! (00a130037 Unusual regionalism

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Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 10, 1847– 1877, September 2006
From a New Regionalism to an Unusual
Regionalism? The Emergence of Non-standard
Regional Spaces and Lessons for the Territorial
Reorganisation of the State
Iain Deas and Alex Lord
[Paper first received, May 2005; in final form, December 2005]
Summary. This paper reports on the results of research to explore a range of attempts to develop
new regional forms, and considers the degree to which they accord to conceptualisations of the ‘new
regionalism’ and accounts of the changing territorial structure of the state. It highlights the array of
new regional configurations which now extends across the territory of the European Union,
discussing the influence exerted by the growth of interest in European spatial planning over the
course of the 1990s and considering the degree to which readings of new regionalist rhetoric
have informed both the creation and substance of a number of recently conceived regional
entities. The paper concludes by considering the implications posed by the growth of these new
regional configurations for attempts to interpret the rescaling of governance and the
reterritorialisation of the state.
Introduction: State Rescaling and the
Emergence of New Territories of
Governance
Many of the most recent efforts to interpret
what is seen as a resurgence of regionalism
in Europe have focused upon the idea that
the territorial organisation of the state has
undergone a fundamental reshaping, associated with a process of glocalisation, in
which the globalisation of economic activity
is linked to an increase in the significance of
cities and regions as economic actors
(Brenner, 1998, 2001). This, it is argued, is
reflected in a related series of institutional,
political and policy changes in which
politico-institutional space begins to accord
to the putative new realities of internationalised economic space. Part of this is said to
have involved substantive changes in the
nature of policy intervention, primarily in
order to enhance territorial competitiveness.
Part has also involved a series of linked
changes to structures of governance: a reterritorialisation of the state in which power has
dislocated upwards (to an array of supranational institutional entities), downwards (to
cities and regions) and, as Amin (2002)
notes, ‘outwards’ (to non-state bodies) (see
also Brenner, 1999, 2001; Hudson, 2003;
Jessop, 1994, 2005; MacLeod and Goodwin,
1999; Swyngedouw, 1997, 2004).
More recent accounts of this process of
rescaling have focused on questions around
the socio-political construction of scale.
Much of this has emphasised that regions are
not fixed territorial entities, but have been
constructed and reconstructed in uneven
ways that defy assumptions of hierarchical
Iain Deas and Alex Lord are in the School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester,
M13 9PL, UK. Fax: 0161 275 6893. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected]
0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=101847 –31 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies
DOI: 10.1080=00420980600838143
1848
IAIN DEAS AND ALEX LORD
scalar neatness and which reflect struggle
around issues of boundary and identity
(Amin, 2002; Brenner, 2003a; Deas and
Giordano, 2003; Herod and Wright, 2002;
Marston, 2000; Paasi, 2004). Research in the
wake of Collinge’s (1999) ‘relativisation of
scale’ thesis (and especially Jessop and
Sum’s (2000) notion of a glurbanisation
process of state restructuring of urban spaces
in the quest for international competitive
advantage) has similarly emphasised the
conflict-ridden and spatio-temporal unevenness of the changing scalar expression of the
state and, in particular, the continuing centrality of the nation-state (see also Jessop, 2000;
Mansfield, 2005). Part of the result of this, it
is argued, is that rescaling is manifested in
quite different and sometimes conflicting
ways, including the growth of networks of
cities to create non-contiguous or virtual
regions (see, for example, Allen et al., 1998;
Heeg et al., 2003; Leitner and Sheppard,
2002; Phelps et al., 2002), the increasing
significance of global city-regions (Scott,
1998, 2001), the revitalisation and changing
substantive focus of longer-standing territorial
forms based around administrative regions or
more tightly drawn city-regions (see, for
example, Brenner, 2003b; Parr, 2005) or the
emergence of transborder regions that extend
across nation-states (see, for example,
Church and Reid, 1999; Clement and
Sparrow, 2001; Scott, 1999; Siddaway, 2001).
Nevertheless, the great bulk of these disparate readings of the changing spatial structure
of the state has tended largely to focus on
established territorial entities. To varying
extents, they have highlighted the pivotal
role played by the globalisation of economic
activity in driving attempts to bolster different
types of regional institution and initiative and,
in doing so, enhance ‘regional’ competitive
advantage. What is less prominent, however,
is any attempt (within the context of these
efforts to conceptualise regionalism) to enumerate and interpret the array of territorially
contiguous new regional coalitions and institutions—what might be termed ‘unusual
regions’—that have begun to emerge, many
of which transcend, and jar against,
established territorially bounded bodies at
regional and sub-national scales.
This paper reports on research to explore a
range of attempts to develop new regional
forms and considers the degree to which
they accord to attempts to conceptualise the
shifting territorial structure of the state. It
attempts to identify a range of ‘new’ regions
and explores the extent to which the main
elements of new regionalist thinking are
reflected in the nature and form of emergent
regionalism. In doing so, the paper focuses
in particular upon the influence exerted by
the growth of interest in European spatial
planning over the course of the 1990s, and
considers the degree to which new regional
forms take any concrete form beyond
loosely articulated planning ‘visions’. It also
assesses the balance between organic pressures for new multicity or polycentric regions
and top – down EU encouragement for innovation in territorial governance and policymaking. The paper concludes by considering
the implications posed by the growth of
these new regional configurations for attempts
to interpret the rescaling of governance and
the reterritorialisation of the state.
Competition,
Cohesion
and
the
Orchestration of New European Regions
Much of the impetus for the creation of new
regional territories in Europe derives from
three principal and interrelated drivers, all
central to thinking within the European
Commission at various times. The first
relates to efforts to reconceptualise European
economic and political space, linked to the
desire to make national boundaries more permeable and thereby improve the functioning
of the single European market and help
extend the process of European economic
and monetary union (EMU) (Faludi, 1997,
2000; Nadin and Shaw, 1998). Secondly, the
Commission has sought to promote competitiveness across the EU as a whole, partly by
encouraging policy-makers to turn their attention towards the creation of new internationally significant territories of economic
dynamism which could complement existing
NEW REGIONALISM
areas in and around, inter alia, London, Paris
and, to a lesser extent, the Ruhrgebiet
(Albrechts, 1998; Batten, 1995; CEC, 1991,
1999; Priemus, 1998). Thirdly, there has also
been a policy emphasis on the promotion of
territorial cohesion, the diminution of interregional disparities and the reduction of peripherality, partly in order to assist in harmonising
economic space, but also linked to a worldview that sees the maintenance of social cohesion as a prerequisite for competitiveness
(AER, 1995; Faludi and Peyrony, 2001;
Faludi and Waterhout, 2005; Husson, 2002;
Tatzberger, 2003).
These pressures have found institutional
manifestation in a number of different ways.
