Re-Structuring Competitive Metropolitan Regions in North-West Europe: on Territory and Governance
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European Journal of Spatial Development-http://www.nordregio.se/EJSD/-ISSN 1650-9544-Refereed Articles Oct 2003-no 6 Re-structuring Competitive Metropolitan Regions in North-west Europe: On Territory and Governance Wolfgang Knapp and Peter Schmitt Contact details of the authors: Wolfgang Knapp, Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, Construction and Building of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia (ILS), Deutsche Str. 5, DE-44339 Dortmund, e-mail: [email protected] Peter Schmitt, Department of Geography, University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstr. 1, DE- 47057 Duisburg, e-mail: [email protected] and Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, Construction and Building of the Federal State of North Rhine- Westphalia (ILS), Deutsche Str. 5, DE-44339 Dortmund, e-mail: [email protected] 1 European Journal of Spatial Development-http://www.nordregio.se/EJSD/-ISSN 1650-9544-Refereed Articles Oct 2003-no 6 Abstract: This paper intends to build a bridge between academic debates on the con- temporary rescaling of political economy, with regard to urban governance, and the strategic approaches produced by policy makers and planners with a view to establish- ing region-wide governance-structures for metropolitan regions. To do so, the authors use empirical evidence from several north-western metropolitan regions, namely Lon- don, Paris, Randstad and RheinRuhr, which were under study in the framework of two research projects, namely, EURBANET and GEMACA. The paper commences by discussing whether ‘places’ can actually compete, and this will be followed by a short historical survey of the nation state’s interest in developing global cities and metro- politan regions as competitive territories. After taking into account their specific ‘spatial configurations’ we will then focus on the territorial shapes of such regions. The authors present a rather simple method to demarcate city-regions as comparable ‘Functional Urban Regions’. It will then be ar- gued that to optimise their development and to exploit their potentialities, political focus should be directed towards upgrading the economic, institutional and social base, which is a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success. The article chiefly deals with the issue of establishing appropriate city-regional ‘organizing capacities,’ and pro- vides a critical overview of the situation in four exemplary regions. In the concluding section this perspective will be extended by discussing in what sense these ‘Func- tional Urban Regions’ are actually ‘regions’? Keywords: Functional Urban Regions, Internationalisation, Urban Competitiveness, Organizing Capacity, Urban/Regional Governance. Acknowledgements This article is based on a paper first presented at the 42nd Congress of the European Regional Science Association, August 27th – 31st, 2002 in Dortmund (Germany). In assisting our revisions, comments from two anonymous referees were extremely help- ful. The usual disclaimers apply. 2 European Journal of Spatial Development-http://www.nordregio.se/EJSD/-ISSN 1650-9544-Refereed Articles Oct 2003-no 6 Introduction In this article we intend to build a bridge between the academic debates concerning the contemporary re-scaling of political economy and urban governance with those on the strategic approaches of metropolitan regions produced by policy makers and plan- ners to establish region-wide governance-structures. With the help of empirical evi- dence, which resulted from two research projects, namely, EURBANET and GE- MACA1, focus will concentrate on four metropolitan regions in North West Europe, namely London, Paris, Randstad and RheinRuhr. Our main point will be the ongoing restructuring of competitive metropolitan regions and among them especially on ques- tions of territory and governance. It is not intended, however, to deal with newly emergent forms of metropolitan economic development strategies in general besides the overarching goal of such initiatives to enhance regional economic competitive- ness. To begin, the question will be raised as to whether places are actually able to compete, because both the ways in which cities as locations are involved in processes of eco- nomic competition, and the changing significance of urban assets for competitiveness, seem to have become rather controversial issues. This will be followed by a short his- torical survey of the nation state’s interest in developing global cities and metropoli- tan regions as competitive territories. In our view, metropolitan regionalism refers to all strategies designed to establish institutions, policies or governance mechanisms at a geographical scale, which approximates to that of