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METROPOLITAN INSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND THERESCALING OF STATE SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY

WESTERN EUROPE

Neil BrennerNew York University, USA

Throughout western Europe, metropolitangovernance is back on the agenda. Since the early1990s, new forms of city–suburban cooperation,regional coordination, regionwide spatial planningand metropolitan institutional organization havebeen promoted in major western Europeancity–regions. In contrast to the forms ofmetropolitan governance that prevailed during theFordist-Keynesian period – which emphasizedadministrative modernization, interterritorialequalization and the efficient delivery of public

services – the newest wave of metropolitangovernance reform is focused upon economicpriorities such as promoting territorialcompetitiveness and attracting external capitalinvestment in the context of supraregional trendssuch as globalization, European integration andintensified interspatial competition. In short,metropolitan governance is today increasingly beingmobilized as a mechanism of economic developmentpolicy through which national and local political-economic elites are attempting to enhance place-

Abstract

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European Urban and Regional Studies 10(4): 297–324 Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications0969-7764[200310]10:4; 297–324;036248 London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com

Throughout western Europe, metropolitangovernance is back on the agenda. Since the early1990s, new forms of city–suburban cooperation,regional coordination, regionwide spatial planningand metropolitan institutional organization havebeen promoted in major city–regions. In contrast tothe forms of metropolitan governance that prevailedduring the Fordist-Keynesian period – whichemphasized administrative modernization, interterri-torial equalization and the efficient delivery of publicservices – the newest wave of metropolitangovernance reform is focused upon economicpriorities such as territorial competitiveness andattracting external capital investment in the contextof geoeconomic and European integration. Thisarticle develops an interpretation of the newmetropolitan governance in western Europe in twosteps. First, I situate the new metropolitan govern-ance in historical context by underscoring itsqualitative differences from earlier waves ofmetropolitan institutional reform. Second, buildingupon a critique of contemporary ‘new regionalist’discourses, I develop an interpretation of currentmetropolitan reform initiatives as important

structural and strategic expressions of ongoing,crisis-induced transformations of state spatiality. Tothis end, I relate contemporary metropolitan reformprojects: (a) to various broader trends and counter-trends of state spatial reorganization; and (b) tonewly emergent political strategies oriented towardsa reconfiguration of inherited approaches to entre-preneurial urban governance. From this perspective,contemporary forms of metropolitan institutionalreform are interpreted as key expressions ofongoing processes of state rescaling through whichterritorial competitiveness is being promoted at aregional scale, albeit in highly contradictory, oftenself-undermining ways. The article concludes bysummarizing some of the methodological implicationsof this analysis for future studies of urban–regionalrestructuring and the production of new statespaces.

KEY WORDS ★ metropolitan governance ★ new regionalism ★ path dependency ★ state rescaling ★ urban entrepreneurialism ★ western Europe

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specific socio-economic assets. From London,Glasgow, Manchester, the Randstad, Brussels,Copenhagen-Øresund-Malmö, Lille, Lyon andParis to Berlin, the Ruhr district, Hanover,Frankfurt/Rhine-Main, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna,Zürich, Geneva-Lausanne-Montreaux, Madrid,Barcelona, Bologna and Milan, national and localeconomic policies are being linked more directly todiverse forms of spatial planning, infrastructureinvestment and political-economic coordination on ametropolitan scale. In each of these city–regions,and in others throughout western Europe, theintroduction of new frameworks for city–suburbancooperation and new regional administrativestructures has been justified as a basic institutionalprecondition for promoting territorial developmentunder global capitalism and an integrated EuropeanUnion (EU).

Since the early 1980s, the proliferation ofentrepreneurial, competitiveness-oriented localeconomic policies has been documented extensivelythroughout the western European city-system(Harvey, 1989a; Eisenschitz and Gough, 1993). Thekey role of municipal political authorities inpromoting economic development and inwardcapital investment is now widely acknowledged as anessential element of urban governance under post-Fordist capitalism (Hall and Hubbard, 1997). Theintensification of debates on metropolitanregionalism in recent years arguably represents animportant modification of the forms of localeconomic development policy that were diffusedthroughout western Europe during the precedingdecade. Since the early 1990s, localist strategies ofterritorial competition have been ratcheted-up intoregionwide strategies of economic development thatembrace the geographical scale of entiremetropolitan agglomerations. As Krätke (1999: 696)explains:

As a result of intensified interregional competition, theforms of governance in regional development have alsochanged: the political-administrative authorities of theregion are no longer content to offer business activities asuitable spatial framework containing goodinfrastructural equipment. They also seek to initiateentrepreneurial activities themselves. From thisperspective, regions should be managed like a firm, andthe region should be actively marketed as a ‘product’ ...Thus, many regions behave like competing firms in thearea of economic development policy.

The collective action problems and politicalobstacles associated with such regionalizationstrategies are significant and, in some cases, nearlyinsurmountable (Cheshire and Gordon, 1996).Many programmes of metropolitan institutionalreform have been implemented only in a relativelyweak form. Nonetheless, even in cases of apparentfailure, metropolitan reform initiatives have givenissues such as city–suburban cooperation andregionwide economic governance a new prominencein local, regional and national political strugglesthroughout western Europe. In many instances, thedefeat of more comprehensive metropolitan reforminitiatives has generated a new momentum forcompromise solutions that address regionalgovernance problems through informalpartnerships, interorganizational coordination andpublic–private cooperation. In the face of thesedevelopments, major political-economic actorsthroughout western Europe have embraced theassumption that metropolitan regions, rather thanlocalities or national economies, represent thenatural economic zones in which economicdevelopment must be promoted. Whatever theintellectual shortcomings and political dangers ofthis so-called ‘new regionalism’ (Lovering, 1999), itappears to be exercising a considerable influenceupon the ideology, practice and institutionalinfrastructure of urban governance in westernEuropean city–regions.

Against this background, this article confrontstwo specific tasks. First, I situate the newmetropolitan governance in historical context byunderscoring its qualitative differences from earlierwaves of metropolitan institutional reform inwestern Europe. Second, building upon a critique ofcontemporary new regionalist discourses, I developan interpretation of current metropolitan reforminitiatives as important structural and strategicexpressions of ongoing, crisis-inducedtransformations of state spatiality. To this end, Irelate contemporary metropolitan reform projects:(a) to various broader trends and counter-trends ofstate spatial reorganization; and (b) to newlyemergent political strategies oriented towards areconfiguration of inherited approaches toentrepreneurial urban governance. From thisperspective, contemporary forms of metropolitaninstitutional reform represent key expressions ofongoing processes of state rescaling through which

European Urban and Regional Studies 2003 10(4)

298 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 10(4)

territorial competitiveness is being promoted at aregional scale, albeit in highly contradictory, oftenself-undermining ways. The article concludes bysummarizing some of the methodologicalimplications of this analysis for future studies ofurban–regional restructuring and the production ofnew state spaces.

Much of the literature on urban and regionalpolitical economy has tended to bracket processes ofnational state restructuring. Recently, however, anumber of scholars have begun to examine the waysin which: (a) national states mould the productionand transformation of local and regional places; and(b) the resultant politics of place in turn shapes thecontinual evolution of state spatial organization atmultiple geographical scales.1 By building uponsuch studies, the following analysis is intended toexemplify and advance an approach to urban studiesthat is explicitly attuned to the intimate linksbetween urbanization processes, unevengeographical development and the continuallyevolving spatialities of state power under capitalism.Clearly, the rich, multifaceted and contestedpolitical content of recent struggles overmetropolitan governance cannot be reduced to theproblematic of state rescaling (Keil, 2000; Herrscheland Newman, 2002). I would argue, nonetheless,that this issue provides a useful analytical startingpoint through which many other aspects ofcontemporary metropolitan political andinstitutional transformations may be illuminated.

Metropolitan governance and the historicalgeographies of capitalism

The problem of administrative and jurisdictionalfragmentation within large-scale urban regions haslong been a topic of intense debate among NorthAmerican and western European urbanists. Inparticular, the spatial mismatch between localadministrative units and the functional-economicterritory of metropolitan regions has been analysedfrom a range of methodological perspectives,including public-choice theory, liberal approachesand radical or Marxian perspectives (Keating1997a). David Harvey (1989b: 153) describes theproblem concisely as follows:

[Local government] boundaries do not necessarilycoincide with the fluid zones of urban labour andcommodity markets or infrastructural formation; andtheir adjustment through annexation, local governmentreorganization, and metropolitan-wide cooperation iscumbersome, though often of great long-termsignificance. Local jurisdictions frequently divide ratherthan unify the urban region, thus emphasizing thesegmentations (such as that between city and suburb)rather than the tendency toward structured coherenceand class-alliance formation.

Although intra-metropolitan jurisdictionalfragmentation is considerably more pronouncedamong major US cities than in their westernEuropean counterparts, scholars have effectivelydemonstrated the profound consequences ofmetropolitan institutional arrangements for patternsof urban development throughout the westernEuropean city-system (Barlow, 1991; Sharpe, 1995a;Terhorst and Van de Ven, 1997). Fromcity–suburban relations, public service delivery,public infrastructure investment and fiscal policy tospatial planning and economic development policy,metropolitan political structures have played a majorrole in moulding the socio-economic geographiesand developmental trajectories of western Europeancity–regions throughout the 20th century(Goldsmith, 2001).

The historical evolution of metropolitaninstitutional arrangements has been closelyintertwined with successive phases of capitalisturbanization. As the reproduction of capital hasbecome more directly dependent upon processes ofurban, suburban and regional development, theterritorial configuration of metropolitanagglomerations has become an object of intensesociopolitical struggles, pitting place-based alliancesof classes, class fractions and other social forcesagainst one another in a continual effort to achieveopposed goals in the realms of production,distribution, reproduction and governance.Meanwhile, as the process of capitalist territorialdevelopment has accelerated and intensified on aglobal scale, the geographic configuration of urbanregions has likewise evolved quite markedly. Themonocentric urban regions of the classical industrialera were superseded during the course of the 20thcentury by the polynucleated metropolitan regions,urban fields and megalopoli of Fordist capitalism.