They were reflected in part in the creation,
in March 1994, of the Committee of European
Regions (COR). Although possessing few real
powers and by the late 1990s of rapidly
diminishing status and import, the creation
of the COR (if not its subsequent operation)
represented a significant shift in symbolic
terms in that it appeared at the time to
herald the prospect that regional governments
within member-states would have an explicit
link to EU decision-making and policy formulation. Although the COR was in part fuelled
by pressure from regional and local governments which felt marginalised from EU
decision-making, its advent was viewed by
some as having wider significance. In particular, it was seen by some eyes as providing tangible embodiment of the underlying principle
of a ‘Europe of the regions’ which, from the
late 1980s, became fleetingly important as a
result of the legitimacy it apparently accorded
to a regionalist view of EU policy-making
(even if, as Painter (2001) notes, the phrase
was absent from official EU publications).
By the mid-to-late 1990s, however, the
rhetorical momentum underlying the ‘Europe
of the regions’ had begun to dissipate, increasingly superseded by a less dramatic ‘Europe
with the regions’ (Loughlin, 1999; Painter,
2001). Nonetheless, Keating (1996, p. 51)
argues persuasively that, while tentative
efforts to promote regional governance were
evidently not the basis for some ill-defined
and fanciful new European political order
1849
and while the ‘hollowing-out’ of the nationstate had been greatly overstated, what had
emerged by the mid 1990s was a complex
set of interrelationships in which politics at
the scale of the EU had become more regionalised and sub-national territorial politics progressively more Europeanised. The process,
in Huntoon’s (2002) words, was a spasmodic
one of ‘muddling through towards a Europe
of the regions’.
This process has continued through a succession of documents produced by the Commission exhorting member-states to think
and act regionally. The three reports on ‘economic and social cohesion’ published by the
European Commission between 1996 and
2004 provide one example (European
Commission, 1996, 2001, 2004). At the
same time, the principle of ‘territorial cohesion’, based as much on reducing socioeconomic disparities on an interregional basis as
an international one, has occupied an increasingly prominent position in European Commission thinking. It became enshrined in EU
policy-making via Article 16 of the Treaty
of Amsterdam, which talks of the need for
‘harmonious, balanced and sustainable development of economic activities’ (Tatzberger,
2003), while Article 3 of the abortive draft
constitution for Europe also proclaimed a
desire to “promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among
Member-states” (European Convention Secretariat, 2003, p. 6). Notions of territorial
cohesion also form the cornerstone of the
approach of the Commission’s regional
policy directorate, DG Regio, which oversees
policy instruments like the Structural Funds
which seek partly to lessen interregional disparities for reasons of social equity, but also
(and probably more significantly) to help
boost the competitiveness of the EU as a
whole.
The interplay of regionalisation and
Europeanisation has also been evident in the
development of spatial planning provisions
(Eser and Konstadakopulos, 2000; Shaw and
Sykes, 2005). Some of this has related to
initial and limited attempts to harmonise
national spatial planning regimes as one
1850
small part of the wider (and on-going) process
of EMU. Although it remains somewhat
inexact and still far from finalised (Faludi
et al., 2000), the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), developed over
the course of the period 1988–99 by the
now-disbanded Committee on Spatial Development, was the most significant step in this
process. In particular, it sealed a commitment
to territorial cohesion and proclaimed the
view that the EU’s future economic, social
and political development should be based
on the development of horizontally integrated
geographical territories rather than on vertical
sectors (Committee on Spatial Development,
1999, p. 35). Although it lacks any statutory
force at the EU level and its application is
entirely dependent upon the will of national,
regional and local planning authorities
(Williams, 1999), its effect has been to stimulate pioneering actions to begin to develop
more meaningful spatial planning provisions
within and across member-states and their
regions. Part of this process, in the wake of
the ESDP’s concluding exhortation for policy
actors in the member-states to consider the
future shape of regions (Faludi, 2001, p. 668),
has involved initial efforts to create new
regional territorial structures, responding, for
example, to the encouragement for territorial
configurations based on “transEuropean . . .
polycentric development” (Committee on
Spatial Development, 1999, p. 26), “development corridors” (Committee on Spatial
Development, 1999, p. 70) or “polycentric . . .
crystallisation points for economic development” (Committee of the Regions, 2001, p. 4).
Alongside the ESDP, the early 1990s saw
the first, tentative attempts to delimit these
new regional territories, with extensive
cross-national regions outlined in Europe
2000 (European Commission, 1991) and
its successor document Europe 2000 þ
(European Commission, 1994). These, in
turn, paved the way for the later Interreg II
and III initiatives, which involved a range of
experimental territorially based initiatives.
These included the seven transnational
mega-regions, aimed at developing ‘visions’
setting a broad (and typically somewhat less
than precise) framework to guide the work
of constituent regional and national governments in developing spatial planning provisions, and at guiding and responding to the
range of smaller, often-experimental projects
undertaken under Interreg auspices (Nadin
and Shaw, 1998; Nadin, 2002; Williams,
1996). Although only four of the seven
mega-regions subsequently finalised ‘vision’
documents (Nadin, 2002), the top– down
aspiration to create transnational regional
entities, configured very much along nonstandard lines, reflects the longstanding
desire from within parts of the European Commission to develop territorial units—whether
configured along familiar lines or otherwise—to promote its wider agenda for
enhanced competitiveness.
Mapping Unbounded Regionalism
It is within this context that the proliferation of
new regional entities can best be understood.
From the 1990s onwards, a range of new territorial structures and initiatives has been
superimposed upon the EU’s established political geography. Many of these new entities
relate in large measure to top– down admonitions to develop imaginative configurations
that straddle established national and regional
boundaries, in line with spatial planning
imperatives which themselves reflect the
deeper (but still far from realised) desire on
the part of the European Commission to regularise land use planning regimes and remove
international and interregional anomalies in
the way in which economic development is
regulated.
The momentum underlying this process is
exemplified by Figure 1, which illustrates the
bewildering array of collaborative initiatives
that have emerged in line with the European
Commission’s efforts to stimulate new interregional, intercity and transnational collaborative
initiatives in economic development and
spatial planning. The map is an elaborate one
of confusing, overlapping boundaries, reflecting both the infancy of many of the initiatives,
their often-experimental nature and, in many
cases, their continuing struggle to establish
NEW REGIONALISM
legitimacy and permanency. This map of new,
‘unbounded’ regionalism stands in marked contrast to the familiar map of European NUTS II
(Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) administrative regions that form the
basis for the allocation of most EU Structural
Fund resources (Smith, 2004). That many of
the new regional configurations are in direct
competition—both with each other and with
longer-established administrative regions—is
evidenced graphically by the map (see also,
Keating, 1998; Prigge and Ronneberger, 1996).
One illustration of the volume and complexity of territory-building activity of this
type is provided by the assortment of initiatives in and around the Baltic. The North
European Trade Axis (NETA), Vision and
Strategies Around the Baltic (VASAB), the
Sapphire Arc, the New Hanseatic Interregio,
the Baltyk Euregio and others extend across
the Baltic and the administrative regions and
nation-states that encircle it. The principal
stimuli for the emergence of these new
regional configurations in and around the
Baltic are three-fold. They relate, first, to the
end of the Cold War, which enabled longstanding trading routes to be reinstituted and
bottom–up efforts to begin to bring the
Baltic states and Poland back into mainstream
trade in the EU by brokering alliances with
existing member-state regions. The Union of
Baltic Cities and the Northern Development
Action Plan, as Baeten (2004) notes, provide
examples of bottom– up entities that
emerged in this way. Secondly, these initial
elemental innovations were reinforced by
subsequent Commission-led efforts to formalise some of the new alliances via policy
initiatives such as Interreg, especially in the
lead-up to EU enlargement (Baeten, 2004).
