Re-reading the new regionalism: A sympathetic critique

Abstract

This paper provides a sympathetic critique of the new regionalism—currently one of the leading debates taking place in English-speaking human geography. By unpacking the new regionalism from its dual origins in economic geography and political science, the paper engages with some of its inherent lines of weakness by: developing a critique arguing that it is inappropriate on the part of the new regionalism to neglect the role of the state in the resurgence of regions in the reconstituted capitalist space economy; exploring the accusation that the new regionalism has become enmeshed in multifaceted scalar politics and associated tangled policy hierarchies; and, arguing that, through policy-transfer programmes, path- dependency, social capital and soft institutionalism, the new regionalism has been constructed on inadequate foundations. Finally, in developing this sympathetic theoretical and methodological critique towards the new regionalism, this paper speculates on how new regionalists should actually go about ‘doing’ regional regulation.

I would like to acknowledge Martin Jones, Mark Goodwin and Rhys Jones for their careful reading of early versions of this paper, and to Ronan Paddison and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. More formally I would like to acknowledge the funding support of the ESRC (PTA-030-2002-01629). The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. For Keating (1988) the redefinition of the social and economic understanding of territory in western Europe is being contextualised not only by the state, but also by the changing international market and an emerging continental regime.

2. I say regional economic geographers here deliberately because I would give partial exemption to these accusations because Michael Keating and his colleagues in the political-science strand of the new regionalism have been more explicit in their attempts to do this.

3. The idea of a singular reading of the regional scale is taken from the work of Neil Brenner (2001) who used the same concept to critique an earlier paper by Sallie Marston (2000) which he argued treated the household in isolation from other scales.

4. For detailed accounts of clusters and cluster policy see, Journal of Economic Geography (2003) and Urban Studies (2004).

5. MacLeod (2001b, p. 810) argues at this point that Lovering's argument loses some of its appeal because nowhere in his article does he identify which new regionalist writers belong to which respective camp.

6. See Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers (1999–2000).

7. Peck (2003, p. 736) utilises this structure to argue that, while there may be different forms of world city (concept), there can be no variants of New York City (real place).

8. Despite this reworking of an earlier concept, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Amin and Thrift, 2002) is noteworthy for its lack of engagement with the authors' own work on institutionalisation, so much so that in the book's entirety there is not a single reference to their pioneering work on institutionalisation (Amin and Thrift, 1994).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Harrison

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