end of regions (friday fink)
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
The End of Regions?
What new role for cities?:
the recent case of England
Kevin Richardson
www.slideshare.net/30088
Regions?
Cities?
Its not new
Its not only happening here in England
Its not a party political thing
EU Context• EU Parliament / Committee of Regions; but what real
power in TFEU compared to Member States?
• Only very few examples of significant regional government (AU, DE, BE?); exceptions often based on identity (Scotland, Cataluña etc) Cities generally ignored.
• Few (if any) examples of genuine functioning regional economies
• Institutional capacity within Brussels to ‘manage’growing number and widening characteristics of regions?
271 NUT2 Regions
New ‘regions?’
Experiments with ‘macro’ and cross border ‘regions’
Regions
in
England
Bonfire of the Regions
May 2010 (Con / Liberal)
• Regional Development Agencies
• Regional Spatial Strategies (inc. housing &
transport)
• Regional offices of Central Government
• Regional Business Link (enterprise agencies)
• Regional Funding Allocations
• Regional Tourism Boards
• Nationalisation of Employment Programmes and
Inward Investment
• Nationalisation of all funding for technology and
regeneration, including European Social Fund
History: Regional Governmentin England
• ‘14 – administrative / ‘military’ regions
• ’79 – (CON) neo-liberalism, end of spatial strategies
• ’94 – (CON) Government Offices for the Regions (GOs)
• ’97 onwards – (LAB), formal regional government for Scotland, N Ireland (& Wales?); and indirectly (unelected) Regional Assemblies & many new regional strategies & institutions (including RDAs) in England
• ’04 North East referendum farce (78% ‘No’; all 25 districts reject proposal for formal regional government, including Newcastle as a the Core City)
OECD Review of Newcastle in the North East (2006)
• central government is the ‘dominant actor’ in regional development / no national spatial strategy for either regions orcities
• only a small number of central departments engaged in regional development / funds for regional economic development tiny when compared to other mainstream budgets
• sub national agencies with only very limited authority & autonomy
• existing artificial boundaries of institutions increasingly not reflective of functioning economic areas (at all levels of geography)
• “governance arrangements at a metropolitan or functional urban level make sense for issues such as housing, transport, economic development, culture, organisation of retail, environment, universities, and land use planning”
• (but) public identities rooted much more in parochialism
Post 2004 Confusion
•Core Cities
•City-Regions
•Sub Regions
Ref. CURDS, Newcastle University
What new role for Cities?
‘This will start initially by
focusing on the Core Cities and
their surrounding areas, with a
view to expanding to a broader
group and identifying issues
relevant to a wide range of
cities’
A (part-time)
Minister
for ‘cities’
Informal partnerships?
What genuine political interest in hard administrative / boundary reform?
(at all levels)
Understanding ‘trade offs’between supporting agglomeration and high speed rail (between cities) and (for now) local cost air travel
Tomaney at el (2011)
Evidence to House of Commons Transport Select Committee
Cities
are
greener
• Understanding the
real relationship
between the urban
core and
surrounding places
(polycentricity)
• Why facilitate travel
to work by car?
Planning to build
the ‘urban core’
Risk based investment
finance
favours cities
SMART strategies for growth also dependent on cities (and their universities)
McCann and Ortega-Argilés(2011)
Smart Specialisation, Regional Growth and Applications to EU Cohesion Policy
Migrants are
attracted to
cities (and
vice versa)
Does it Matter?
New Economic Geography tells us that growth and the market drives and is increasingly dependent on cities
(see Krugman et al)
A false dichotomy
between national and local levels
(towards shared
design, management &
delivery)?
Or towards a contractual
relationship based
on evidence / results / rewards
Barca (2009)