Thirdly, the traditionally high profile accorded
to spatial planning in northern Europe, as is
evident from Figure 1, meant a particular
desire to take forward interregional and transnational alliances which had planning goals at
the core of their remit.
Across the EU more generally, the precise
balance of power between many of the competing entities shown in Figure 1 varies capriciously, reflecting a wider tendency for the
1851
pattern of new regions to alter as initiatives
emerge and fade. Given that many of these
and other such alliances and institutions
have tried to develop exploratory spatial planning visions, there is perhaps a degree of irony
in the fact that, rather than begin a move
towards greater standardisation in strategic
planning provisions across the EU as a
whole, one of the results of the resurgence
of new regional entities of these types has
been to create a series of often-competing
spatial development prototypes.
Nevertheless, it is immediately clear that
the desire to develop strategic spatial planning
provisions is central to the emergence of
many of the plethora of new regional initiatives. Of the 146 initiatives shown in
Figure 1 and listed in Table 1, no less than
39 have the development of strategic spatial
plans (or, more commonly, less precise precursory ‘visions’) as one of their central, and
in some cases defining, goals. Alongside
strategic visions, however, spatial planning
efforts in other instances have revolved
around more workaday issues of co-operation
and co-ordination, arguably more in accordance with the European Commission’s desire
to resolve the practical impediments to
economic development engendered by international and interregional inconsistencies
across different land use planning regimes.
Such a goal has been at the heart of many of
the 75 initiatives shown in Figure 1 which
focus on border areas (see the Appendix,
Table A1). Some of these exhibit profound
qualitative differences from the megaregions, with their self-professed ‘global’
focus and the audacious underpinning aspiration fundamentally to re-order—to rescale—
the EU’s geography. By contrast, regional
and national cross-border collaborative
initiatives, some of them with relatively
lengthy histories, have focused on routine
issues of intergovernmental co-operation in
relation to environmental protection, heritage
and tourism, vocational training, smallbusiness support, transport linkages and
sundry unglamorous areas of activity.
Yet while the ESDP and Interreg have been
important in prompting the emergence of new
1852
Figure 1. The ‘new regionalism’ in Europe. Key: see Table 1.
Table 1. Key to Figure 1
Alpine Space
Atlantic Area
Baltic Sea
50
51
52
4
5
Northern Periphery
South West Europe
53
54
6
7
8
9
North Sea
Archimed
Western Mediterranean
Central, Adriatic, Danubian and SouthEast-European Space
North West Europe
Non-Continental and Overseas
Co-operation Areas
Basiliensis
Bayerischer Wald/Bohmerwald
Benelux-Middengebied
Bodensee
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
99
100
101
Rives Manches
Karelia Region (Russian-Finnish border)
Western Makedonia Korca
102
103
Tornedalsradet
Kvarken Mittskandia
55
56
57
58
Tatry
West/Nyugat-Pannonia
Marine Transport in the Baltic Sea
Region from a Spatial Development
Perspective
Trans-European Network (Transport)
Transport Infrastructure Needs
Assessment
Visions and Strategies Around the Baltic
Austria-Czech Republic-Hungary
Vienna & Burgenland (AT) - Gyor (HU)
Vienna & Burgenland - Bratislava
104
105
106
107
Sonderjylland Schleswig
Skargaarden Archipelago
Four Cities
MEDOC
59
60
Styria (AT) and Slovenia
Wallonia, Lorraine, Luxembourg
108
109
61
62
63
64
Bornholm (DK)
Storstrøms Amt & Ostholstein, Lübeck
SE France- NW Italy
France-Spain (Pyrenees & Surrounding
Regions)
Nord/Pas-de-Calais & Kent
Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland, Lorraine
110
111
112
113
Ostersjon
Saarland-BerchtesgadenerlandTraunstein
Osterbottens Forbund
Hanseatic
Reseau Metropolisation
Atlantic Arc
114
115
Balkans Commission
Baltic 21
116
Baltic Sea Commission
117
Black Sea Commission
118
European Islands System of Links and
Exchanges
Inter-Mediterranean Commission
Interreg Rhine-Meuse Activities
Oberschlesein/Nord-Moravian
Metropolitan Fringes
18
Burgenland
Communidade de Trabalho GaliciaNorte de Portugal
Egrensis
65
66
67
19
Elbe/Labe
68
20
Ems-Dollart Region
69
21
22
23
24
Erzgebirge
Freiburger Regio-Gesellschaft
Meuse-Rhine
Inn-Salzach
70
71
72
73
Bayern (DE); Öbersösterreich, Salzburg,
Tirol, Vorarlberg (AT)
Germany-Czech Republic-Poland border
area
Frankfurt am Oder, Poznañ, Slubice,
Peitz, Zielona Góra
Gibraltar
Arbeits-gemeinschaft Alpenlander
Puglia (IT) & Albania
NE Italy- SEAustria
119
120
121
122
1853
(Table continued)
NEW REGIONALISM
1
2
3
Continued
Insubrica
Neisse
74
75
27
PAMINA
76
28
Pomerania
77
29
30
31
32
Pro Europa Viadrina
Regionalverband Mittlerer Oberrhein
Rhein-Mass-Nord
Rhein-Waal
78
79
80
81
33
34
Saar Lor Lux
Scheldemond
82
83
35
36
37
38
39
40
Spree Neisse Bober
TriRhena
Waldviertael-Sudtsechechien
Wattenmeer/Waddensee
Weinviertel-Sudmahren-Westslovakie
Zugspitze-Wetterstein-Karwendel
84
85
86
87
88
89
41
Baltyk
90
42
43
Bug
Carpathian
91
92
Puglia (IT) & Western Greece
Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and Veneto/
Slovenian border regions
Lombardia, Valle d’Aosta, Piemonte and
Bolzano/Swiss border regions
Cadiz, Malaga, Ceuta & Mellila
(Morocco)
Northern Ireland
Karelia Region (Russian-Finnish border)
SE Finland
Spain: Andalusia, Extremadura, Castilla
y Léon, Galicia; Portugal: Algarve,
Alentejo, Centre, North
North Calotte Region (SE, FI, NO)
Wien, Graz, Klagenfurt (AT)–Ljubljana,
Maribor, Ravne (SI)
Wallonia, Lorraine, Luxembourg
Oresund Region (DK)
France-Spain border regions
France-Switzerland-Italy-Germany
Euregio Rijn-Waal
Brandenburg - Lubuskie &
Zachodniopomorskie
Saxony and Polish and Czech border
regions
Alpenrhein-Bodensee-Hochrhein
Inter þ move
44
45
46
47
48
49
Danube-Drava-Save
DMTC/DKMT
Glacensis
Helsinki-Tallinn
Niemen
Saule
93
94
95
96
97
98
Ireland-Wales ‘border’ regions
Italy-Austria border regions
Italy-France border regions
Italy-Slovenia
Italy-Switzerland
Netherlands-Belgium
Source: Author.