BRENNER: METROPOLITAN INSTITUTIONAL REFORM 299

Since the mid-1970s, the urban–regional grids ofthe postwar epoch have been still further reworkedto form still larger and more decentralizedconfigurations of territorial development that havebeen characterized variously as exopolises, 100-milecities, multiplex cities and mega-cities (Soja, 2000).Throughout the older industrialized world, each ofthese historical configurations of capitalist territorialorganization has generated contextually specificgovernance problems and sociopolitical conflictswithin major city–regions. Within this confusingmosaic of perpetually shifting urban spaces,metropolitan reform initiatives may be viewed asstrategies to subject the capitalist urban process toregionally configured forms of state regulatorycontrol.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries,large-scale urban agglomerations such as New York,London and Berlin introduced consolidatedmetropolitan institutions. It was only in the 1960sand early 1970s, however, that metropolitan politicalinstitutions were introduced more widely amongNorth American and western European city–regions(Keating, 1998). During this era, in conjunctionwith the expansion of Fordist-Keynesian socialengineering projects, debates on metropolitangovernance focused predominantly upon the issuesof administrative efficiency, local service provision,regional planning and spatial redistribution withinthe nationally organized macroeconomic policyframeworks of the Keynesian welfare national state.Larger units of urban territorial administration weregenerally seen as being analogous to Fordist formsof mass-production insofar as they were thought togenerate economies of scale in the field of publicservice provision (Keating, 1997a: 118). Assuburbanization proceeded apace during thepostwar period, consolidated metropolitaninstitutions were widely introduced in order todifferentiate city–regions functionally among zonesof production, housing, transportation, recreationand so forth. Among the major metropolitaninstitutions established during this period inwestern Europe were the Greater London Council(1963), the Madrid Metropolitan Area Planning andCoordinating Commission (1963) the Rijnmond orGreater Rotterdam Port Authority (1964), thecommunautés urbaines in French cities such asBordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Strasbourg (1966), theRegionalverband Stuttgart (1972), the metropolitan

counties in British cities such as Manchester,Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield andNewcastle (1974), the Corporació Metropolitana deBarcelona (1974), the Greater Copenhagen Council(1974), the Umlandverband Frankfurt (1974) andthe Kommunalverband Ruhr (1975) (Sharpe, 1995a;1995b). These large-scale, technocratic andbureaucratized forms of metropolitan politicalorganization served as a key institutional pillarwithin the nationalized system of spatialKeynesianism that prevailed throughout westernEurope from the early 1960s until the late 1970s(Brenner, forthcoming: ch. 4).

By the early 1980s, however, these large-scaletechnocratic projects of metropolitan governancehad been widely discredited and were increasinglyunder attack. Following the systemic crisis of theFordist-Keynesian developmental model in the1970s, a new mosaic of uneven regionaldevelopment and territorial competition began tocrystallize throughout western Europe. Theeconomic infrastructure of major urban regions wassystematically restructured in conjunction with thedecline of traditional Fordist production systems,the mobilization of new corporate accumulationstrategies, the crystallization of new spatial divisionsof labour within neo-Fordist and flexible productionsystems, the intensified financialization of capitaland the acceleration of geoeconomic integration(Dunford and Kafkalas, 1992; Swyngedouw, 1992).Under these conditions, the forms of urbanmanagerialism, welfarist redistribution andcompensatory regional policy associated with spatialKeynesianism were gradually retrenched ordismantled. Local governments subsequently beganto mobilize new strategies of endogenous economicdevelopment in order to cope with place-specificsocio-economic problems, to adjust to newlyimposed fiscal constraints and to attract new sourcesof external capital investment (Eisenschitz andGough, 1993). In this context of national fiscalausterity, proliferating entrepreneurial urbanpolicies and intensifying interlocality competition,consolidated metropolitan institutions wereincreasingly viewed as outdated, excessivelybureaucratic and cumbersome vestiges of ‘biggovernment’ (Barlow, 1991: 289–98). Keating(1997a: 122) explains, ‘Large-scale localgovernment, like other large-scale organizations,came to be blamed for all manner of problems and



political and intellectual fashion moved back to the“small is beautiful” philosophy’. Within this rapidlyneoliberalizing political environment, officialsupport for large-scale strategic planning projectswaned and traditional welfarist policy relays weresignificantly dismantled or downsized. In the wakeof these realignments, during the mid- to late 1980s,major metropolitan institutions such as the GreaterLondon Council, the English metropolitan counties,the Madrid Metropolitan Area Planning andCoordinating Commission, the BarcelonaMetropolitan Corporation, the Greater CopenhagenCouncil and the Rijnmond in Rotterdam wereabolished. Elsewhere in western Europe,metropolitan institutional forms were formallypreserved but severely weakened due to centrallyimposed budgetary pressures, the widespreadadoption of neoliberal, deregulatory policies andintensified competition between city cores andsuburban peripheries for external capital investment(Sharpe 1995a; 1995b).

This low tide of metropolitan regionalism duringthe 1980s resulted not only from externalconstraints, a sustained economic recession andneoliberal political realignments, but also, in part,from various internal problems within inheritedforms of urban territorial administration. Becausemetropolitan governments during the postwarperiod were generally imposed from above, and wereusually organized according to purely functionalcriteria such as efficiency, they generally lackedpopular legitimacy and were thus particularlyvulnerable to ideological attack. Moreover, most ofthe metropolitan authorities created during thepostwar era remained relatively weak; their planningagendas were thus frequently undermined orblocked by other units of territorial administrationwithin an urban region, such as central city cores,suburban municipalities and provincial or centralstate authorities (Sharpe, 1995b: 20–7). Themetropolitan institutions of the postwar era alsofrequently provided a political arena for theexpression of various types of socioterritorialantagonism; for instance, between central city coresand wealthy suburban peripheries, and betweenmajor urban regions and superordinate (regional ornational) levels of the state. Consequently,metropolitan institutions frequently became majorsites of political conflict between competingsociopolitical forces organized at different

geographical scales, both within and beyondcity–regions. As the abolition of the Labour-dominated Greater London Council by theneoconservative Thatcherite central government in1986 dramatically indicated, the role ofmetropolitan institutions as arenas of such political-ideological struggles could even lead to theircomplete destruction.

Towards competitive regionalism? Theresurgence of metropolitan governance inthe 1990s

As of the late 1980s, many administrative scientistshad concluded that metropolitan models of urbangovernance were in the midst of a major intellectualand political crisis (Barlow, 1991; Sharpe, 1995a).Yet, shortly after the high-profile abolitions of theGreater London Council and Rotterdam’sRijnmond, proposals to reconstitute metropolitanpolitical institutions began to generate considerablediscussion in major European urban regions.Subsequently, during the course of the 1990s,intense debates on the installation of newmetropolitan institutions have proliferatedthroughout the western European urban system,leading in many cases to significant changes inurban and regional governance and territorialplanning systems. In some cities, such as in London,Bologna, Stuttgart, Hanover and Copenhagen,entirely new metropolitan institutions have beenconstructed in which a broad range of regionalplanning competencies and administrative powersare concentrated. More frequently, new frameworksof metropolitan governance have been superimposedupon inherited administrative geographies and haveprovided new institutional frameworks for politicalnegotiations regarding various major regional issues,from economic development policy, place marketingand infrastructural planning to suburban sprawl,environmental sustainability and democraticaccountability. In most western European countries,metropolitan institutional frameworks are no longerbeing designed according to a single recipe andimposed from above, but are emerging ‘as a productof the system of actors as the process [ofinstitutional reform] unfolds’ (Lefèvre, 1998: 18).Faced with these ongoing institutional changes,



regulatory experiments and political debates inmajor European urban regions, numerouscommentators have suggested that a renaissance ofmetropolitan regionalism is currently under waythroughout western Europe.2

As recent scholarship has indicated, the currentrenaissance of metropolitan regionalism in westernEurope has been extraordinarily multifaceted(Herrschel and Newman, 2002; Salet et al., 2003).Therefore, each project of regionwide institutionalrestructuring must be understood with reference tothe nationally and locally specific industriallandscape and administrative-constitutional systemin which it has emerged. Processes of regionaleconomic restructuring have interacted in place-specific ways with inherited institutionalframeworks, leading in turn to the establishment of‘a more bewildering tangle of municipalities,governmental and regional organizations andinstitutions, and public, private, or informalcooperative approaches with differing actors,functions, and jurisdictions’ (Heinz, 2000: 27). This‘bewildering tangle’ of new metropolitaninstitutions has also been intertwined with new,regionalized configurations of power relations, or‘power-geometries’ (Massey, 1993), in whichopposed sociopolitical forces struggle to mould thetrajectories of regional economic restructuring andinstitutional change. Even though these regionalizedpatterns of institutional restructuring and politicalstruggle have necessarily been articulated in place-specific forms, the broad outlines of four pan-European trends can be discerned.

1. Metropolitan reform as a form of locational policyOne of the most strikingly novel characteristics ofnewly emergent metropolitan regionalisms has beentheir explicitly entrepreneurial or competitiveorientation (Jonas and Ward, 2002). Proposals toreconfigure inherited frameworks of metropolitangovernance have been justified in large part as ameans to transpose extant strategies of localeconomic development onto a regional scale andthus to position major urban agglomerationsstrategically within European and global flows ofcapital. In stark contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, inwhich debates on metropolitan institutions focusedon the issues of administrative efficiency, localservice provision and interterritorial equalizationwithin the administrative hierarchies of the

Keynesian welfare national state, mostcontemporary western European discussions ofmetropolitan reform have been oriented towards theoverarching priority of promoting endogenousregional growth in a context of accelerated geo-economic and European integration and a perceivedintensification of inter-place competition for mobilecapital investment. In this sense, metropolitanreform strategies represent an important instance ofa new ‘locational policy’ (Standortpolitik) throughwhich local and regional growth machines areattempting to enhance the competitive advantages ofstrategic regional economies.3 In short, across thewestern European urban and regional system, themanagerial forms of metropolitan politicalorganization that predominated during the era ofhigh Fordism have been superseded byentrepreneurial, competitiveness-orientedapproaches to metropolitan governance thatprivilege developmentalist priorities such aseconomic growth, labour market flexibility andterritorial competitiveness.

2. Narratives of globalization and Europeaninterspatial competition Since the run-up to theestablishment of the Single European Market in theearly 1990s, a number of key discursive tropes havebeen repeated with striking regularity amongwestern European policymakers engaged in debateson metropolitan reform:

• the claim that geo-economic integration hasintensified inter-place competition forhypermobile capital investment at European andglobal scales;

• the claim that large-scale urban regions ratherthan localities, cities or national economiesrepresent the most basic territorial units betweenwhich this competition is occurring;

• the claim that competition among places andlocalities within a major urban region to attractexternal capital investment undermines theregion’s capacity to compete for such investmentat supraregional scales;

• the claim that new forms of regionwidecooperation, spatial planning and economicgovernance are required in order to enhance aregion’s capacity to engage in global andEuropean territorial competition;

• the claim that effective regionwide economic



cooperation hinges upon the incorporation ofimportant local and regional economic‘stakeholders’ – including business associations,chambers of commerce, airport developmentagencies, transport authorities and other localboosterist organizations – into major regionaldevelopment initiatives;

• the claim that extant administrative structuresand spatial planning arrangements undermineregional economic competitiveness insofar asthey fragment rather than unify a region’scapacities for economic development;

• the claim that the introduction of new stateadministrative structures would provide animportant institutional means to enhanceregionwide cooperation, to bundle regionalproductive capacities and to strengthen regionalcompetitive advantages.

