ABSTRACT
Decline, socio-spatial polarisation, and urban crises In Western Europe there is a strong connection between the literature on urban decline and the economic restructuring in old industrialised areas. In the globalised economy, only a few global cities and metropolitan regions are said to be the ‘control points of the global economic system’ (Dicken, 2003: p. 240). Within the international system, ‘networked’ cities and agglomerations (especially capital cities) are said to be the number one location for headquarters of multinational companies and big national enterprises or subcontractors, in particular in the financial sector. In this way, current processes of internationalisation and global inter-and intra-firm relations tend to concentrate much of the world’s most important trading activities in a relatively limited number of subnational regions or agglomerations (Krätke, 2014; Scott & Storper, 2003; Beaverstock, Smith, & Taylor, 1999). Amin and Thrift suggest that capital cities and core metropolitan regions can derive competitive advantage from the presence of many organisations in economic, political, and cultural life (1994: p. 105). Current tendencies of globalisation are likely to promote concentrated economic and demographic development in some metropolitan regions, which thereby dominate national urban and economic systems, to the disadvantage of other old industrialised agglomerations or smaller non-metropolitan regions. As a consequence of this spatial polarisation, many regions based on traditional (or old) economies are still struggling to find their role in the globalising economy and to respond to this form of socio-economic crisis. Indeed, in the past years, regional disparities within the EU have increased (EC, 2010), and the European Union has witnessed a new form of socio-spatial polarisation, with often economically dynamic capital and second-tier metropolitan regions with population and GDP growth on the one hand and less dynamic smaller metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions on the other hand (EC, 2013). The recent economic and financial crisis brought to an end a period during which regional disparities (measured in regional GDP per head and regional unemployment rates) within Europe were generally shrinking (with the exception of the new Eastern European member states) (Lang, 2011). Despite the strong overall performance of the bigger agglomerations in the EU, most of them saw their GDP per head drop between 2007 and 2010 relative to the national level. Smaller agglomerations lost most ground; three out of four declined relative to their country average. The capital regions showed a stronger performance with only 30 per cent of them losing ground (EU, 2013: p. 22). Looking at employment figures, similar to the GDP per head changes, the capital regions in general outperformed the rest of their respective countries: nine out of ten had a stronger employment performance, nine EU capital regions even achieved employment growth despite increasing national unemployment (ibid.: p. 23). Hence, throughout the EU, there has been a general trend favouring the biggest metropolitan and capital regions. One could argue that these city regions have shown high resilience because they recovered quickly after short turbulences in the fate of the financial and economic crisis throughout the past
years. On the other side of the coin, however, this crisis has added a new dimension to the struggles of third-tier city regions and non-metropolitan regions, in particular under the conditions of a longer lasting and ongoing economic and financial crisis in the Southern European countries. Having identified the reasons for the crisis to be to a large degree at the level of the national economic and financial systems (see also Gambarotto & Solari, 2014), it would be naive to explain the different performances of city regions by analysing the properties of urban and regional socio-economic systems. A more integrated and multilevel perspective would be needed, which is, however, often neglected, as the following brief review of various attempts to explain regional development shows. The question of why some cities’ and regions’ economic performance is better than others is an enduring one. It has been addressed by many scholars in recent decades, with interpretations linked, inter alia, to industrial districts (Marshall, 1920; Pyke, Becattini, & Sengenberger, 1990), innovative milieus (Aydalot, 1986), clusters (Porter, 1998), the creative class (Florida, 2002), performance within the information age (Castells, 1996), or cities’ and regions’ networking function within global flows (Beaverstock, Smith, & Taylor, 1999) allowing them to link up with the global economy. However, none of these attempts seems to recognise the role of the state when it comes to moderating and regulating the globalised economy. The debate around urban and regional economic resilience bears similarities to these attempts to sufficiently explain economic performance (Hudson, 2010) but it similarly does exclude a conceptualisation of the role of the state and of present-day capitalism. In the light of this initial criticism, it has to be discussed whether resilience can be seen as a property which can be ‘learned’ through particular forms of governance and institutional learning and whether a resilience perspective could include a critical take on the political economy of globalisation. In terms of the management of uneven development and decline, Painter and Goodwin point out that local governance can only be effective if it is part of a multi-scale system of regulation. As the causes for uneven development often, to a large extent, lie outside the local sphere of influence, local governance at best ‘can influence only the local half of the (unequal) relationship between global flows and local conditions’ (Painter & Goodwin, 2000: p. 43). Local governance must be seen as limited in its stabilising capacity in a multi-scale mode of regulation. Nevertheless, in particular in Southern Europe, cities and regions have to find answers to the challenges of multi-scale and overlapping forms of socioeconomic crises and the question of how cities and regions can recover after external shocks has become even more relevant.