123
124
North European Trade Axis
North Sea Commission
125
126
Strategy and action programme for
developing a South-Baltic region
Baltic Sea Region
127
128
129
130
Randstad G4
AG Alpen Adria
Alpes-Maritimes/Cuneo d’Imperia
Barents
131
132
Central Maecedonia
Co-operation North
133
134
135
136
137
138
Corse-Sardegna
CT Juraregionen
Eastern Macedonia
Epirus-Albania
Ett Granslost Samarbete
Fyns-Amt KERN
139
Inre Skandinavia
140
142
Mitteleuropaische Region
Mitteleuropaische Region (No. 2 Swiss-French Border)
Nestos Mesta
Nordatlantiska Samarbetet
Nordens Grone Balte
Nordisk Ministeraap
143
144
145
146
25
26
1854
Table 1.
NEW REGIONALISM
regional territories and embryonic institutions, it would be wrong to say that their
impact on the resurgence of regionalism
based on standard administrative areas has
been, for the most part, anything other than
modest. In an English context, for example,
other factors have been of considerably
greater import (Tomaney, 2002). Nevertheless, the ESDP has exerted a degree of influence (particularly, and perhaps uniquely, in
the UK) and, again in a British context, this
has been especially evident in the period
since the election of the Blair government in
1997 (Tewdwr-Jones et al., 2000; Shaw and
Sykes, 2005; Sykes and Shaw, 2005). The
system of Regional Planning Guidance
(RPG), encouraged by national Planning
Policy Guidance (ODPM, 2000), was compelled to take cognisance of ESDP provisions,
giving the latter, as Faludi (2001, p. 672)
notes, almost the status of a broad, indirect
and unintentional national plan. Equally,
some of the new regionalist principles that
have emerged in tandem with, and have
underpinned, the ESDP are reflected in
English RPG. For example, notions of interurban polycentricity (as Richardson and Jensen,
2000, and Davoudi, 2003, note) and transborder trading corridors—notably NETA—
infuse the RPG documents of the North
West and Yorkshire and the Humber, both of
which explicitly acknowledge the ESDP and
the Interreg mega-regions (GONW, 2002;
GOYH, 2001). These are concerns that are
set to continue to be prominent in English
regional planning, with the statutory Regional
Spatial Strategies introduced from 2004
required by government guidance to reflect
not only the provisions of the ESDP, but
also to take account of Interreg III, the
related ESPON research programme and the
EU Structural Funds (ODPM, 2004, p. 8)
(although Sykes and Shaw (2005) argue that
this national guidance gives less prominence
to the ESDP than in the years immediately
preceding). But despite this, it is new regionalist ideas themselves and, more concretely,
the related devolution of powers to regions
and nations within the UK, rather than the
ESDP directly, that have been of significantly
1855
greater importance in fuelling regionalism in
England. It is to the influence of these new
regionalist ideas in shaping the emerging
regional configurations that the paper now
turns.
The Influence of ‘New Regionalist’ Discourse
It is clear, then, that much of the impetus for
the emergence of new regional entities
derives from the need to synchronise spatial
planning provisions across EU memberstates and administrative regions. But it also
draws—in some cases, consciously and explicitly—from the discourse that surrounds conceptual readings of new regionalism. The
myriad rhetorical espousals of new regionalism have clearly had geographically extensive, if as yet largely symbolic and perhaps
superficial, impact. The existence of the near
150 new regional entities shown in Figure 1
and listed in Table 1—which collectively
stand in marked contrast to the extant geography of regionalism, based on established
administrative areas—provides one illustration of the potency of such arguments.
What is significant here is that, although the
arguments underlying the new regionalism, on
both conceptual and practical levels, are
eminently contestable, they have exerted
extraordinary influence on policy-makers,
and part of the result has been the multiplication of efforts to remap the EU’s regional
geography. As Lovering (2001) notes, one
consequence has been to re-energise longerestablished regional bodies and to create a
marked growth in ‘regionally badged’ economic development initiatives, committed, in
various ways and to varying extents, to what
might be described as the new regionalist
orthodoxy that ‘thick’ networks of regionally
based institutions can help to support intimately integrated lattices of globally competitive firms. But at the same time, it is also clear
that the new regionalist treatise is a significant
contributory factor underlying the creation of
regions defined and delimited in hitherto
atypical ways. Figure 1 provides a striking
diagrammatic representation of the remarkable degree to which new regionalist
1856
narratives have informed the actions of policy
actors and contributed to the emergence of
these novel and unusually demarcated spaces.
The boundaries of a number of these areas,
reflecting their immaturity, appear in many
instances to be arbitrary: imagined regions
and oddly configured ‘corridors’ whose often
curious geography bears little relation to functional integrity in terms of culture and identity, socioeconomic circumstances, political
disposition or geomorphology. To Hebbert
(2000, p. 385) they reflect the “broad brush
geography of the European Union”. They are
“‘imaginary’ spaces envisioned by politicians” (Church and Reid, 1999, p. 654) and
often delimited not in relation to functional
geographies, but in a wholly subjective way
involving “the map and the pencil” (van
Houtum and Lagendijk, 2001, p. 765), with
the effect that their
fundamentally different . . . culture [and]
socio-political and physical-geographical
circumstances . . . [make] their proposed
commonality somewhat difficult to see
(Herrschel and Newman, 2002, p. 48).
Yet there is a degree of logic underlying their
delimitation. First, many (and particularly the
mega-regions) were delineated consciously to
grate against existing nation-state boundaries.
In part, this was an attempt to ensure that new
institutions and policy initiatives would transcend national borders, thereby helping to harmonise land use planning regimes and (more
broadly) contributing to the “frictionless
mobility” of labour and capital across the EU
(Dabinett and Richardson, 2005, p. 215). To
some authors, this was viewed in the 1990s as
part of a wider attempt to continue to bolster
the power of sub-national territorial units at
the expense of member-states (Gripaios and
Mangles, 1993; Zonneveld, 1995).
Secondly, many of these new regions reflect
the view that size is critical: that extensive
regional territories are necessary to assist in
the process of international competition with
existing global cities. This goes part of the
way to explaining what appears on first
inspection to be a forced, manufactured and
unusual delimitation, often reflected in the
prominence of the notion of polycentricity in
the literature on European spatial planning.