Although such claims have crystallized in neoliberal,centrist and social democratic forms (Eisenschitzand Gough, 1993), they appear to represent a shareddiscursive-ideological foundation on which basismost debates on metropolitan reform are currentlybeing conducted across western Europe. In contrastto the ‘new localisms’ of the 1980s, which promoteda zero-sum politics of territorial competition at bothlocal and supralocal scales (Mayer, 1994; Peck andTickell, 1994), these emergent ‘new regionalisms’embrace cooperation within urban regions as aninstitutional springboard for engaging still moreaggressively in territorial competition against otherurban regions at national, European and globalscales (Prigge and Ronneberger, 1996).

3. New regulatory geographies In contrast to thehierarchical-bureaucratic frameworks ofmetropolitan service delivery that prevailed duringthe 1960s and 1970s, the entrepreneurial approachto metropolitan governance of the 1990s hasgenerally been grounded upon a new model ofpublic action which ‘highlights values ofnegotiation, partnership, voluntary participationand flexibility in the constitution of new structures’(Lefèvre, 1998: 18; see also Healey, 2000). Ratherstrikingly, across western Europe, this emphasis on‘lean and mean’ forms of public administration –which is in turn derived from neoliberal discourseson the New Public Management and public choicetheory – has replaced the traditional Fordist-

Keynesian assumption that large-scale bureaucratichierarchies would generate economies of scale in thedelivery of public services. Consequently:

… whereas the question of regional government wasonce addressed mainly in the context of anadministrative hierarchy, with an emphasis on verticalrelationships, the situation today is one in which thehorizontal relations among regions are equallyimportant, as also is a vertical relationship that goesbeyond the state. (Barlow, 1997: 410)

In this manner, metropolitan governance is beingredefined from a vertical, coordinative andredistributive relationship within a nationaladministrative hierarchy into a horizontal,competitive and developmentalist relationshipbetween subnational economic territories battlingagainst one another at European and global scales toattract external capital investment.

4. Lines of power and political contestation Recentmetropolitan reform initiatives have been supportedprimarily by: (a) modernizing national governments;(b) political elites within entrepreneurial and/orfiscally distressed central cities; and (c) local andregional business elites, industrialists and other‘boosterists’.4 The most vocal opponents ofcomprehensive metropolitan reforms have generallyincluded: (a) representatives of middle-tier orprovincial governmental agencies that perceivepowerful metropolitan institutions as a threat totheir administrative authority; (b) ‘militantparticularist’ (Harvey, 1996) representatives ofwealthy suburban towns that fear central citydominance and/or reject external claims on thelocal tax base; and (c) residents within large citiesthat fear a loss of democratic accountability andlocal political control (Heinz, 2000: 21–8). Theconfrontation between these opposed political-economic forces and territorial alliances hassignificantly shaped the process of metropolitangovernance reform within most major westernEuropean city–regions.

In sum, while there has been a marked discrepancybetween demands for comprehensive administrativereforms within metropolitan regions and the moremodest types of regionwide cooperation and spatialplanning that have actually been implementedduring the 1990s (Newman, 2000), the preceding



discussion suggests that contemporarytransformations of metropolitan governance inwestern Europe share a number of common featuresacross national, regional and local contexts.

Decoding metropolitan governancereform: the limits of ‘new regionalist’interpretations

It is tempting, at first glance, to interpret thecontemporary renaissance of metropolitanregionalism in western Europe as a major expressionof the processes of subnational political-economicmobilization that have been described under therubric of the ‘new regionalism’. Although the notionof a new regionalism is intensely contentious(Lovering, 1999; Jones, 2001; MacLeod, 2001), ithas been used quite pervasively in recent years as ashorthand reference to at least two broad strands ofanalysis within contemporary political and economicgeography.

First, the notion of the new regionalism is oftenused to refer to studies of the resurgence of regionaleconomies under conditions of globalized, post-Fordist capitalism (see, for instance, Cooke andMorgan, 1998; Amin, 1999). From this perspective,the new regionalism refers to the key role of large-scale regional agglomerations – and theirconcomitant interfirm relations, innovation clusters,learning processes, associational networks, untradedinterdependencies and forms of institutionalthickness – as the crucibles of economicdevelopment within contemporary global capitalism(Florida, 1995; Morgan, 1997). This strand of thenew regionalism has focused, in particular, uponcertain purportedly paradigmatic industrial districtssuch as Emilia-Romagna, Baden-Württemberg,Rhônes-Alpes, Boston’s Route 128, Silicon Valleyand Los Angeles/Orange County. However, itsarguments have also been adopted more broadlyamong many national, regional and localpolicymakers concerned to find the appropriaterecipe for regional economic rejuvenation (Sabel,1989; Scott, 2001).

Second, the notion of the new regionalism hasbeen used to describe the new subnational political-economic landscapes – in Bullmann’s (1994) phrase,the ‘politics of the third level’ – that have emerged

within a rapidly integrating EU (Keating, 1998; LeGalès and Lequesne, 1998). From this perspective,the new regionalism refers to the proposition thatthe nationalized political-economic spaces ofpostwar western Europe are being recast bothupwards and downwards as a new ‘Europe of theregions’ is forged (Keating, 1997b). While thenotion of a Europe of the regions was initiallyarticulated as a political counterpoint to theorthodox liberal notion of a Europe of thecorporations (Ronneberger and Schmid, 1995), ithas more recently come to signify: (a) the formationof a European framework of multilevel governanceand intergovernmental relations in which nationalgovernments represent one among manyinstitutional layers involved in the formation andimplementation of collectively binding policies; and(b) the geopolitical strategies of subnationaleconomic spaces to promote endogenous regionaldevelopment under conditions of intensifiedsupranational territorial competition. Accordingly,in this second strand of discussion, the notion of anew regionalism is used to refer not only to the‘hollowing out’ or rescaling of national politicalspace within the supranational administrativehierarchies of the EU, but also to the enhanced rolesof subnational institutions – including both regionaland local governments – in establishing theregulatory infrastructure for economic governancewithin the Single European Market. Thus, asKeating (1998: 73) explains, the new regionalism‘pits regions against each other in a competitivemode, rather than providing complementary rolesfor them in a national division of labour’.

Taken together, both strands of the newregionalism suggest that the institutionalarchitecture of subnational political-economicspaces is being systematically reworked in thecurrent period through a range of geo-economic andgeopolitical transformations. Whatever theirdifferences of methodology, interpretation, politicalorientation and empirical focus, all analysts of thenew regionalism appear to concur that regions havebecome major geographical arenas for a wide rangeof institutional changes, regulatory experiments andpolitical struggles within contemporary capitalism.

It might initially seem appropriate to interpretthe recent resurgence of metropolitan regionalism inwestern Europe as an unambiguous verification ofeach of the aforementioned strands of the new



regionalist discussion. For, as indicated, recentmetropolitan reform initiatives in western Europeancity–regions have been justified in significantmeasure as a means to promote regional economicgrowth and territorial competitiveness underconditions of accelerated global and Europeanintegration. At the same time, in many westernEuropean city–regions, the need for new forms ofmetropolitan governance has often been justifiedwith reference to the purported inability of nationalgovernments to provide the customized, place-specific regulatory infrastructures that are said to berequired for sustained regional growth undercontemporary geo-economic conditions. From sucha perspective, the resurgence of metropolitan reforminitiatives in contemporary western Europe mightbe understood as a new form of regional politicalassertiveness that has crystallized in response to thecombined impacts of global economic restructuring,accelerated European integration and nationalpolitical retrenchment. Adopting Lipietz’s (1994:27) terminology, one might even view those westernEuropean urban regions in which metropolitaninstitutional reform has been pushed furthest asparadigmatic examples of ‘spaces-for-themselves’ or‘regional armatures’ in which the dominant classesof the hegemonic bloc have (a) self-consciouslyformulated a regionally coordinated strategy ofterritorial development; and (b) embodied thatstrategy in a specific politico-organizational form.And finally, given the degree to which many of themost prominent proponents of metropolitaninstitutional reform in western Europeancity–regions have been explicitly concerned ‘toreplace the “imagined community” at the nationallevel with an “imagined unit of competition” at theregional level’ (Lovering, 1999: 392), it might alsoappear plausible to interpret these emergentsubnational political arenas as the organizationalbedrock for a post-Westphalian formation ofpolitical space in which city-states, regionaldirectorates and supranational trade confederationsare superseding territorially sovereign nationalstates as the basis for collective political order(Ohmae, 1995; Scott, 1998).

In my view, however, such new regionalistinterpretations of the current metropolitanresurgence contain a number of methodological andpolitical blind spots. Many ‘vulgar’ approaches tothe new regionalism have assumed a more or less

direct correspondence between official justificationsfor regional institutional change and their actualfunctions and consequences for regional economicdevelopment. In this manner, some analysts havetended to interpret nearly any regionally configuredinstitutional modifications within a major urbanagglomeration as evidence for the broader and morepervasive types of regional renaissance that areunderscored within new regionalist theories.5 Thismethodological procedure can be called intoquestion on at least two counts.

1. Fiddling with governance while the economy burnsAs more sophisticated approaches to the newregionalism have indicated (see, for instance,Storper and Scott, 1995; Amin, 1999), all forms ofregional institutional change do not necessarilyestablish the requisite, place-specific forms ofeconomic governance that prevent technologicallock-ins, enhance local innovative capacities andenable sustainable developmental trajectories (seealso Hudson et al., 1997).6 Indeed, many of theregional institutions that are being established inwestern Europe actively facilitate wasteful, zero-sum forms of investment poaching and regulatorydowngrading. Such predatory, neomercantilistregional policies are an important expression ofwhat Peck (2000: 74) has aptly described as the‘widespread tendencies to fiddle with governancewhile the economy burns’; and they are considerablyat odds with the high-trust, collaborative socialenvironments that characterize the industrialdistricts upon which much of new regionalist theoryis based (Peck and Tickell, 1994). From thisperspective, the current regional renaissance mustbe interpreted less as the geographical basis for anew upswing of capitalist expansion than as anexpression of the intensified forms of unevengeographical development and sociospatialpolarization that are proliferating at all spatial scaleswithin contemporary capitalism. With a few notableexceptions, most analyses of the new regionalismhave bracketed this broader macroeconomic context,or have treated it as a purely extrinsic parameter forcontemporary regional industrial dynamics(MacLeod, 2000: 224).

