Rethinking Local Politics: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Entrepreneurial Cities

Abstract

The territorial dimensions of the state are undergoing substantial changes. Political entities, such as cities and regions, are gaining in importance. Described as entrepreneurial city politics, policy-makers of contemporary cities are using new, economically oriented strategies to strengthen their city's position in interurban competition. Despite this state of affairs, social science still tends to treat local politics as equal to sub-national politics. This has especially been the case in Scandinavia, where local governments have traditionally functioned as an extension of the central welfare state. Since processes associated with entrepreneurial city politics are manifested in Scandinavia as well, this article argues that there is a need to rethink what local politics ultimately is about. The article proposes the ideas recently formed at the ‘Lancaster School of Cultural Political Economy’ as an approach with which to reconceptualise local politics. In the final section, some remarks on a future research agenda, centred on the cultural political economy of contemporary city politics, are presented.

This article was originally a paper, presented at the conference ‘Performing Regions, Regional Performance’ at Lancaster University in September 2007. The author is grateful for the helpful comments from the workshop on ‘Cultural Political Economy’ held by Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum. Many thanks also to the author's supervisor Håkan Magnusson and to Andrew Tonn who carefully read the final version as well as earlier drafts. Finally, the article benefitted from the comments of two anonymous referees.

Notes

For an overview of case studies within an American and European context, see Short and Kim, 1999, p. 119; for Asian cities, see Jessop and Sum, 2000; for different European cities including Lisbon, Dublin, Vienna and Bilbao, see Moulaert et al., 2003.

Malmö is the third-largest city in Sweden and has a population of approximately 290 000 inhabitants. The municipality's official name is ‘the city of Malmö’. Previous studies of the city by social scientists have emphasised different themes from those explored here. For example, Jansson (2006) studies the international housing exhibition that took place in 2001 focusing on representations of city space. Book and Eskilsson's dissertation (2001) has a geographical planning perspective. Billing and Stigendals (1994) area of interest is the Social Democratic Party and the Swedish model in a historical setting. In addition, the notion of the post-industrial city has recently been applied to Malmö, although with a focus on issues of migration, identities and representation (Sernhede and Johansson, 2006).

The empirical illustrations of this paper are taken from my on-going case study of entrepreneurial city politics in Malmö. The field study was conducted during the past few years and includes approximately 50 interviews with leading actors within and around the city. The informants were chosen using the ‘snow-ball method’ and loosely structured. When referring to ‘the city of Malmö’, I have these leading politicians and civil servants in mind.

CPE is primarily based on previous work by Jessop on the strategic-relational approach (SRA) and regulation theory, alongside neo-Gramscian perspectives on international political economy (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). Another main source of inspiration is critical discourse analysis (CDA), in the versions of Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak (see for example, Fairclough, 2005). For a discussion on the difference between CPE and CDA, see Jessop, 2007, p. 257. For some critical remarks on CPE, see Martins Jones' recently published article in Political Geography (2008). Nevertheless, I would argue that these remarks have already been dealt with through Sum's theorisation on different ‘moments’ in the production of hegemony (Sum, 2004, 2006).

For a discussion on ontological and epistemological issues, where CPE is placed within the tradition of critical realism, see Fairclough et al., 2004; and Ribera-Fumaz, 2005, pp. 145–146. For a discussion that deals thoroughly with the problems with ‘radical constructivism’ and classical political economy, see Jessop, 2007, ch. 10.

The discursive and material selection of a particular discourse goes through the different stages of ‘variation, selection and retention’ (Jessop, 2004; Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). Sum specifies these stages by developing upon different (Foucauldian) ‘technologies of power’ and ‘moments’ in the production of hegemony (Sum, 2004, 2006).These moments have been applied to urban issues by Moulaert et al., 2007.

On the knowledge-based economy as an economic imaginary, see Jessop 2008; on the discursive dimensions of globalisation, i.e. globalism, see for example, Cameron and Palan, 2004.

Ngai-Ling Sum, drawing on Foucault in this regard, develops different technologies of power—i.e. techniques through which hegemonic discourses gets institutionalised in political practice (Sum, 2004, 2006, 2007).