However, much of this policy literature,
upon closer inspection, appears to employ
the concept of polycentricity in a fundamentally different way from the manner in which
it is often used in the academic literature,
“in that it moves away from the analytical
utility of the concept towards its normative
values” (Davoudi, 2003, p. 988; see also
Davoudi, 1999). This reflects a discursive
shift in which a neo-liberal growth agenda
has been grafted on to a longer-standing
desire to promote sustainability through
polycentric linkage, with environmental
concerns viewed by many as increasingly subordinate to economic goals (see, for example,
Richardson and Jensen, 2000). The tension
between these contrasting perceptions of
polycentricity stems from a well-documented
historical view of polynucleated regional
territories as functional spaces, delimited by
optimal travel-to-work times of typically
between 30 and 60 minutes, in which planning
can be exercised in an ordered and logical way
(see, Batten, 1995; Bailey and Turok, 2001;
Blumenfeld, 1971; Davoudi, 2002, 2003;
Geddes, 1915). The upshot of this tension
between conceptions of polycentricity is
that, whilst much is made of the potential
economic benefits of associational behaviour
and co-operation between cities within
polycentric areas through the mechanism of
agglomeration economics (Krugman, 1991;
Porter, 1990), much less significance is
attached to the implications of such regional
constructs for the ESDP’s aim of promoting
a “spatial development with the area’s
ecological and cultural functions and hence
[contributing] to a sustainable, and balanced
territorial development” (CEC, 1999, p.10).
As Hague and Kirk (2003, p. 20) note, “the
ESDP has a strong environmental emphasis
but this is not integrated into the discussion
on polycentric development”. Instead, the
focus is clearly upon developing the idea
that combinations of cities with apparently
limited levels of functional interaction can,
through deliberate collaboration and the
development of complementary economic
NEW REGIONALISM
niches, provide medium-sized cities—for
example, those within polynucleated urban
regions like the Randstad, the Ruhrgebeit or
the more broadly conceived ‘Flemish
Diamond’—with a realistic means of challenging the international ascendancy of genuinely ‘global’ cities like London, New York
and Tokyo (Albrechts, 1998; Bailey and
Turok, 2001; Dieleman and Faludi, 1998;
Docherty et al., 2004; Faludi, 2001; Hague
and Kirk, 2003; Parr, 2003; Priemus, 1998).
The seemingly contrived nature of such
intercity linkages—what Herrshel and
Newman (2002) call ‘marriages of convenience’—is a reflection, in this respect, of the
practical difficulty of developing meaningful
regional territories embracing medium-sized
cities which collectively possess the size
deemed necessary to enable competition
with the existing monocentric world cities.
Yet, although numerous authors have questioned the degree to which many putative polycentric regions in reality operate in a
functionally integrated way (see, for example,
Bailey and Turok, 2001; Kloosterman and
Lambregts, 2001; Lambooy, 1998), there are
several instances of attempts to delineate
large regions of this type. For example,
the Norvision document generated by the
North Sea mega-region, one of the seven such
regions established as part of Interreg II,
concluded that further work is merited on
how best to realise the benefits from ‘intercity
co-operation networks’ (Planco, 2000). In not
dissimilar vein, the Interreg Baltic Sea
Region’s VASAB document asserts that one
of its key priorities
is to raise the competitiveness of urban
regions . . . and thus to enhance a polycentric urban system . . . [and] . . . to make
powerful metropolitan regions stronger at
the international scale (Conference of
Ministers for Spatial Planning, 2001, p. 21).
Exhibiting the widespread tendency in European spatial planning to deal in extravagant
metaphor (Jensen and Richardson, 2003), the
VASAB goal is one that envisages a polycentric grouping of ‘pearls’—cities—linked
1857
by ‘strings’ (improved infrastructure) (Scott,
2002).
Concerns about engendering polycentric
regions have also underlain strategic planning
visions developed by more localised groupings. One example is provided by the Interreg
IIc study, Cities and Networking: the Baltic
Sea Region, which highlighted the Øresund
(Copenhagen –Malmo) area as an example of
an existing, if relatively small, transnational
polycentric region whose underlying principles might be extended to more extensive
areas like the Gulf of Finland, an area comprising Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallin, Riga and St
Petersburg, which could eventually operate
as a functional multicentred ‘global’ region
(Groth, 2001, p. 13). Another is the FrancoBelgian cross-border region covering cities
within the Brussels Capital, Flanders and Wallonia and Nord– Pas-de-Calais regions
(including Lille Métropole, Antwerp, Ghent,
Charleroi, Dunkirk, Liège, Valenciennes and
Brussels) (Mission Interministérielle et Interrégionale d’Aménagement du Territoire des
Pays du Nord, 2002). In contrast to the
visions of Interreg mega-regions like the
North and Baltic Seas, the case for developing
this more localised set of intercity alliances as
part of a broader polycentric region was not
one obliquely acknowledging arguments
about geographically ‘balanced growth’, ‘territorial cohesion’ and the presumed need to
offset economic overheating in Europe’s core
and rebalance the uneven development characteristic of the EU’s regional geography.
Instead, the vision was one of the FrancoBelgian area at the core of a European heartland—a part of Brunet’s (1989) ‘banane
bleue’—benefiting from its proximity to, and
linkages with, the ‘méga-attracteurs’ of
London, Ile-de-France, the Randstad and the
Rhine– Ruhr complex. But as with the megaregions, the argument pursued revolves
firmly around the core tenets of the new
regionalist orthodoxy: the language used is
not French but the international neo-liberal
one of ‘recherche et l’innovation’, ‘pôles en
émergence’ and ‘nouveaux corridors’.
The thrust of the approach adopted by groupings such as Franco-Belgian cross-border
1858
coalition of cities and regions emphasises that
enhancing territorial competitiveness is the
principal goal. In this sense, their efforts
support the contention of Scott (2002) that
European spatial planning and regional
policy are driven to a large extent by the
agenda of the European ‘core’, based on a
view that the global competitiveness of the
EU is best served by reinforcing and extending the roughly defined core around London
and the Paris basin. However, it is also the
case that this world-view is challenged by
aspects of European spatial planning and
regional policy which emphasise territorial
equity concerns and highlight a need for
balanced growth and, by implication, redistribution. But also lying alongside efforts to
reinforce the core are regional entities that
reflect a view that sees territorially balanced
growth not in terms of socioeconomic redistribution, but in terms of a perceived need to
stimulate the development of new regions
that can compete in international terms,
linked to the broader desire, as part of the
EU Lisbon Strategy, to make Europe the
world’s most competitive knowledge-based
economy (Faludi and Waterhout, 2005,
p. 331). As Hague and Kirk (2003) note, the
argument is that the ‘Pentagon’—bounded
by London, Paris, Milan, Munich and
Hamburg—is Europe’s only area of global
economic significance, in comparison with
four the authors identify in North America.
The response has involved not just trying to
bolster the existing core, but trying in addition
to construct new territories that could augment
it, based on an approach that prioritises
supply-side revitalisation of local economies
and views social intervention as critical (the
latter as a means of instilling the cohesion
felt necessary to underpin competitiveness,
rather than as an end in itself).
Building a North West Metropolitan Area
One of the most instructive illustrations of the
pervasiveness of this kind of philosophy is
provided by the North West Metropolitan
Area (NWMA) mega-region, covering seven
EU member-states (Republic of Ireland, UK,
Belgium and Luxemburg in their entirety,
and parts of the Netherlands, France and
Germany), plus Switzerland (see Table 2).
Its evolution under Interreg II, via the development of a spatial vision and associated
pilot projects, was funded through a budget
of some E892 million. A further E656
million was made available for the Interreg
III programme which began in 2002 and
runs to 2006, and which was established to
focus more explicitly on issues of implementation rather than research.
