Global ‘system’ and local ‘personality’ in urban and regional politics

Abstract

This paper seeks to re‐establish a structural context for the explanation of urban and regional politics by assembling what we refer to as a ‘conceptual hierarchy’. Specifically, we question the success of attempts to develop urban regime theory in the context of changing global economic and political circumstances while suggesting that these efforts, though revealing, will ultimately fail to provide a way forward for theoretical exploration. We return to David Harvey's concept of structured coherence and argue that this provides a fruitful point of linkage across the axis of explanation. The example of the North East region of England is used to illustrate the usefulness of the concept before we conclude the paper by arguing for a ‘nested’ analysis of urban politics that is sensitive to more than just local ‘personalities’.