Nested dependent city-regions: FDI, uneven development, and Slovakia’s Bratislava, Nitra, Trencin, Trnava, and Zilina city-regions

ABSTRACT

Despite their growing dependence upon foreign direct investment, the growth trajectories of the postsocialist city-regions of Central Europe have remained tightly embedded in their national development contexts. Guided by nested city theory and drawing upon empirical data and the author’s field research, this article argues that Slovakia’s postsocialist state development approach has served to reinforce historical uneven development among the Bratislava, Nitra, Trencin, Trnava, and Zilina city-regions (hereafter the Bratislava–Zilina auto corridor) and these areas’ dependency upon foreign capital. It also contends that this embedded policy framework has helped transform these 5 city-regions into nested dependent city-regions. That is, the current level of economic unevenness among them and their overreliance upon foreign transnational corporations has been shaped by central government policy initiatives, which themselves have been tightly embedded within Slovakia’s past and contemporary national and supranational–regional development contexts.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges Eric Clark, Igor Vojnovic, Casey Wagner, Jennifer Jacobs, Randall Spence, and the anonymous reviewers for the comments, edits, and suggestions on the article.

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Notes on contributors

A. J. Jacobs

A. J. Jacobs is an associate professor in East Carolina University’s Department of Sociology. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and at Hosei University’s Business School in Tokyo. He has authored more than 30 articles and chapters on urban and regional development in North America, Europe, and Japan. He is the editor of the Lexington Books series International Comparative Development and has published three books: The World’s Cities: Contrasting Regional, National, and Global Perspectives (Routledge); The “New Domestic” Automakers in the U.S. and Canada: History, Impacts, and Prospects (Lexington Books); and Automotive FDI in Emerging Europe: Shifting Locales in the World Motor Vehicle Industry (Palgrave).