The central aim of the NWMA is to respond
to the ESDP agenda, and the broader drive for
EU integration, by setting out a framework
through which to guide the implementation
of a range of projects which, in future, will
help to meet a number of goals, the quintessence of which revolves around: facilitating
interurban linkages within the NWMA territory and thereby bolstering constituent
cities’ standing in the global economy;
improving intraregional and extraregional
communications (with particular focus on
internal waterways and maritime linkages);
and protecting and promoting cultural and
environmental assets. There are also avowals
of support for broader goals of reducing
global environmental impact and encouraging
a more equitable distribution of wealth, but
these ambitious—and, if one was being critical, platitudinous and tokenistic—ideals are
very much in the background: the document
revolves firmly around a hub of spatial
planning concerns linked to economic competitiveness goals.
Perhaps the most significant and revealing
output from the NWMA in its initial years
was the publication of a schematic spatial
vision (Figure 2), encapsulating some of the
broader goals underlying the Interreg
programme. The tentativeness and vagueness
of the accompanying vision document, its
consciously draft feel and the copious invitations for ‘discussion’ within it, reflect the predictable difficulty in brokering agreement
across a wide variety of existing regional territories in what is incontestably a complex
cultural, economic and political space
(Nadin, 2002). But although the vision, in
NEW REGIONALISM
1859
Table 2. The North West Metropolitan Area Interreg region: key elements
Geographical location
Timescale
Cost/funding
Members
Aims
Objectives
Substantive
focus/justification
Proposals/projects
The north-west quadrant of the European Union
1997– 2001 (Interreg II) and 2001–06 (Interreg III)
E892.4 million (Interreg IIc/ERDF/private) E655.790 million (Interreg
IIIc)
The whole of Republic of Ireland, the UK, Belgium and Luxembourg;
southern and central Netherlands; Nordrhein–Westfalen, RheinlandPfalz, Saarland, Hessen and Baden– Württemberg as well as the northern
and western parts of Bavaria; Nord– Pas-de-Calais, Ile-de-France,
Bourgogne, Centre, Picardie, Champagne–Ardennes, Basse- and HauteNormandie, Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté, Bretagne and Pays de
la Loire; and 15 Swiss cantons (Basel-Stadt, Basel-Landschaft, Aargau,
Solothurn, Bern, Jura, Uri, Schwyz, Obwalden, Nidwalden, Luzern,
Glarus, Zug, Zürich, Neuchâtel)
To complement existing co-operation at the regional and European levels
through joint policy development and community-level action (from the
ESDP) and transnational co-operation among public and private bodies
(from Community Initiative Interreg IIc)
Transforming the ESDP into more specific operational objectives for northwest Europe
Providing a framework for the projects carried out under Interreg IIC and
to extract findings for the whole region
Providing a framework for national and regional spatial planning in
member-states
Guiding the creation and implementation of further transnational cooperation under Interreg IIB.
Five priorities have been identified:
An attractive and coherent system of cities, towns and regions
External and internal accessibility
Sustainable management of water resources and prevention of flood
damage
Sustainable development, prudent management and protection of other
natural resources and of cultural heritage
Promoting the maritime potential of NWE and its territorial integration
across seas
The key challenges facing the region include the need to:
Enhance the global role of north-west Europe’s metropolitan areas
Ensure more fairness in the distribution of prosperity
Reduce the global environmental impact of the region
Protect and manage the cultural and natural resources of the region
Maintain a high level of access to and from the region
Improve internal access and mobility in a sustainable way
Selected projects carried out to date include: transnational spatial planning
policy co-ordination of regional-scale out-of-town developments;
sustainable open space development; international network of highspeed-train urban regions; network of cross-border cities; links between
freight facilities and spatial planning; options for airport development; a
working party on urban regeneration; projects piloting teleworking; town
centre management
Projects that may be carried out under Interreg III include: strategic action
to transform the old industrial landscapes into new ecological corridors; a
study on the spatial development implications of the energy market; the
development of a network of ‘global gateways’ in the central zone of the
mega-region; developing an investment plan and a strategy to develop
three by-pass routes to avoid the most congested core of the mega-region;
producing management plans for corridors within the area to ensure their
most efficient use
1860
Figure 2. North-west Europe draft ‘Spatial Vision’. Source: NWMA (2000).
1861
NEW REGIONALISM
strategic planning terms, is a broad-brush and
preliminary one, separate from the formal
plan-making processes of constituent national
and regional territories and lacking the formal
imprimatur of government, its makeup nevertheless provides some telling pointers about
the influence of new regionalist thinking and
the way in which it has begun to be interpreted
and applied by policy-makers. One example
centres on the concept of global gateways—
another variant of the polycentric urban
region concept—which the spatial vision
ardently propounds. It suggests the long-term
development of three polycentric areas—Saarland–Lorraine–Luxemburg, Lille–Brussels
and the North (Manchester–Liverpool–Sheffield–Leeds) and Midlands of England—as
‘counterweights’ to correct the overheating
claimed to characterise the European core
around London, the South East of England
and the Paris basin (NWMA, 2000). This, as
we have seen, draws partly (and in some
cases directly) on academic research proselytising the merits of developing polycentric linkages between cities as a means of enabling
more effective competition with existing
monocentric world cities. It also draws explicitly, as Faludi (2001, p. 670) notes, on the
ESDP’s stand-point that a key priority for
the competitiveness of the EU is to increase
the number of ‘global economic integration
zones’ along the lines of the supposed
London–Paris–Milan–Munich–Hamburg
‘pentagon’.
This is a radical—and, to some, implausible—goal which relates directly to customary
readings of the new regionalism (although it
is interesting to note that the development of
global gateways is posited not just on
competitiveness grounds, but on the quasiredistributional grounds of creating counterweights to the dominance of London, Paris
and their immediate regional hinterlands, and
on the environmental grounds that the retention of interaction within a relatively confined
interurban area is more sustainable than the
longer-distance links held to characterise
the globalisation of economic activity). But
the means by which this ambitious goal is to
be achieved are much more traditional in
their outlook, focusing in large measure on
securing infrastructural links, developing telecommunications, capitalising on higher-education research capacity, harnessing firm
innovation and encouraging the formation of
Porterian clusters of firms. While the spatial
planning vision is one that speaks in expansive
terms of securing global status and achieving
‘world class’ standing, the practical dimension
is tied in particular to the imperatives of transport, with new and improved communications
at the heart of the NWMA agenda. In this sense,
the vision is one driven by the technocratic perspectives of public officials, with little or no
involvement either from communities or
businesses, and with no discernible political
involvement beyond largely ceremonial
launch events (Nadin, 2002). But as Faludi
(2001, p. 674) argues, the NWMA and the
spatial vision are at the vanguard of attempts
to refine and apply the ESDP, offering an
initial, and potentially very influential, prototype for other policy actors to take forward.
