ABSTRACT
It has now been over three decades since critical theorists observed the importance of seeing urban regions as “strategic institutional arenas in which far reaching transformation of state spatiality is unfolding” (Brenner 2004: 447). Thus, rather than addressing metropolitan scalar dynamics as being a byproduct of naturally occurring urban growth, scale is since understood to be a space for strategic actions designed to harness “material structures and processes” (Jonas 2006: 405) to shape, direct and control. Theorists have been highlighting the importance of seeing urban regions as intentional spaces of action. Accompanying this framework is the added recognition of the region as being a dynamic and changing entity reflective of the struggles to capture and control flows of capital and labor. As Cox (1998) suggested,
People, firms, state agencies, etc., organize in order to secure the conditions for the continued existence of their spaces of dependence but in so doing they have to engage with other centers of social power. […] In doing so they construct a different form of space which I call here a space of engagement: the space in which the politics of securing a space of dependence unfolds.
(Cox 1998: 2: emphasis added)