2. New regionalism as political strategy Because newregionalist discourses regarding territorialcompetitiveness, regional learning, associational



networks and the supposed imperatives ofglobalization have now been widely disseminatedamong local, regional and national policymakersthroughout western Europe, the use of sucharguments to justify subnational institutionalmodifications cannot be viewed simply as anendogenous response to the new regulatoryimperatives associated with global capitalism or anintegrated EU. On the contrary, the proliferation ofnew regionalist terminology at various scales of stateregulation must be understood as a politicallymediated outcome of complex, cross-national formsof policy transfer and ideological diffusion.7 At thepresent time, the specific politico-ideologicalmechanisms through which notions of territorialcompetitiveness, learning regions, globalization andother new regionalist keywords have been diffusedare not well understood. However, any explanationof this trend would clearly need to consider the‘instrumental utility [of such notions] to powerfulindustrial, state and social constituencies’ (Lovering,1999: 399). In short, much of the new discourseregarding regional economic competitiveness andthe purported constraints imposed by globalterritorial competition is profoundly ideological, forit has served to normalize the uneven sociospatialeffects of economic restructuring and stateretrenchment in the interests of dominant regionalclass fractions, growth coalitions and political elites(Lovering, 1999).

These considerations point towards a stillbroader issue that has been occluded in mostapproaches to the new regionalism – namely, themacropolitical context within which contemporarydiscussions of subnational economic governance arebeing conducted. Although many new regionalistscholars acknowledge the degree to which theKeynesian welfare national states of the postwarperiod have been undermined since the early 1970s,most neglect to theorize the manifold ways in whichsuch politico-institutional transformations haveimpacted the subnational architectures of economicgovernance within major urban regions. This state-theoretical lacuna in new regionalist research isparticularly problematic because, as MacLeod(2000: 221) explains:

… many of the policy innovations associated with thenew regionalism should be seen as running parallelalongside a deeper political effort to erode the Keynesian

welfarist institutional settlement founded upon the job-for-life, large-firm centered industrial labor markets andintegrated welfare entitlement.8

Indeed, most western European national states havecoupled their rolling-back of traditionalredistributive and managerial-welfarist spatialpolicies with an aggressive rolling-forward of newforms of locational policy that target strategicsubnational spaces as key sites for economicregeneration (Brenner, 2003; forthcoming). Thispervasive reworking of national political space hasbeen a ‘major determinant in actively shaping theemerging regional world of “smart” innovation-mediated spaces and trusting social capital(ism)’(MacLeod, 2000: 221). While it would be a mistaketo subsume all aspects of regional economicgovernance under the rubric of the state’sregulatory activities (Krätke, 1999), it would beequally problematic to bracket the profound ways inwhich (a) the dismantling of spatial Keynesianismacross western Europe has opened up a space withinwhich subnational state institutions have beenimpelled to adopt new, place-specific developmentalstrategies; and (b) national states have continued tosteer major aspects of subnational territorialdevelopment across western Europe.

In the present context, I shall not attempt toelaborate a comprehensive, comparative account ofthe interconnections between contemporarymetropolitan reform initiatives and broadertransformations of state spatiality in westernEurope. Instead, the remainder of this articledevelops a stylized state-theoretical interpretation ofmetropolitan governance reform in westernEuropean city–regions that builds upon theforegoing critical perspectives on the newregionalism. While a variety of contextuallydistinctive pathways of metropolitan governancereform and state spatial restructuring havecrystallized in western European national states(Herrschel and Newman, 2002; Salet et al., 2003),the following analysis focuses upon their sharedpolitico-institutional features and evolutionarytendencies.9

As conceived here, contemporary metropolitaninstitutional reform projects must be interpreted notonly with reference to their manifold effects uponlocal and regional economies, but also with referenceto their potentially more durable consequences for



the evolving institutional and territorialinfrastructures of state power on various spatialscales. From this point of view, the restructuring ofmetropolitan governance in western Europeancity–regions can be interpreted as a key politico-institutional mechanism through which broadertransformations of state spatiality have beenunfolding. I shall argue, in particular, that nationalstates have been significantly reshaped, bothfunctionally and geographically, through their rolesin promoting metropolitan institutional reformwithin strategic urban regions.

These contentions can be unpacked, in a firststep, by considering some of the ways in which thecontemporary resurgence of metropolitangovernance has been intertwined with variousstructural tendencies and countertendencies of statespatial reorganization. I shall then, in a second step,develop an interpretation of metropolitangovernance reform as a path-dependent politicalstrategy through which (national and local) statesare attempting to manage the governance failuresand crisis-tendencies associated with earlier roundsof local regulatory experimentation.

Metropolitan governance reform and thestructural moments of state spatialreorganization

In recent decades, extensive scholarly attention hasbeen devoted to the decentring of nationally scaledforms of state regulatory activity and,concomitantly, to the crystallization of newsupranational and subnational regulatoryarrangements (Jessop, 1994; Ruggie, 1993; Sassen,1996). However, while considerable evidence nowexists that inherited Westphalian forms of politicalterritoriality are being undermined (Anderson,1996), this development should not be equated withan erosion of the national state form as such or even,necessarily, with a weakening of national statecapacities. On the contrary, it can be argued that weare currently witnessing a rehierarchization ofmodern statehood as the basic functions of Fordist-Keynesian national states are being upscaled anddownscaled towards a variety of (pre-existent andnewly created) institutional levels within anincreasingly multitiered political architecture

(Jessop, 2002).10 Post-Keynesian national states havefrequently promoted this relativization of statescalar organization insofar as they have establishednew regulatory arenas, institutional forms andgovernance arrangements both above and below thenational scale. These trends simultaneously blur theboundaries between inherited scales of political-economic organization and generate new scalarhierarchies, interscalar networks and scale-selectivepolitical strategies as competing ‘economic andpolitical forces seek the most favourable conditionsfor insertion into a changing international order’(Jessop, 2000: 343).

Building upon such discussions, a number ofscholars have recently hypothesized that aqualitatively new form of ‘state spatial selectivity’ iscrystallizing as post-Keynesian national statesattempt to confront the many contradictory tasks ofterritorial regulation within contemporarycapitalism – from promoting economic developmentand social reproduction to managing sociospatialinequalities and maintaining political legitimation(Jones, 1997; Brenner et al., 2002). In contrast to thenationally focused patterns of state spatial selectivitythat underpinned the Keynesian welfare nationalstate, in which national economies and nationalsocieties were naturalized as taken-for-grantedarenas for socio-economic policies, these newlyemergent, ‘glocalized’ configurations of state spatialselectivity have entailed an intensified targeting ofsupranational economic blocks and strategicsubnational economic zones as sites foraccumulation strategies and regulatory projects(Martin and Sunley, 1997; Swyngedouw, 1997).Whereas the postwar project of spatialKeynesianism emphasized the spreading of industryand population evenly across the national territory,contemporary glocalizing competition state regimesare focused upon the systematic reconcentration ofindustrial capacities, infrastructural investments andlabour power within strategic subnational economicspaces, such as global city–regions and majorindustrial districts (Brenner, 1998; 2003). Since theearly 1980s, the mobilization of entrepreneurialapproaches to local economic development hasrepresented one particularly prevalent politico-institutional mechanism through which thisglocalization of state spatiality has been unfoldingthroughout western Europe. Within this emergent,if deeply contradictory, framework of political



regulation, intra-national uneven development is nolonger viewed as a problem to be alleviated throughredistributive regional policies, but rather as thegeographical basis on which place- and territory-specific strategies of economic development may bemobilized. In conjunction with this reworking ofnational territorial space, inherited stateinstitutional structures have also been pervasivelyreconfigured as new scales and arenas for stateintervention are established throughout eachnational territory.

Bob Jessop’s various writings on statereorganization provide a useful framework throughwhich to situate the most recent wave ofmetropolitan institutional reform in relation to thesenewly emergent, reterritorialized and rescaled formsof state spatial selectivity.11 Jessop distinguishesthree major trends of state reorganization – theinternationalization of the state; thedenationalization of statehood; and the destatizationof the political system. First, stateinternationalization occurs due to the ‘increasedstrategic significance of the international context ofstate action and the latter’s extension to a widerange of extraterritorial or transnational factors andprocesses’ (Jessop, 1999a: 391). Second, statedenationalization occurs through the rearticulationof state functions upwards, downwards andoutwards to other levels of politico-institutionalorganization, leading in turn to a systematicreworking of the traditional Fordist-Keynesianformation of statehood (Jessop, 1999a: 387). Third,destatization involves a ‘movement from the taken-for-granted primacy of official (typically national)state apparatuses toward the taken-for-grantednecessity of varied forms and levels of partnershipbetween official, parastatal and nongovernmentalorganizations in managing economic and socialrelations’ (Jessop, 1999a: 389–90). According toJessop, each of these trends became particularlyapparent following the crisis of the Keynesianwelfare national state in the early 1970s and hasbeen further accelerated in conjunction withsubsequent processes of geo-economic integration.

Crucially, Jessop (2000: 353–5) also indicates thateach of the three trends has been intertwined with acounter-trend of state reorganization that ‘bothqualifies and transforms its significance for politicalclass domination and accumulation’: such counter-trends must be viewed as ‘reactions to the new

trends rather than as survivals of earlier patterns’(Jessop, 1999b: 26). State internationalization is thusaccompanied by an ‘interiorization’ of internationalconstraints into domestic policy orientations,leading states to engage proactively in various formsof locational policy to promote globalcompetitiveness within their territorial jurisdictions.State denationalization is counterbalanced by therise of interscalar strategies through which statesattempt to ‘control the articulation of scales and thetransfer of powers between them’ (Jessop, 2000:353). Finally, destatization occurs in conjunctionwith a proliferation of meta-governance strategiesthrough which states attempt to coordinate andsupervise the increasingly complex relationsbetween different governance regimes, inter-organizational networks, public–privatepartnerships and parastate institutional formswithin their territories (Jessop, 2000: 354). Byunderscoring the interplay between these trends andcounter-trends, Jessop is able to represent processesof state restructuring as an open-ended, conflictualdialectic rather than as a unilinear transition fromone state form to another. The basic elements ofthese trends and counter-trends of statereorganization are summarized in Table 1.

Most important in the present context, Jessop’saccount of state spatial reorganization is attuned tothe scale-specific patterns in which each of theaforementioned trends and counter-trends isarticulated.

• National Jessop devotes particularly nuancedattention to the role of the national scale of statepower as a strategic site for each of the trendsand their corresponding counter-trends. Becausethe national scale served as the dominant level ofpolitical-economic regulation during the Fordist-Keynesian period, it has also been an essentialinstitutional focal point around which the varioustrends of state reorganization have beenarticulated during the last 30 years.Concomitantly, the counter-trends of locationalpolicy, interscalar management and meta-governance may be understood as politicalstrategies through which post-Keynesiannational states are attempting to reassert theirfunctional importance to the process of political-economic governance, even as the primacy of thenational scale is being decentred.



