobilize, local socio-political responses. The limited success of these endeavours, it is argued, reflects path dependency in scalar arrangements and the arrested state of local relational dynamics. During the past decade, a third and comprehensive attempt at rearticulating established formations of state spatial organization has been launched, marked by the construction of new state intervention scales at the subnational and EU levels. The perception of cities and regions as ‘action spaces’ and the promotion of ‘place-based’ and ‘networking governance’ initiatives suggest rescaling intentionality. In light of the narrow involvement of localities in the process, rescaling reflects centralist steering and the markings of EU policy prioritizations, aimed at triggering a competitiveness-oriented locational policy. This paper explores the path-dependent evolution of state spatial forms in Greece, commenting on the context-specific risks associated with the competitiveness shift.

Regulating Regional Uneven Development and the Politics of Reconfiguring Belgian State Space

Abstract: This article mobilises a strategic‐relational approach to state spatial restructuring to overcome the weaknesses of the conventional “New Regionalist” account in economic geography of the resurgence of the region as a strategic site for economic governance. Focusing on hegemonic projects and the shifting nexus of spatial dependencies and engagements through which these are reproduced, undermined and transformed, the role and geography of political agency in state spatial restructuring is highlighted. To illustrate this point, I analyse the construction of new regional state spaces in Belgium, paying particular attention to the hegemonic projects that create a social basis for particular state spaces, the construction of collective agency on different scales (Belgian‐national and Flemish‐regional) and the various ways in which these processes are informed by pre‐existing state spatial and scalar selectivities.

Re‐Politicising the Analysis of “New State Spaces” in Hungary and Beyond: Towards an Effective Engagement with “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Abstract: Recent scholarship grounded in strategic‐relational state theory has offered a compelling approach to state spatial restructuring under neoliberal capitalism. By drawing on Hungary's post‐1990 state spatial reforms, this paper discusses a major limitation of state theoretical frameworks. In particular, the paper seeks to challenge state theorists’ generally subtle but persistent bias to capitalist economic structures, and argues that the above bias impedes an adequate and effectively critical account of state spatial regulation. Finally, it makes a case for a perspective on new state spaces that acknowledges the wider socio‐historical embeddedness of state space production, as well as its inherently political nature.

Urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western Europe, 1960–2000

Against the background of contemporary debates on globalization and the crystallization of a post-Westphalian world order, this article develops an interpretation of state spatial restructuring in post-1970s western Europe While many analyses of globalization and the changing state have focused on the construction of new supranational political regimes, such as the European Union, it is argued here that subnational scales, particularly those of major urban regions, represent strategic institutional arenas in which far-reaching transformations of state spatiality are unfolding. I suggest, in particular, that processes ofurban governancerepresent a key mechanism for the rescaling of state space. First, managerial-welfarist forms of urban governance are shown to have played a major role in the consolidation and eventual crisis of Keynesian welfare national states between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. Second, the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that have proliferated during the post-1970s period are interpreted as significant expressions and catalysts of‘glocalization strategies’oriented towards a fundamental rescaling of national state space. In contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states, glocalization strategies promote the formation of Glocalizing Competition State Regimes (GCSRs) in which (a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to subnational institutional levels and (b) major socioeconomic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts. Urban governance therefore represents an essential institutional scaffolding upon which the national and subnational geographies of state regulation are configured as well as one of the major politico-institutional mechanisms through which those geographies are currently being reworked. The article concludes by underscoring the ways in which GCSRs exacerbate intra-national uneven spatial development, leading in turn to the introduction of new crisis-management strategies that further differentiate the institutional and scalar landscapes of state regulation.

Building ‘Euro-Regions’

Against the background of recent debates on state spatial restructuring in the European Union (EU), this article elaborates a critical geographical interpretation of the contemporary debate on locational competitiveness ( Standortdebatte) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). On the one hand, the current debate on Standort Deutschland (Germany as an investment location) represents the growing instability of the ‘Rhine model’ of capitalism under conditions of accelerating globalization and European integration. In this aspect, the contemporary locational debate has served to justify various forms of deregulation and institutional erosion at each level within the German political system. On the other hand, the contemporary locational debate has also entailed the delineation of new subnational geographical targets for major socio-economic policies. The protection and enhancement of nationally specific competitive advantages within an integrated European economy is increasingly seen to hinge upon the construction of ‘Euro-regions’ associated with territorially specific conditions of production, socio-economic assets and institutional forms at subnational scales.The politics of deregulation in post-unification Germany have therefore been closely intertwined with a broader reterritorialization and re-scaling of state power in which new subnational institutional spaces are being mobilized as the geographical spearheads for renewed economic growth. These arguments are illustrated with reference to two major realms of debate on locational competitiveness in the post-unification era, each of which has entailed a distinctive scalar articulation of neoliberal political agendas: the regionalization of national spatial planning policies ( Raumordnungspolitik); and the debate on ‘competition federalism’ ( Wettbewerbs-föderalismus) and fiscal equalization ( Finanzausgleich) among the German Länder. However, against essentializing interpretations of subnational regions as privileged geographical loci for neocorporatist social compromises or for post-Fordist spatial fixes, contemporary regionalization processes in the FRG are conceptualized here as an institutional medium through which the German state is engaging in strategies of crisis-management.