ABSTRACT
Strategy-making focused on urban areas involves creating some conception of an ‘urban region’ and forming institutional arenas in which to develop and maintain the strategic focus. It involves calling to mind significant relationships about urban dynamics and drawing together many actors and networks necessary for linking a strategic concept to the possibility of shaping how material resources and regulatory powers are used in urban development processes. Creating a spatial strategy focused on some idea of an urban ‘region’ adds another frame of reference into the mix of framing concepts and discourses through which ongoing investment and regulation processes in an urban area are being shaped. Such a frame creates an idea of an urban entity with particular place qualities (Amin 2004; Healey 2002). Explicitly or implicitly, it positions this entity within a wider geography and indicates how the places in an urban area relate to the conception of an urban area. For most people, Amsterdam, Milan, Newcastle, Barcelona or Gothenburg are places on some kind of map of cities in a country or in Western Europe. Each is also a collection of neighbourhoods and locales. Each is also a unity, an identity and an imagery, called to mind by the naming of an urban area. This naming involves a mixture of imagination and experience through which to ‘see’ such an urban area and to identify what interventions, if any, could and should be articulated to ‘shape’ the future trajectory of its development.