• Supranational Jessop (1999a; 1999b; 2000; 2002)indicates on various occasions that thesupranational scale has likewise become animportant site for each of the trends and counter-trends of state reorganization, albeit one that hasnot matched the national scale in strategic orfunctional importance. Thus supranationalpolitical institutions such as the EU representimportant expressions of stateinternationalization, denationalization anddestatization as well as key institutional arenas inwhich new forms of locational politics,interscalar management and meta-governance arebeing articulated.

• Subnational Finally, Jessop’s (1998a; 1997b)writings on entrepreneurial cities underscore thedegree to which the local and regional scales have

become key arenas for the three trends of statereorganization. As local and/or regional statesreorganize themselves in order to rejuvenateeconomic growth within their territories, theyalso contribute in important ways to theinternationalization, denationalization anddestatization of statehood.

Jessop’s remarks on the scalar articulations of thetrends and counter-trends of state reorganizationare intended primarily to illustrate the manifoldpolicy fields, institutional arenas and spatial sites inwhich statehood is being transformed. However,Jessop’s categories also provide a useful analyticalstarting point through which the evolutionarytrajectories of state rescaling processes during thepost-1970s period may be analysed more closely.



Table 1 Trends and counter-trends of state spatial reorganization in contemporary capitalism

Trend of state spatial reorganization Corresponding counter-trend of state spatial reorganization

The internationalization of policy regimes … and the rise of locational policy

• National state policies are adjusted to the putatively • Global constraints are increasingly interiorized into the external constraints of global economic competition. policy paradigms and discursive frameworks of national

• Global structural competitiveness begins to replace and subnational institutions.traditional macro-economic goals (such as full • The promotion of territorial competitiveness and other employment) as the overarching goal of various forms forms of locational policy (Standortpolitik) become of national socio-economic policy. increasingly self-evident goals for state institutions at

various spatial scales.

The denationalization of statehood … and the rise of interscalar strategies

• State power is upscaled towards supranational • State institutions at supranational, national and institutional forms and downscaled towards subnational subnational scales attempt to (re)assert regulatory institutional forms. control over supranational economic flows and to

• The national scale of political-economic governance is coordinate the relations among different scales ofincreasingly decentred or relativized. political-economic organization.

• Interscalar linkages among extant levels of state powerare recalibrated and states introduce new forms ofinterscalar coordination within strategic and/or crisis-stricken political-economic spaces.

The destatization of the political system … and the rise of meta-governance strategies

• New forms of governance, public–private cooperation • State institutions explore new ways of coordinating, and interorganizational networking are superimposed controlling and supervising governance processes at a upon traditional, hierarchical-bureaucratic forms of range of spatial scales.government and territorial administration. • States increasingly attempt to provide the ‘ground rules’

• Non-state and para-state institutions, agencies and for public–private interaction and to serve as the ‘court actors acquire increasingly direct roles in the fulfillment of appeal’ for the emergent conflicts regarding the of various state functions at various spatial scales. institutional trajectories and goals of governance projects.

Sources: adapted from Jessop (1998b; 1999a; 1999b; 2000; 2002).

Insofar as each of the trends and counter-trends ofstate reorganization tends to crystallizepredominantly at some geographical scales asopposed to others, and to generate scale-specificpolitical-economic consequences, it is defined by adistinctive pattern of ‘scalar selectivity’. Such scalarselectivities are articulated and continuallyrearticulated within each trend and counter-trend ofstate reorganization as diverse socioterritorial forcesstruggle to reconfigure the scalar organization ofstate institutions and forms of state interventiontowards their own particular ends.

The key issue, in the present context, is theevolving structural positions of subnational scales ofregulatory activity in relation to the trends andcounter-trends of state reorganization summarizedabove. As indicated, Jessop’s writings on thenational state underscore its role as an arena andmedium for each of the trends and counter-trends of state spatial reorganization. Meanwhile,Jessop’s writings on entrepreneurial cities highlightthe ways in which the three trends of statereorganization have been articulated at the urbanscale. A still more differentiated mapping of newlyemergent political spaces in western Europeancity–regions can be developed by examining thecontradictory role of local governments within eachof the three counter-trends of state spatialreorganization.

• Local states as agents of locational policy Giventhe vast literatures that have emerged on urbanentrepreneurialism during the last 15 years (Halland Hubbard, 1997), it seems plausible tointerpret the developmentalist, growth-orientedactivities of western European local states asparticularly prominent instances of locationalpolicy, and thus as powerful localized expressionsof the counter-trend to state internationalization.

• Intercity networks as agents of interscalarmanagement Many local states have also becomeincreasingly involved in new forms of interscalarmanagement. The formation of intercitynetworks, such as EUROCITIES andMETREX, through which municipalgovernments are attempting to promote commonpolitical and economic goals, represents a majorexpression of this development.12 However, incontrast to nationally based forms of interscalarmanagement, which are generally intended to

counteract the tendency of statedenationalization, these newly emergent projectsof interlocal networking may actually intensifythe latter. For, while nationally based forms ofinterscalar management are grounded uponstrategies to regulate the interplay of global,supranational and subnational processes within acoherently bounded (national) territorialjurisdiction, intercity networks generally bypassneighboring scales and territories in order toconstruct transversal linkages among localitieswithin supranational scalar orbits (Jessop, 2001).In this sense, the transversal forms of interlocalnetworking that are currently being promoted bywestern European local states represent,simultaneously, localized responses todenationalization tendencies and an importantmechanism through which the scalar geographiesof state denationalization are being furtherreworked. The example of intercity networksunderscores the degree to which statedenationalization is being advanced not onlythrough vertical processes of institutionalupscaling and downscaling, but also throughhorizontal processes of inter-organizationalcooperation, coordination and alliance formationacross geographically dispersed, non-contiguousscales and territories.

• An absence of localized meta-governance? Whilelocal governments have played a key role inestablishing various forms of public–privatepartnership, and thus in advancing thedestatization of the political system, they do notappear to be particularly active in promotingcountervailing forms of meta-governance withintheir jurisdictions. At the present time, thecoordinative, supervisory and monitoringoperations associated with meta-governanceappear to be nested predominantly at supralocalscales, including national states andsupranational institutional forms such as theEuropean Commission.

These considerations provide a state-theoreticalbasis on which to interpret the (re)establishment ofmetropolitan political institutions in major westernEuropean city–regions during the last decade. For,although newly emergent metropolitan politicalforms lack the institutional, fiscal and politico-ideological capacities of national governments, they



appear to have become important scalar sites notonly for the trends towards internationalization,denationalization and destatization, but also for eachof the corresponding counter-trends of locationalpolicy, interscalar management and meta-governance.

Metropolitan reform initiatives advance stateinternationalization insofar as they constitute aregional political response to the perceivedpressures of intensified global territorialcompetition; they advance denationalization insofaras they promote city–regions rather than nationalterritories as the privileged level of political-economic regulation; and they advance destatizationinsofar as they generally entail the establishment ofnew forms of public–private partnership,coordination and governance in the implementationof major regional policies. At the same time,metropolitan political institutions also appear tohave become important geographical arenas inwhich the three counter-trends of staterestructuring are currently being advanced.

• Metropolitan institutions as agents of locationalpolicy Metropolitan reform initiatives havepromoted city–regions as sites for new forms oflocational policy that interiorize the perceivedconstraints of international territorialcompetition directly into local and regionalpolicy agendas. As we have seen, thisdevelopment has entailed a significantratcheting-up of earlier forms of local economicdevelopment policy onto a metropolitan scale.This project of institutional upscaling has beengrounded upon a critique of purely localiststrategies of economic development and anaffirmation that metropolitan regions rather than cities or localities represent the mostappropriate territorial units within which place-specific competitive advantages may be secured.The resultant metropolitanization of locationalpolicy is thus being justified as a means tostrengthen the competitive advantages of aregional economy in the face of local marketfailures and apparently intensifying externalpressures.

• Metropolitan institutions as agents of interscalarmanagement Metropolitan reform initiatives havealso promoted city–regions as major institutionalarenas in which new forms of interscalar

management are to be developed. As discussedabove, the new metropolitan political institutionsof the 1990s have introduced a variety ofadministrative reforms and regulatory strategiesthat are intended to alleviate competitionbetween administrative units within an urbanregion and to coordinate their external political-economic relations through a singleorganizational framework. At the same time, thenew politics of metropolitan reform activelyaffirms the project of territorial competitionbetween regions on European and global scales.Contemporary metropolitan reform projects canthus be understood as attempts to secure newregionalized scalar fixes and to manage thecompetitive interactions that underpin interlocalrelations within an integrated Europeaneconomy. To this end, the city–region is beingmobilized as the key institutional pivot betweenan internal realm of cooperation, administrativecoordination, embedded firms and sociospatialsolidarity and an external space of aggressiveterritorial competition, intergovernmentalausterity, mobile capital flows and unfetteredmarket relations. By (re)calibrating the interplaybetween competitive and cooperative relationswithin an urban region, metropolitan politicalinstitutions are thus viewed as a means toalleviate the intraterritorial tensions, conflictsand contradictions associated with earlier formsof relatively unregulated interlocalitycompetition.

• Metropolitan institutions as agents of meta-governance Newly established approaches tometropolitan governance in western Europe mayalso be viewed as an important institutionalmedium through which new state capacities formeta-governance are being constructed. Themobilization of local economic initiatives duringthe 1980s generally entailed the transfer ofauthority to a range of private and para-stateactors and organizations. By contrast, themetropolitan reform projects of the 1990s haverepresented, in many cases, attempts by nationaland local state institutions to maintain somemeasure of regulatory coordination over theinformal governance networks, quangos,voluntary bodies and public–private partnershipsthat underpin regional economic governance. Inthis sense, the new politics of metropolitan



institutional reform may be viewed in part as astrategic subnational response to the increasingfragmentation and differentiation of politicalauthority that ensued within most westernEuropean urban regions during the initial phaseof post-Keynesian state retrenchment. In suchcases, the goal of metropolitan governancereform is to constrain non-state or para-stateactors and organizations to coordinate theiractivities within a state-dominated institutionalframework at a regional scale. Although the newpolitics of meta-governance have been articulatedin diverse forms and have generated variegatedpolitico-institutional consequences within majorcity–regions, this issue has arguably played anincreasingly important role across the entirewestern European urban system since the early1990s.

This general conceptualization of the evolving scalarselectivities associated with each of the trends andcounter-trends of state reorganization issummarized in Table 2. It must be immediatelyemphasized that this representation of the trendsand counter-trends of state reorganization is notintended to explain the timing, institutional shape orpolitical form of metropolitan reform initiatives inspecific western European city–regions. Its goal,rather, is to depict in general terms some of theways in which these metropolitan reform initiativeshave been intertwined with scale-specifictransformations of state spatiality across westernEurope.

