ABSTRACT
In the mid-twentieth century, planners assumed they could rely on the authoritative power of formal government structures of accountability and legitimacy. Their contribution was to translate broad policy objectives and value orientations into spatial strategies and design schemes for the development of cities and neighborhoods. They typically operated with mental models of integrated socio-spatial relations operating across discrete territories, typically the city region. Today, these concepts seem naive and rigid in the face of the complexity of governance structures and practices that are to be found in areas we call urban regions, and the multiplexity of the time-space relations that stretch across and intersect to create the realities of such areas. These complexities demand new ways of imagining governance and urban region dynamics. The “network” idea is a powerful force in shaping these imaginations, as stakeholder groups, planners, policy analysts, and other social scientists struggle to re-think urban regions and their governance. Governance is increasingly understood in terms of complex sets of policy communities (Rhodes 1997) or “epistemic communities” (Haas 1992), cross-cutting with attempts to build partnership and coalitions, arenas, and networks to create new policy discourses and agendas (Le Galès 2002, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003a, Hajer 2003). In such contexts, as Booher and Innes (2002) argue, authoritative power gives way to “network power.” Urban regions are similarly understood, following recent geographical work and the advocacy of Castells (1996), in terms of dynamic relational webs, replacing nested hierarchies of administrative-functional spaces with an appreciation of the diversity of networks, each with distinctive
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Healey 1999; Healey 1997a).