Interpreting the Emergence
Regional Configurations
of
New
How, then, might we interpret the emergence
of this abundance of different new regional
configurations? Might it be possible, for
example, to view them as representing part
of a collision of competing spatialities, as
some of the literature on the rescaling of the
state implies (Baeten, 2004; Keating, 1998;
Le Gales, 1998; Storper, 1997)? In some
senses, these new regional spaces accord perfectly with some of the main lineaments of the
arguments that the state is undergoing a fundamental transformation of its territorial organisation, as the inherited post-Westphalian
arrangement of political borders of which
the likes of Anderson (1996) and Cerny
(2004) write is recast under what is viewed
as the coercive force of globalising late capitalism. The advent of new regional spaces
within Europe, it could be argued, reflects
Smith’s (1993) widely employed notion of a
‘jumping of scales’ in which socio-political
and socioeconomic forces, through processes
of contestation and struggle, find new
1862
‘power geometries’ (Massey, 1993) via the
promulgation of a neo-liberalist competitionat-any-cost agenda. The result, it is contended,
is the formation of regional enclaves dictated
by conditions of perceived agglomerative
optimisation (Brenner, 2003b; Brenner et al.,
2003; Keating, 2001; MacLeod and Goodwin,
1999; Murphy, 1996) which, to critics,
become the “imagined unit of competition”
(Lovering, 1999, p. 392). This, it could be
argued, is reflected in regionally based economic development policy-making of differing
geographical form, challenging, in some cases,
established political and institutional spaces
and their modus operandi.
Yet this only provides partial support for
arguments around the territorial reorganisation of the state. Any argument that the
new regions documented in this paper represent a fundamental rescaling of governance
and policy-making has to be tempered, as we
have seen, by the limited resources and standing of many of the new institutions and their
policy initiatives. Equally, it is also clear
that the emergence of these new spaces has
tended to be driven in the main by particular
categories of local or regional policy actor
(notably economic development officers) in
conjunction with supranational institutions,
with other élite groupings playing much less
prominent roles. National-state actors, in the
majority of cases, have tended to occupy a
subordinate role, often simply licensing the
development of new regional initiatives
which are seen as modest, uncontentious and
unthreatening. The position of capital, likewise, is also typically less than prominent,
certainly in the context of the UK, where
what business involvement there is has
tended for the most part not to extend
beyond perfunctory support for regional
initiatives, where they are seen as broadly
pro-growth and business-friendly (Deas,
2006; Valler et al., 2004).
Much of the literature on the rescaling of
governance and policy-making emphasises
conflict across institutions organised around
different, and sometimes overlapping, territories: what Brenner, echoing Jessop (2000),
has called the
process of state restructuring as an openended, conflictual dialectic rather than as
a unilinear transition from one state form
to another (Brenner, 2003b, p. 308).
Given the non-standard configuration of most
of the new regional spaces highlighted in this
paper, it might be expected, then, that conflict
would be a feature of relations with established, conventionally configured territories
that relate to standard administrative regions
or the more narrowly drawn city-regions (or
even, assuming the most extreme vision of
the hollowed-out-state thesis, to nation-states
themselves). There is little evidence to
suggest that this is the case. Indeed, the
impetus for the creation of many or most of
the new regional spaces, although stemming
originally in many instances from the European Commission, has derived in no small
measure from the existing standard administrative regions—and from policy élites
related
to
established
politicoinstitutional territories, rather than from
alternative groups of policy or economic
actors seeking to wrestle control from existing
axes of power, or fundamentally to realign
policy with pro-growth concerns (Zonneveld,
2005). In this sense the emergence of new
regional spaces can perhaps be read as emerging as a result of a political response to a perceived (but questionable) economic necessity.
From this perspective, the emergence of such
spaces echoes other research highlighting the
dynamic between political and economic
forces in the reterritorialisation of the state
(Jones and MacLeod, 2004).
This absence of interinstitutional or crossscalar struggle is itself instructive in that
most of the literature on rescaling implies
that the birth of new regional entities is
characterised by contestation and conflict
with branches of the state organised around
different territories, and perhaps particularly
nation-states. Just as there is little or no evidence of significant conflict with ‘old’
regions, so too there are few if any indications
of conflict with nation-states. In many cases—
in the UK, for example (DETR, 2000; DTLR,
2002)—nation-states sometimes actively
NEW REGIONALISM
encourage the creation of these intermediate
political spaces, even if this is largely to
assist in meeting the short-term expedient
goal of securing a larger share of EU resources
(and even if nation-state encouragement is
rarely enthusiastic or high-profile). In this
sense, the new regional spaces highlighted in
this paper represent a form of rescaling
which, in contrast to the manifest conflicts
around other forms of regionalism (see, for
example, Deas and Ward, 2000; Jones and
MacLeod, 2004), is largely devoid of struggle:
one that is actively promoted at the supranational scale, enthusiastically advanced by
many existing sub-national bodies and typically receives the pragmatic endorsement of
nation-states.
A second and related question concerns the
extent to which the new regional spaces
are likely to endure, or evolve merely as
short-lived ‘aspirational spaces’. The relatively limited record of success in fostering
associational behaviour within existing polynucleated regions (Kramsch, 2002), on the
one hand, makes it tempting to dismiss them
as transient experimental regions, driven by
a dissonant combination of policy-maker
whimsy and a more concrete desire to maximise policy resources, but bearing little
relationship to the realities of functional economic and political space, and likely to disappear as rapidly as they emerged. Their
support, in many cases, derives almost
entirely from a relatively narrow cadre of
public policy-makers, and it would be difficult
to argue (in contrast to, say, experience in
South East England (While et al., 2004))
that many have emerged as a direct response
to the desire of local capital for reshaped
forms of regulation. But in the light of the
absence of conflict in and around these new
regional spaces, it could also be contended,
conversely, that their future is likely to be a
secure one, their outlook one of increasing
significance underwritten by institutions
across spatial scales. The truth is probably
somewhere between these two extremes.
Part of the very appeal of the new regional
spaces is precisely because they constitute
an unthreatening presence. In the still-unlikely
1863
event that they were to become better
resourced, their boundaries more formally
recognised and their existence underpinned
by the emergence of new or stronger types
of popular identity, then the kind of low-level
consensual support that has hitherto existed
could well begin to unravel.
In this light, the real significance of the new
regional spaces may be as a manifestation
(even if it is only a transient one) of the ideological desire amongst policy actors to
reinforce and extend what they perceive to
be the imperative to rescale governance.
This undercurrent of policy, predicated upon
a set of mediated, normative desires, is given
expression by Davoudi who contends that
instead of being used to describe an existing
or emerging reality, the concept [of polycentricity] is coming to determine that
reality (Davoudi, 2002, p. 117).
The same could be said of policy actor efforts
to reconstruct spaces to produce scales perceived as conducive to realising the right
“atmosphere” (Jones and Jones, 2004,
p. 415) or “business climate” (Cox, 2004,
p. 186). As Brenner notes
much of the new discourse regarding
regional economic competitiveness and
the purported constraints imposed by
global territorial competition is profoundly
ideological, for it has served to normalise
the uneven socio-spatial effects of economic restructuring and state retrenchment
in the interests of dominant regional class
fractions, growth coalitions and political
élites (Brenner, 2003b, p. 306; see also
Jones and Jones, 2004).