Strategic moments of state spatialreorganization: crisis-tendencies of urbanentrepreneurialism

The structural perspective developed aboveprovides an initial basis on which to relatecontemporary metropolitan reform initiatives inwestern Europe to broader trends and counter-trends of state spatial reorganization. From thispoint of view, metropolitan institutions have becomekey arenas in and through which major rescalings ofEuropean state space are currently unfolding. Asindicated, however, this structural perspectivegenerates no more than a partial account of the

current wave of metropolitan institutional reform,for it cannot, in itself, fully illuminate the nationallyand locally specific forms in which metropolitanreform initiatives have been articulated or theparticular political strategies through which suchreforms have been promoted.

In order to explore such issues, it is necessary toexplore the moments of ‘strategic choice’ and ‘path-shaping’ in which dominant sociopolitical forceshave attempted to ‘redesign the “board” on whichthey are moving and [to] reformulate the rules of thegame’ within major urban regions (Nielson et al.,1995: 6–7). From this perspective, metropolitangovernance arrangements may be viewed asproducts of path-shaping political strategies that aimto reconfigure the institutional infrastructure ofurban and regional spaces. Political strategiesfocused upon the reconfiguration of state spatial andscalar structures may be oriented towards a diverserange of political-economic projects, including: theentrapment of capital within particular territorialjurisdictions (Cox, 1990); the transformation oflocal relations of exploitation and domination(Swyngedouw, 1996); the social and/or geographicalrechannelling of distributional relays; and theregulation of historically and geographically specificcrisis-tendencies and contradictions within anational, regional or local economy (Hudson, 1989;Eisenschitz and Gough, 1996).13

Crucially, such political strategies never emergeon a ‘blank slate’ in which new institutional spacesare forged ex nihilo; rather, they are alwaysembedded within an already partitioned, unevenlydeveloped political geography that has beeninherited from earlier patterns of state spatialorganization and regulatory activity (MacLeod andGoodwin, 1999). Therefore, new state spaces areproduced neither through a simple logic ofstructural determinism nor through a spontaneousvoluntarism, but rather through a mutuallytransformative evolution of (inherited) spatialstructures and (emergent) spatial strategies withinan internally differentiated, continually evolvinggrid of state institutions and regulatory projects(Brenner, forthcoming). This conflictual interactionof inherited institutional landscapes and emergentregulatory projects may be described as a process ofstate spatial structuration (see also MacLeod, 1999).The rescaled regulatory geographies that havecrystallized within major western European





Table 2 Trends and counter-trends of state reorganization: a general representation of their scalar selectivities at nationaland subnational scales

National Local Regional metropolitan

The internationalization of National states, municipal governments and metropolitan/regional institutions are policy regimes … constrained to adjust inherited policy repertoires to new global competitive pressures: the

international context gains structural significance as a basic horizon for policy formationat each scale of state institutional organization.

… and the rise of locational National states, entrepreneurial local states and newly (re-)established competitionpolicy oriented metropolitan governments interiorize global economic constraints in the form of

new policies oriented towards territorial competitiveness, inter-place competition, place-marketing and the attraction of inward capital investment.

The denationalization National states transfer various regulatory tasks and capacities upwards and downwards toof statehood … other tiers of state power; intergovernmental relations are recalibrated to privilege

subnational state apparatuses (including municipal/regional governments andmetropolitan agencies) in the implementation of key policy agendas; entrepreneurialregional and local states acquire more important roles in the formulation andimplementation of scale-specific strategies of territorial development.

… and the rise of interscalar National states attempt to Local states promote new Metropolitan institutions are strategies (re)assert control over the horizontal or transversal (re-)established to alleviate

relations between forms of intermunicipal intraregional competition intranational and cooperation in order to among extant administrative supranational scales of achieve common political- units, to position a political-economic economic goals: examples city–region strategically organization and to include EUROCITIES and within supranational circuits

establish new forms of METREX. of capital and to coordinate a interscalar coordination city–region’s relations to within and beyond their supraregional scales ofterritorial jurisdictions. political-economic

organization.

The destatization of the political National states, entrepreneurial local states and newly (re-)established competition-system … oriented metropolitan governments establish new forms of cooperation, coordination and

partnership with non-state and para-state agencies in order to accomplish basic statefunctions; new, often informal forms of public–private interaction, interorganizationalnetworking and governance are established at all extant scales of state power as well as atnewly established scales of state regulatory activity.

… and the rise of meta- National states acquire key Local states lack major Metropolitan institutions governance strategies roles in regulating, meta-governance functions. acquire increasingly

coordinating and supervising important roles in regulating, the relations among public– coordinating and supervising private partnerships and other the relations among informal systems of public–private partnerships,

governance at various scales voluntary bodies and other within a national territory. informal systems of

governance within an urbanregion.

city–regions during the last decade have been forgedprecisely through the interaction of such inheritedinstitutional landscapes and emergent politicalstrategies designed to restructure regulatoryarrangements at various spatial scales (see also Peck,1998; MacKinnon, 2001).

In the case of contemporary western Europeanmetropolitan regions, inherited institutionallandscapes are derived most immediately from (a)the contextually specific configurations of industrialdevelopment, state territorial organization andpolitical–economic regulation that prevailed duringthe Fordist-Keynesian period; and (b) thecontextually specific patterns of crisis formation,institutional restructuring and political struggle thatcrystallized during the post-1970s period followingthe exhaustion of the Fordist-Keynesiandevelopmental regime (Lipietz, 1994). Whether ornot a given instance of metropolitan governancereform represents an incremental adjustment of, or aradical break from, these inherited institutionallandscapes hinges upon the degrees of freedom thathave been attained by path-shaping social forceswithin a particular urban region. For this reason, theresults of the process of state spatial structurationcan never be foreseen in advance, and are necessarilyarticulated in place and territory-specific forms. It ispossible, nonetheless, to delineate three major typesof political strategies that have been associated withthe current round of metropolitan institutionalreform: accumulation strategies; redistributivestrategies; and state strategies.

1. Accumulation strategies Metropolitan institutionalrestructuring may become an arena foraccumulation strategies that attempt to establish aparticular model of economic development withinan urban region. Such metropolitan accumulationstrategies may seek to reduce the costs of investmentwithin a regional economy, and thus to attractmobile capital; they may seek to create non-substitutable, place-specific locational advantages,and thus to enhance capital’s embeddedness within aregional economy; or, they may seek to promotedistinctive combinations of the latter agendas.Although accumulation strategies have remainedrelatively inchoate in many European city–regions,they have played a centrally important role in recentdebates on metropolitan political reform. In thecases of Lille, Lyon, Stuttgart and Copenhagen, in

particular, metropolitan regulatory reform appearsto have contributed quite significantly to thearticulation and institutionalization of accumulationstrategies at a regional scale during the last 15 years.

2. Redistributive strategies Metropolitan institutionalrestructuring may also become an arena forredistributive strategies that attempt to recalibratethe social and geographical balance between growthand redistribution within an urban region. Suchmetropolitan redistributive strategies may entail theintroduction of new social and environmentalpolicies to manage the dysfunctional effects ofregional economic restructuring as well as new fiscalpolicies to rechannel tax revenues into fiscallyenfeebled city cores and older industrial towns.Whereas the tension between redistribution andgrowth exists in some form in nearly allcontemporary city–regions, it is only politicizedunder certain circumstances, generally due to theactivities of a redistribution-oriented territorialalliance within a national, regional or local economy.Strategies of intraregional fiscal redistribution andterritorial equalization have played particularlyprominent roles within recent German debates onmetropolitan institutional reform.

3. State strategies Finally, metropolitan institutionalrestructuring may become an arena for statestrategies that attempt to modify the specificaccumulation regimes, institutional arrangements,patterns of regulatory intervention and forms ofinterorganizational coordination within an urbanregion. Such metropolitan-level state strategies mayentail a reorientation of local and regional economicpolicies, a reorganization of the division ofregulatory tasks, burdens and responsibilities withinextant state institutions and, under some conditions,the creation of entirely new state agencies andregulatory bodies oriented towards specific aspectsof regional economic governance. State strategies lieat the very heart of metropolitan institutionalreform and are generally a key institutionalprecondition for the mobilization of politicalstrategies oriented towards other goals, such asaccumulation, redistribution and so forth.14

The central question that emerges from theseconsiderations is: Why have political strategies –whether oriented towards accumulation,



redistribution, an adjustment of state capacities orother regulatory goals – crystallized so pervasivelyat a metropolitan scale across western Europeduring the last decade? The preceding discussionhas already indicated how metropolitan regions havebecome key institutional arenas within whichvarious broader trends and counter-trends of statereorganization have been articulated. As noted,however, metropolitan reform initiatives cannot beexplained adequately with reference to their role incontributing to this dynamic of state spatialreorganization: the evolving scalar selectivities ofsuch trends and counter-trends are outcomes, notcauses, of the types of political strategies outlinedabove. A more complete account of thecontemporary resurgence of metropolitan reforminitiatives can be developed by relating the latter tothe path-dependent processes of state spatialrestructuring that have ensued across westernEurope since the early 1970s.

As noted above, following the crisis of NorthAtlantic Fordism during the 1970s, westernEuropean national states began to reorganizeinherited regulatory landscapes throughout theirterritories, particularly at the subnational scales ofmajor urban regions. National states systematicallyretrenched the local infrastructures of Keynesianwelfarism and attempted to impose a new,competitiveness-oriented framework for localeconomic governance. Traditional compensatoryregional policies were abandoned or retrenched;meanwhile, national intergovernmental systems,fiscal relays and welfare arrangements wererecalibrated in order to constrain municipalgovernments to engage more directly in market-driven local economic development policies andother place-marketing initiatives (Mayer, 1992;Harding, 1997). Entrepreneurial cities subsequentlyproliferated throughout western Europe as localstates began to engage proactively in diverseprojects to promote endogenous growth, localeconomic development and territorialcompetitiveness within their jurisdictions(Parkinson, 1991; Cheshire and Gordon, 1995).