existing socio-economic interde- pendencies within an urban agglomeration. This puts the territorial shape of such ‘metropolitan regions’ on the agenda by taking into account their specific ‘spatial con- figurations’. Within the aforementioned GEMACA-project, therefore, a rather simple, but no less efficient method to define and demarcate city-regions as comparable ‘Functional Urban Regions’ has been developed. By means of this approach, it is pos- sible to bridge various definitions throughout Europe as to what actually constitutes a city or a city-region as an economic area. Following an institutional perspective on city-regional development, we argue that for the optimal development and exploitation of their potentialities, and for focus to be directed to the wealth of regions (not to individual firms), with the upgrading of their economic, institutional and social base considered as a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success. The current article does not however deal with all of these issues, the focus here being substantially dedicated to the question of building city-regional ‘organizing capacities’ in the four aforementioned case study-regions. Referring to Paasi’s (1986, 1991) approach with regard to the ‘institutionalisation’ of regions, we will come back to a broader perspective in a concluding section that discusses the question of in what sense these ‘Functional Urban Regions’ are actually ‘regions’? The contemporary re-scaling of political economy Recent debates concerning socio-economic and territorial development stress that the largely national mode of economic regulation, which helped to sustain the post-war Fordist growth paradigm, is being re-configured (cf. Swyngedouw 1997; Jessop 1997a, 1997b; Brenner 1997, 1998). In the globalising post-national area, new geog- raphies of governance are emerging, where state capacities are being re-organised both territorially and functionally. In the midst of this re-composition of political 3 European Journal of Spatial Development-http://www.nordregio.se/EJSD/-ISSN 1650-9544-Refereed Articles Oct 2003-no 6 space, one can detect a growing appeal to regions in general and metropolitan areas in particular as key sites for the territorial embedding of innovation and the configuring of socio-economic prosperity (cf. Storper 1995, 1996; Keating 1997; Morgan 1997). Contemporary forms of metropolitan or region-wide governance are grounded upon strategies to stitch together a new ‘structured coherence’ (cf. Harvey 1989) for urban development within city-regions, whose economic, political and social geographies have been reconfigured in recent decades. The current debates on metropolitan coop- eration and coordination represent a new politics of scale in which local, state-level and federal institutions, as well as public and private actors, are struggling to adjust to diverse restructuring processes that are systematically unsettling inherited patterns of territorial and scalar organisation2 within such city-regions. In the context of contem- porary debates on urban governance, the politics of scale refers to the decentring of national urban hierarchies and national intergovernmental systems and to the con- comitant emergence of new sub-national political strategies to position cities and met- ropolitan regions within supranational circuits of capital, money, commodities and labour (Jessop, 1997c, 1998a, Brenner 1999, 2000). This rescaling of urban governance is intertwined with at least two other contempo- rary rescaling processes, namely the ‘glocalisation’ (Swyngedouw 1997) of economic activities since the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s (Storper 1996, Cox 1997) and the re- territorialisation of state institutions at diverse spatial levels as they attempt to adjust to the new socio-economic conditions and constraints of the post-Keynesian epoch (Jessop 2000, Brenner 1998, Gough and Eisenschitz 1996). The resurgence of debates on metropolitan governance, therefore, must be understood in relation to these ongo- ing processes of economic globalization/localization and political re-territorialisation through which the scalar frameworks of social life are reconfigured. Even in an era in which technological transactions at a global scale have been en- hanced and a number of studies consider the globalising economy as being ‘place- less’, the sources of industrial competitiveness are still tightly embedded within terri- torially localised production complexes (global-city-regions, industrial districts, ex- port-processing zones etc.), which provide firms with place-specific clusters of non- substitutable locational assets, including specific labour power, technology, infrastruc- ture and ‘un-traded interdependencies’ (cf. Storper 1996, Scott 1998, Cox 1997). The up-scaling of capitalist control capacities and commodity chains towards the