In this sense, it is possible to argue that the
new regional spaces, while clearly not yet
representing any fundamental reorganisation
of state territoriality, could symbolise an
additional dimension of rescaling, a projection
on reality, in which governance is not so much
being redistributed upwards, downwards or
outwards, as displaced sideways and
expressed in new ways—as potential spaces
for the accommodation of economic development. The new regions, in this respect, are not
1864
‘new’ in themselves, but a different
expression of an existing phenomenon. In
other words, they do not so much supplant
existing sub-national structures and provide
an incipient and modest challenge to the
ascendancy of nation-states (as a crude
reading of the rescaling literature might
imply) as augment a complex, multidimensional pattern of state reterritorialisation—a
further ‘filling-in’ of the state (Jones et al.,
2005), in which the national state retains a
pivotal role (Mansfield, 2005). In this sense,
new regional spaces constitute one element
in a wider process of reterritorialisation of
the state, in which
‘hollowing out’ at a national scale is only
the beginning of a series of steps that ultimately lead to widely differing settlements
at a more local and regional level
(Goodwin et al., 2005, p. 425).
This presents a future vision of new regional
spaces that may exist fleetingly, as the impermanent spatial fixity of neo-liberalism
searches out new “regulatory surfaces”
(Jones and Jones, 2004, p. 410; see also,
Jessop, 1999), but which nonetheless represents one part of the broader search for
new territorial ‘solutions’. Those that are
likely to evolve beyond transitory ‘aspirational spaces’ and acquire greater permanency
are likely to continue to be those which
provide functionality in terms of top– down
policies, particularly those (like Interreg)
which provide tangible incentive for institution-building based on non-standard territories which traverse regional or national
boundaries and/or which contribute to
broader supranational policy goals (whether
in terms of strategic transport axes, the facilitation of international economic integration or
the bolstering of EU-wide competitiveness).
Conclusion: Towards the Territorial
Restructuring of the State and (Another)
‘New Regionalism’?
Numerous new regional configurations now
festoon the map of Europe. Running in
tandem with the growth of interest in European
spatial planning over the course of the 1990s,
there has been a proliferation of competing,
overlapping and sometimes ephemeral ‘new’
regional groupings, which stand in marked contrast to the ordered, stable and formal administrative regions of Europe. It is clear that many
of these new regions draw, sometimes explicitly, on the disputed arguments encapsulated
by the new regionalism, which, although
profoundly questionable, continue to exert a
powerful discursive pull on policy actors.
While a large part of the impetus for their creation derives from top–down promptings
associated with the effort to begin to create
EU-wide spatial planning provisions, it is also
the case that the language they employ, and
the policy measures they advocate, are firmly
in line with the ideas underlying conceptualisations of the new regionalism.
Equally, it is clear that the strategies being
pursued by many of these new regional
entities are largely symbolic and confined to
date mainly to the realms of rhetoric. Many
of the new regional entities espouse an
ambitious and expansive, globally fixated
rhetoric which, as Nadin (2002) argues, not
infrequently comprises vague and vacuous
‘non-visionary visions’: what Perry (2002),
in the different context of metropolitan
region-building in North America, has called
‘regionalist happy talk’. But at the same
time, their emergence can be seen as significant in commencing a very lengthy process
of co-operation based on networks of policy
actors that attempt to transcend—and less
commonly try to challenge—established
regional and national boundaries (Perkmann,
1999). They can be interpreted, in this
respect, as an additional facet of the rescaling
of governance: they represent a new layer of
region superimposed on existing regional
institutional and political geographies,
adding to the potential for cross-scalar conflict
within the context of multilevel governance
(Nadin, 2002; Perkmann, 1999).
Whether this can be interpreted as signifying a more fundamental element of an
underlying shift in the territorial organisation
of the state remains questionable. There is
now a strong body of opinion that earlier
NEW REGIONALISM
conceptions of the rescaling of governance
were posited on a reified view of the ‘hollowing-out’ of the nation-state that was in retrospect greatly oversimplified (see, for
example, Brenner, 2004). The existence of
these incipient new regions does not gainsay
such a view, but confirms that, in a very
modest and invariably tentative way, some
resources and powers have begun to coalesce
around regions configured in non-standard
ways. There is no evidence to support the
implausible and far-fetched contention that
this represents another part of a fundamental
rescaling which challenges the primacy of
nation-states. But it does offer the suggestion
that another ‘new regionalism’ can be discerned: one which moves away from conceptions of the region based solely around
either functional metropolitan areas or culturally and administratively distinct provincial
regions, and towards non-standard areas that
relate to ideological perceptions of the changing nature of economic space. Even if the
assumption that such spaces really are functioning, integrated economic entities is
largely illusory and rooted in nothing more
than policy-maker aspiration, the existence
of these new regions, and the substance of
the policy approaches they embody, does
provide a further indication of organic
desires from policy and business élites for
politico-institutional territories which relate
to their views of the governance and regulation of economic space at different scales,
from the EU as a whole down to more disaggregated regions. This is not to advance any
claim for the desirability of this new form of
regionalism as a means of promoting economic revitalisation, but simply to acknowledge that it has begun to exert a powerful
lure to policy-makers and that it could conceivably represent a new scalar axis which could
offset the momentum characteristic of
changes in spatial governance at other scales
(for example, for the English standard
regions until 2004, or the English provincial
city-regions in the early – mid 2000s).
This, in turn, provides support for some of
the more rounded attempts to conceptualise
the resurgence of regionalism. The transience
1865
of some of the new regional structures, and
their shifting composition and spatial focus,
for example, is in line with the ‘fuzzy
regionalism’—flexibly configured regions of
varying shape, in response to changing
imperatives over time—which has been identified in a North American context (Foster,
2001). It also reconfirms the conclusions of
Brenner (2001) and Smith (2004) that, in contrast to the ‘old’ fixed and bounded regions,
new forms of regionalism are associated
with a sort of territorial flux in which spaces
are rapidly and repeatedly redefined, recreated
and reshuffled, triggered by aspirations and
tensions that shift over time. The result is
what Herrschel and Newman (2002, p. 23)
refer to as the emergence of a “map of
Europe [comprising] . . . a patchwork of territories with changing boundaries”. It is also
clear that the globalisation of economic
activity—or, more accurately, the perception
amongst policy actors that glocalisation is an
inexorable process to which they are required
to respond—and the associated rescaling are
stimulating the emergence and development
of a variety of territorial entities. Alongside
the global city-regions, the non-contiguous
intercity networks of virtual regions and the
sometimes faltering renaissance of administrative regions, it is clear that the complex
dynamics within the process of rescaling are
also in evidence in the creation of the web
of new regions, and their scalar ‘layering’
(Brenner, 2004), which has emerged as a
feature of the EU’s political geography.
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Appendix
Table A1. New regional characteristics
NEW REGIONALISM
1871
(Table continued )
1872
Table A1. Continued
NEW REGIONALISM
1873
(Table continued )
1874
Table A1. Continued
NEW REGIONALISM
1875
(Table continued )
1876
Table A1. Continued
NEW REGIONALISM
1877

! (00a130037 Unusual regionalism

Transcription

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