During the course of the 1980s, theseentrepreneurial local policies generated significant,if highly uneven and contradictory, impacts uponinherited landscapes of state regulation. Inparticular, the proliferation of local economicinitiatives encouraged zero-sum forms of territorial

competition among western European cities, leadingin turn to a ‘general trend towards diverting publicresources to support private capital accumulation atthe expense of social expenditures [and towards]encouraging the search for short-term gains at theexpense of more important longer-term investmentsin the health of cities and the well-being of theirresidents’ (Leitner and Sheppard, 1997: 305).Consequently, the local economic developmentstrategies of the 1980s tended to intensify unevenspatial development, to encourage a race to thebottom in social service provision, to reinforce orexacerbate entrenched inequalities within nationalurban hierarchies, and to generate new fault-lines ofpolitical conflict at various scales within nationalterritories (Eisenschitz and Gough, 1993). Eventhough some cities managed to acquire short-termcompetitive advantages through the relatively earlyadoption of entrepreneurial urban policies, suchadvantages were generally eroded as urbanentrepreneurialism was diffused ever more widely(Leitner and Sheppard, 1997: 303). Theproliferation of place-specific strategies ofendogenous local economic development during thisperiod also exacerbated a number of regulatorydeficits, governance failures and coordinationproblems within national and local state institutions.Because entrepreneurial local policies enhanced thegeographical differentiation of state regulatoryactivities without establishing new institutionalmechanisms for embedding subnationaldevelopment initiatives and competitive strategieswithin an overarching national policy framework,they tended to undermine the organizationalcoherence and functional integration of stateinstitutions. Just as crucially, the intensification ofuneven development, sociospatial inequality andinterlocality competition within national territoriesworsened life-chances for significant segments ofnational populations, and thus frequently triggeredsignificant legitimation problems for nationalgovernments (Eisenschitz and Gough, 1996; 1998).

The resurgence of metropolitan reforminitiatives during the 1990s may be conceptualizedas a constellation of political responses to the policyfailures, coordination problems, institutionaldislocations and crisis-tendencies associated withthe entrepreneurial approaches to local economicgovernance that prevailed during the precedingdecade. Such metropolitan political strategies have



emerged through the combined impacts ofdeliberate design, institutional learning and chancediscoveries as diverse social forces, politicalcoalitions and territorial alliances have struggled toreshape the trajectory of state institutionalrestructuring. From this perspective, the increasingmetropolitanization of locational policy, interscalarmanagement and meta-governance has resultedfrom nationally and locally specific strategies tostrengthen subnational economic developmentpolicies while also establishing a variety of flankingmechanisms designed to alleviate the destructiveside-effects of traditional, zero-sum forms of urbanentrepreneurialism and local regulatory downgrading.Whereas most strategies of metropolitan politicalreform continue to privilege the goals of promotinglocal and regional economic development, theygenerally attempt to address as well some of themajor regulatory deficits that have been associatedwith localist approaches to economic regeneration.The widespread concern of metropolitan reformerswith issues such as regionwide cooperation, interlocalpolicy coordination, interscalar management andmeta-governance may be understood with referenceto these tendencies of state spatial restructuringduring the post-Keynesian period.

This interpretation suggests, furthermore, thatthe political form and institutional shape ofmetropolitan reform strategies vary not only bynational context but also in relation to the specifictypes of local economic development policy thatwere mobilized during the previous two decades. Inother words, the path-dependent character ofmetropolitan institutional change results not onlyfrom the impact of inherited landscapes of nationalstate regulation, but also from the legacies of thelocal economic development policies and crisis-management strategies that were introducedfollowing the exhaustion of North Atlantic Fordism.For it is in relation to the endemic limitations ofthese local policies, and the contextually specificsociospatial dislocations they have generated, thatthe alleged need for ‘metropolitan solutions to urbanproblems’ has been perceived, politicized and actedupon by the dominant political-economic forceswithin each national territory. The contradictorylegacies of local economic initiatives in differentnational and local contexts therefore merit detailedattention in any systematic comparative study ofmetropolitan institutional reform.

It must be emphasized, however, that newlyestablished metropolitan regulatory frameworksgenerally internalize rather than resolve the crisis-tendencies associated with earlier forms ofentrepreneurial urban governance. As argued above,one of the common denominators of metropolitanreform initiatives across western Europe is theirpromotion of the metropolitan scale as a privilegedarena in which new forms of economic developmentpolicy are to be mobilized. In each national context,this regionally focused rescaling of state institutionalstructures and forms of regulatory intervention hasitself been fraught with any number of internaltensions and crisis-tendencies that systematicallyundermine the capacity of metropolitan politicalinstitutions to achieve these goals.

First, particularly when powerful social andeconomic interests are tied closely to extant levels ofstate territorial organization, the project ofmetropolitan state rescaling generates intensestruggles between opposed class factions, politicalcoalitions and territorial alliances regarding issuessuch as jurisdictional boundaries, institutionalcapacities, democratic accountability, fiscal relaysand intergovernmental linkages. Relatedly, evenwhen new frameworks of metropolitan politicalorganization are successfully established, anynumber of unresolved tensions permeate the projectof promoting place-specific strategies of economicdevelopment within their jurisdictions. In mostwestern European city–regions, the agenda ofenhancing regional distinctiveness stands in directtension with the perceived need to reduceproduction costs through regulatory downgradingand direct subsidies to capital. Meanwhile, theproject of enhancing regional institutional flexibilitystands in direct tension with the need for continuedfiscal support and administrative coordination fromsuperordinate tiers of the state, including regionaland national governments. The specific balance thatobtains among these opposed regulatory prioritieswithin a given urban region is thus likewise a matterof intense sociopolitical contestation at a range ofspatial scales (Jones, 2001).

Second, the capacity of newly establishedmetropolitan political institutions to manage thecrisis-tendencies that pervade contemporary localand regional economies remains deeply problematic.Indeed, most contemporary metropolitanapproaches to economic development policy extend



the limitations of earlier, localist approaches toeconomic rejuvenation onto the larger spatial scaleof city–regions. For, in their current, market-ledforms, metropolitan political institutions likewisetend to intensify intra-national sociospatialinequality, uneven development and interspatialcompetition, and thus to undermine the territorialconditions for sustainable economic development.Moreover, despite their explicit attention toproblems of interscalar coordination and meta-governance, metropolitan political institutionscannot, in themselves, resolve the pervasivegovernance failures, regulatory deficits andlegitimation problems that ensue as public funds arespread out ever more thinly among a wide numberof subnational entrepreneurial initiatives. Themetropolitan political institutions that have beenintroduced throughout western Europeancity–regions during the course of the 1990s thusappear to have exacerbated rather than alleviated theproblems of unfettered interspatial competition,uneven development, intergovernmentalcoordination and political legitimation thataccompanied the entrepreneurial urban policies ofthe preceding decade.

Yet, whatever the limitations of metropolitanreform initiatives as solutions to the endemic crisis-tendencies within contemporary western Europeancity–regions, I would argue that they havenonetheless played a key role during the last decadein redefining the national and subnationalgeographies of state power throughout westernEurope. In particular, the resurgence ofmetropolitan political institutions appears to havequalitatively modified the landscapes of stateregulation that have been emerging since theabandonment of spatial Keynesianism in mostwestern European countries as of the late 1970s.Whereas the proliferation of entrepreneurialapproaches to local economic policy during the1970s and 1980s entailed an initial rescaling of thenationally focused regulatory geographies associatedwith the postwar Keynesian welfare national state, afurther wave of state rescaling has been inducedthrough the metropolitan reform projects of the1990s. This has in turn generated a markedevolutionary modification of the splinteredregulatory geographies that had been established inwestern European national states immediatelyfollowing the crisis of North Atlantic Fordism.

Table 3 provides a stylized outline of the ways inwhich different forms of urban and regionalgovernance have been intertwined with evolvingforms of state spatial selectivity in western Europesince the Fordist-Keynesian period.

For present purposes, the essential point is thaturban regions represent important institutionalarenas in which the conflictual, multiscalarinteraction between inherited regulatorygeographies and emergent political strategiesunfolds. The evolving spatial and scalar selectivitiesof state institutions represent an outcome of thisongoing interaction while in turn providing arelatively fixed and provisionally stabilizedscaffolding of political space in which newregulatory projects may be mobilized at a variety ofgeographical scales. The regulatory deficitsassociated with newly established metropolitanpolitical institutions are thus likely to generate a newround of spatially selective regulatory responses andpolitical strategies, leading in turn to further roundsof regulatory experimentation and state spatialrestructuring.

Concluding comment: pathways of statespatial structuration

The key question, in short, is not whether the state isglobalizing or localizing, but rather what kind ofstruggles are being waged and by whom, and how therescaling of the state toward the glocal produces andreflects shifts in relative sociospatial power geometries.(Swyngedouw, 1997: 159)

This article has argued that a resurgence ofmetropolitan reform initiatives, oriented above alltowards the priority of regional economicdevelopment, has been occurring since the early1990s in major city–regions throughout westernEurope. Through a critical engagement with recentdebates on the new regionalism, I have outlined thebasic elements of a state-theoretical interpretation ofthese new metropolitan reform initiatives. Whereasmetropolitan reform initiatives are stronglyconditioned by extant frameworks of state territorialorganization, they also represent an importantpolitical mechanism through which suchframeworks are being reterritorialized and rescaled.While the institutional forms and functions of these



rescaled national states are qualitatively differentfrom those associated with the Keynesian welfarenational states of the postwar period, I have arguedthat contemporary rescaling processes have notundermined the overarching role of national stateinstitutions in (re)structuring major aspects of localand regional economic governance. As

conceptualized here, then, national states do notsimply filter global forces into a territorial economybut actively produce, reproduce and continuallyreshape the institutional-regulatory landscapeswithin which contemporary processes of global,national and local restructuring are being articulated(Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner, 1998).



Table 3 Urban–regional governance and changing configurations of state spatiality in western Europe

Dominant form of Form of Major tensions, conflicts and Temporal phase urban–regional regulation state spatial selectivity contradictions

High Fordism: • Managerialism: local states • Spatial Keynesianism: national • Urban cores and growth poles 1960s–early 1970s operate mainly as sites of states promote economic may overheat due to processes of

welfare service provision and development by spreading cumulative causation.collective consumption. industry, population and • Distributional struggles • Metropolitan institutions infrastructural investment evenly proliferate as peripheral localities serve to coordinate the across the national territory. and regions articulate demands

provision of welfare services • Primacy of the national scale of for central subsidies.and to manage the physical state regulation: national • National and local fiscal crises expansion of large-scale economies, national societies ensue as struggles intensify over Fordist urban agglomerations. and national urban systems are the appropriate balance of growth

viewed as pre-given territorial vs redistribution.arenas for economic, social and spatial relations.

First wave of • Entrepreneurialism: local • The rise of glocalization • Intensified uneven development glocalization states acquire more important strategies: national states and zero-sum forms ofstrategies and roles in the promotion of local promote the reconcentration of interlocality competition crisis- economic development and economic capacities and undermine national economic management: other place-marketing strategies. infrastructure investments into stability.early 1970s– • Metropolitan institutions are the most globally • Local economic initiatives late 1980s abolished or significantly competitive cities and industrial trigger systemic governance

downsized in conjunction with districts within their territories. failures due to a lack of supralocal welfare state retrenchment • Supranational and subnational policy coordination.programmes. scales of state regulation acquire • National and local legitimation

an enhanced significance in crises ensue as sociospatial accumulation strategies and inequality intensifies.regulatory processes.

