Intensifying fragmentation: states, places, and dissonant struggles over the political geographies of power

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an engagement with The Fragmented State, published in 1983 and representing Ronan Paddison’s most significant book-length contribution. The paper demonstrates how certain claims prosecuted by Paddison – especially relating to central local state relations and a splintering of metropolitan governance – continue to hold a relevance for understanding ‘real world’ transitions in the institutional and territorial forms assumed by Western states since 1983. The Fragmented State is thereby revealed to be not merely an impressive outcrop of past intellectual labour on space and polity, but remains a fresh provocation for all who take seriously the present challenges of state (re)formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ronan Paddison the fragmented state
• centre-local relations
• metropolitan administrations

Acknowledgements

The author owes a huge debt of gratitude to Mark Boyle and Chris Philo for their patience and also for some exceedingly insightful comments and insights at various junctures that have helped considerably in developing the narrative. And also to Ronan Paddison; for writing The Fragmented State and for much else. When attending the commemoration event in November 2019, and hearing from so many who knew him, it became palpable how Ronan was leaving such a wonderful legacy in the Department of Geography at Glasgow University, in the City of Glasgow itself, and also with the flourishing of critical academic debate in Space and Polity and Urban Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Gordon MacLeod researches and teaches urban and regional studies in the Department of Geography at Durham University.

Notes

1 In actual fact, eleven months had elapsed since Ronan and colleagues had provided their insightful comments.

2 Renamed Political Geography in 1992.

3 In making this argument, Ronan is also citing approvingly some of the pioneering work on the capitalist state that had only recently been developed by geographers like Gordon Clark and Michael Dear (also Clark & Dear, 1984).

4 Ronan did also recognise there to be other state forms - beyond the 'modern industrial state' - where 'redistributive justice' would remain on the periphery of state activity, while at the same time he recognised that many mature industrial states have often only ever paid 'lip service' to such commitments.

5 Ronan never lost sight of the importance of the politics of service provision: indeed arguably it was precisely this focus on the relationship between endeavours by the Glasgow local state to ‘manage’ expectations of distributive justice while also de-amplifying protest about this very management alongside the erosion of the public spaces of Glasgow that has enabled his paper on the ‘post-political city’ to remain one of the standout papers thus far in the debate (Paddison, 2009; Karaliotas, 2020).

6 The initial prompting of this was the Changing Urban and Regional System initiative funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council which ran from 1984 to 1988. While the research provided some significant findings (e.g. Cooke, 1989), these became enveloped by an often acrimonious set of discussions over methodology and theory (see Duncan, 1989), while also offering some foresight into how postmodernism became entangled with debates in urban studies (Harvey, 1987; Cooke, 1987). Re-reading the early stages of TFS prompts me to contemplate how so well-placed Ronan was to offer something constructive to this debate.

7 Some of Germany’s sixteen regional-level governments assert the title Länder (meaning literally land countries). Amid much talk in the 1990s of a Europe of the Regions, a notable debate surfaced about the extent to which these Federal arrangements served well in shaping powerful regional-state level economies (Harvie, 1994).

8 While at various stages in TFS, Ronan signals the growing urbanization of the population, in the period since, this has escalated considerably.

9 In these pages, Ronan offers an adroit synthesis of key works by Williams and Adrian (1963), Stanyer (1976), Cockburn (1977), Castells (1977), and Saunders (1979).

10 In contrast to the Block grant, these are tied to particular spending programmes and coming with conditions determined by central government (Paddison, 1983, p. 168).

11 Ronan qualifies this a little by signaling that rates of urbanization in the ‘developing’ countries were happening at a faster rate than in the industrial ‘developed’ ones, where ‘counter-urbanization’ has also been a key trend. But the overall argument is accurate and much of what proceeds in the chapter appreciates the complexity of such ‘counter-urban’ arguments, not least in that many such spaces have since the 1980s been overwhelmed by various forms of urbanization, suburbanization, and post-suburbanization (Keil, 2018).

12 A classic case is offered in the ‘redlining’ of certain neighbourhoods in US cities during much of the period of ‘urban renewal’, a process that saw banks and lending institutions reluctant to offer mortgage loans often on the grounds of race (Smith, 1996).

13 See Iveson (2014) for a recent retrospective on this.

14 One might surmise that Ronan’s interest in this insurgent movement surfaced during a sabbatical in 1976–77 at the University of New England, Armidale, in New South Wales, where he became involved in establishing a new Planning Course (Philo, 2020).

15 The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines a SMSA as one or more adjecent counties or county equivalents that have at least one urban core of 50,000 population. The figure of 392 also includes 8 for Puerto Rico: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bulletin-20-01.pdf

16 https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/governments/cb12-161.html

17 Given Ronan’s excursion into some key instances of post-politicising in Glasgow (Paddison, 2009; Karaliotas, 2020), it is easy to envisage him being avidly interested in examining how special districts raise the spectre of a de-politicisation of metropolitan areas.

18 This is measured relatively taking into consideration population and land area (Hendrick & Shi, 2015).

19 At certain stages in chapters 5 and 6 of TFS, there are signs that Ronan might have been searching to develop a critical political geography of urban justice, especially with regard to ensuring citizens a fair distribution of services and welfare. To be sure by the time of its publication, Marxian analysis had already been having a profound influence, and David Harvey’s (1973) Social Justice and the City appears, as does the more reformist ‘welfare geography’ of David Smith (1977). But there is also a sense that Ronan might have been aiming to articulate something akin to that of the spatiality of justice which Ed Soja (Soja, 2010) arrived at sometime later in his ever tenacious endeavours to uncover the geography of Los Angeles, itself often depicted to be the most iconic ‘fragmented metropolis’ of recent decades. Mark Boyle has offered some helpful prompts on these reflections.

20 There are resonances here with Beauregard’s (2006) more recent thesis detailing how suburban jurisdictions impose a form of ‘parasitic urbanization’ in relation to central cities.

21 From a population that was 85% white in 1980, Ferguson had become 69% Black by 2010 (Goldstein, 2014). And more generally, as Rothstein (2014) identifies, ‘Whereas 20th century segregation took the form of Black central cities surrounded by white suburbs, 21st century segregation is in transition—to whiter central cities with adjoining Black suburbs.’

22 It is not anticipated that a vaccine which could be applied on a mass basis across the world will be available much before the latter stages of 2020, this being on the optimistic side.

23 The highest in aggregate but the seventh highest per 100,000 population, although date for this is fast-moving and contested.

24 Ronan offered some discussion about the uncritical decentralization of authority to local power bases and the limits to democracy of a localism (Paddison, 1983, pp. 52–53), to some extent presaging the idea of what Purcell (2006) terms ‘localist trap’: the uncritical assumption that because it is ‘closest to the people’, the local represents the most significant governmental level for enhancing democracy.