ABSTRACT
Introduction Recent years have witnessed growing policy and academic interest in the new economic geography of regions (Storper, 1997; MacLeod, 2001) and along with this a particular focus on city-regions as agents of wealth creation, redistribution and territorial policy adjustment (Herschell and Newman, 2002; Ohmae, 1995; Scott, 2001). A literature on this topic has emerged, which talks of the geographic reconfiguration of the state in the wake of economic restructuring in a post-Fordist age (Brenner, 1998; Jessop, 2002; Smith, 1995). The gist of the argument here is that, in response to the new imperatives of economic globalisation, policy neo-liberalisation and inter-spatial competitiveness, states are required to reconfigure internal territorial policy and planning frameworks (Peck and Tickell, 2002). One outcome is the rescaling (territorial restructuring) of governance structures and institutional capacities down from the national to the urban and regional scales (Jessop, 2002), as well as the construction of stronger linkages between cities and regional structures, especially those cities that want to pursue competitiveness policies. Competitive city-regionalism – the strengthening of institutional and fiscal relations between core cities and their surrounding regional hinterlands so as to produce competitive economic advantages – represents potentially a new framework for territorial management (Jonas and Ward, 2002; Keating, 1997). For example, researchers suggest that the (re)emergence of American-style ‘growth coalitions’ (see Molotch, 1976) across many European cities and regions may well be symptomatic of territorial policy adjustment and convergence in a neo-liberal age (Brenner, 2004; Harding, 1997; Jessop, Peck and Tickell, 1999; Leitner and Sheppard, 2002).