Second wave of • Competitive regionalism: • The metropolitanization of • Metropolitan institutional glocalization metropolitan institutions are glocalization strategies: national reforms trigger an upscaling ofstrategies and rejuvenated in conjunction with states target large-scale the problems of uneven crisis- projects to promote interlocality metropolitan regions rather than development, intensified management: cooperation and regional cities or localities as the most sociospatial inequality, inadequate early 1990s– economic development. appropriate scales for economic policy coordination and present • Metropolitan institutions rejuvenation. legitimation to major

acquire new roles in various • Metropolitan and regional metropolitan regions.aspects of interscalar scales gain a new significance in • Crisis-tendencies and management and meta- strategic spatial planning, crisis- governance failures are rescaled governance. management, intergovernmental upwards but remain unresolved at

coordination and the regulation a national scale.of uneven spatial development.

This article has also outlined a methodologicalstrategy through which the interplay betweenurban–regional restructuring and ongoingtransformations of state spatiality may be theorizedand explored more systematically. I haveemphasized, on the one hand, that city–regions havebecome key geographical sites in which varioustrends and counter-trends of state reorganizationare being articulated. On the other hand, thisdiscussion has suggested that the geographies ofstate power in western Europe are being rescaledthrough a conflictual interaction between inheritedlandscapes of regulation and emergent, path-shaping political strategies oriented towards thetransformation of those landscapes. Thisconceptualization has provided a basis on which tointerpret contemporary struggles over metropolitaninstitutional reform as strategic political responsesto some of the regulatory deficits, governancefailures and crisis-tendencies induced by earlierprojects of urban entrepreneurialism.Contemporary metropolitan reform initiatives inwestern Europe must be viewed, simultaneously, aspath-dependent outcomes of inherited geographies ofstate regulatory activity and as path-shapingpolitical strategies through which the scalar contoursof such geographies are being fundamentallyreworked.

Whereas the present article has schematicallyexplored this interaction between inheritedregulatory landscapes and emergent regulatoryprojects with reference to the case of metropolitaninstitutional reform, I would argue that thismethodological strategy could be fruitfully appliedto many other aspects of state spatial restructuring,at a broad range of geographical scales, undercontemporary capitalism. Additional cross-nationaland comparative research on these matters isurgently needed in order to enhance our theoreticalunderstanding of the many different institutionalpathways, political strategies and social strugglesthrough which the geographies of statehood havebeen reworked throughout the world economy sincethe exhaustion of North Atlantic Fordism in theearly 1970s (see Brenner et al., 2002).

By way of conclusion, it is worth underscoringone of the key themes that has been raised by thepreceding analysis – namely, the politicalgeographies of capitalist crisis. The approach

deployed here is intended to contribute to the crisis-theoretical approaches to regulatory transformationthat have been developed in recent years by ‘4thgeneration’ regulationists and other criticalgeographers.15 Thus conceived, crisis is not a single,totalized event but an endemic tendency withincapitalist society that can be shown to underpin abroad range of apparently unrelated economicrealignments, institutional adjustments and politicalstruggles (Harvey, 1982). In the context of stateregulatory restructuring, this conceptualizationentails a rejection of the traditional regulationistvision of crisis as a linear transition from one fullyformed mode of regulation to the next, andconcomitantly, an analytical emphasis on the ways inwhich crises are mediated through open-endedprocesses and strategies of regulatory change atmultiple spatial scales, at divergent temporal ratesand within diverse institutional configurations. Thepreceding analysis has attempted to expand ourunderstanding of the spatio-temporality ofprocesses of institutional-regulatory restructuringby emphasizing their strongly path-dependentcharacter. From this perspective, I have suggestedthat the strategies of state regulation and crisis-management that are adopted during one phase ofcrisis-induced capitalist restructuring have a massiveimpact upon the strategies that are adopted duringsubsequent phases of crisis-induced restructuring(Florida and Jonas, 1991). This proposition has beenillustrated here through the argument thatcontemporary metropolitan reform initiatives havebeen conditioned strongly by the regulatory deficitsand governance failures within earlier approaches tourban entrepreneurialism – which were in turn saidto be conditioned strongly by the crisis-tendencieswithin Fordist-Keynesian forms of urbangovernance. On this basis, we can anticipate that thestructural limitations of contemporary metropolitanreform projects will in turn powerfully shape thepolitical and institutional form in which futurestrategies of state spatial restructuring will bearticulated, whether at local, regional, national orsupranational scales. Future studies of new statespaces could be significantly advanced through moreexplicit, crisis-theoretical investigations of thecontextually specific pathways through which statespatial restructuring unfolds.



Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Susanne Heeg and GordonMacLeod for incisive comments on a previous draft.I assume full responsibility for all errors of fact orinterpretation. An early version of this article waswritten during my work as a James Bryant ConantFellow at the Center for European Studies, HarvardUniversity (2000–2001). I am grateful to the Centerfor its support.

Notes

1 See, for example, MacLeod and Goodwin (1999); Jessop(2000; 2002); Hudson (2001); Jones (2001); MacKinnon(2001); MacLeod (2001).

2 The relevant literature on these developments is vast andrapidly expanding. The following sources provide usefuland representative overviews in English, French andGerman: Aigner and Miosga (1994); Weck (1995); Saezet al. (1997); Jouve and Lefèvre (1999); BrBR 2000;Heinz (2000); Saller (2000); STANDORT (2000);Herrschel and Newman (2002); Salet et al. (2003).

3 As deployed here, the notion of locational policy refersto spatially selective state strategies intended: (a) toenhance the structural competitiveness of particularterritorial jurisdictions; and (b) to position thosejurisdictions strategically within broader circuits ofcapital accumulation (Brenner, 2000). While the term‘locational policy’ (Standortpolitik) is derived fromcontemporary German policy debates on StandortDeutschland (Germany as an investment location), it isused here in a more specific, social-scientific sense todescribe particular types of state strategies. Suchstrategies are characterized by spatial selectivity insofaras they: (a) are mobilized by scale and place-specific stateinstitutions; (b) are grounded upon particular spaces ofcompetitiveness; and (c) are oriented towards particularspaces of competition (on these distinctions, see Brenner,2000). On state strategies, see Jessop (1990) and Jessop etal. (1988); on state spatial selectivity, see Jones (1997;1998); on the interplay between state spatial strategiesand state spatial selectivity, see Brenner (forthcoming).

4 It should be noted, however, that supporters ofmetropolitan institutional reform in contemporarywestern Europe have embraced a variety of radicallyopposed programmes for regional economicdevelopment, ranging from neoliberal, cost-cutting andderegulatory initiatives to ‘offensive’, associationalist orsocial democratic strategies focused upon democraticallynegotiated settlements within the local population(Ronneberger and Schmid, 1995).

5 Analogous methodological tendencies underpinnedmany early applications of French regulation theory tothe study of local politics. In this context, localinstitutional changes were commonly ‘read off ’ fromposited macro-economic shifts, such as the putativetransition to post-Fordism (for discussion see Peck, 2000).

6 The distinction between ‘vulgar’ and ‘sophisticated’approaches to the new regionalism is derived fromLovering (1999).

7 In other words, the basic concepts of the newregionalism have come to serve not only as categories ofanalysis but also as categories of practice (see Bourdieu,1977).

8 Lovering (1999: 392) articulates a closely analogous pointby suggesting that the new regionalism ‘bypasses thepolitical motors of decentralization and fails to addressthe political construction of markets and economicactors more generally’.

9 In Tilly’s (1990) terms, the following discussion isgrounded upon a combination of ‘encompassing’ and‘universalizing’ comparisons: its goal is to analysecommon institutional changes among European cities interms of: (a) their embeddedness within a shared geo-economic and Europe-wide political-economic space;and (b) their broadly shared pathways of industrialchange and political-economic restructuring during thelast 30 years. This emphasis on commonalities amongwestern European states and cities should not, however,be construed as an endorsement of the view thatcontemporary globalization entails a simple empiricalconvergence of institutional outcomes. On the contrary, Ibelieve that ‘individualizing’ and ‘variation-finding’comparisons (Tilly, 1990) are more important than everunder contemporary geo-economic conditions as ameans to underscore the impressive diversity ofinstitutional dynamics and political struggles throughwhich contemporary cities are being shaped andreshaped. See Brenner (2001) for a more detaileddiscussion of the potential contributions of each of theseapproaches to comparative analysis in the context ofcontemporary urban studies.

10 To be sure, this denationalization of state functions hasoccurred in close conjunction with an increasingallocation of major regulatory tasks to a variety of non-state actors and institutions. However, as Jessop (2002)has indicated, the proliferation of such governancenetworks has undermined the organizational unity ofnational states without eroding their functional centralityto the basic tasks of political-economic regulation undercontemporary capitalism.

11 See, for instance, Jessop, 1994; 1997; 1998a; 1998b;1999a; 1999b; 2000; 2002.

12 Cappellin (1991), Parkinson (1992), Heeg et al. (2000;2003), Friedmann (2001).

13 In this context, it should also be noted that political



strategies oriented towards the reconfiguration of aparticular scale of state territorial organization may beanimated by sociopolitical forces rooted within otherscales of state power: thus national states, majorsubnational state institutions (e.g. Länder, regionalgovernments, provinces, etc.) or, under some conditions,municipalities, have generally played essential roles inthe establishment of new frameworks for metropolitangovernance in contemporary western Europe.

14 As Jessop et al. (1993: 37, italics added) indicate, statestrategies attempt to establish the requisite level of‘apparatus unity’ to enable the state to pursueaccumulation strategies and other regulatory projectswithin civil society: ‘State capacities to advance anaccumulation strategy depend in turn on the state’ssecond-order capacity to reflect upon and manage itscapacities to pursue strategies which secure its owninternal unity ... Indeed, the need to establish apparatusunity might well lead to policies which appear irrelevantor contradictory in relation to accumulation strategies.But, without a modicum of apparatus unity ... the statecould not realize the political conditions needed toimplement an accumulation strategy.’ Insofar as statestrategies of metropolitan institutional reform attempt toreconfigure the form of regulation within an urbanregion, they might also be viewed as projects of ‘meta-regulation’ (Collinge, 1999).

15 See, for instance, Peck and Tickell (1995), Peck (1998;2000), Goodwin and Painter (1996), Hudson (2001),Jones (2001), Jones and MacLeod (1999), MacKinnon(2001), MacLeod (2001), Jonas and Ward (2002).

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Correspondence to:

Neil Brenner, Department of Sociology,Metropolitan Studies Program, New YorkUniversity, 269 Mercer Street, 4th floor, New York,NY 10003–6687, USA.[email: [email protected]]



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