The Rise of the “City-region” Concept and its Development Policy Implications

Abstract

As well as enjoying a rich scientific history, the concept of the “city-region” has also attracted particular attention in recent years. Combinations of an urban core or cores, linked to semi-urban and rural hinterland by functional ties, are increasingly regarded as the “adequate” scale for the implementation of development policies. The popularization and widespread use of the city-region concept for policy-making has important implications for the design and implementation of development strategies. It first signals a change from sectoral to territorial approaches to development and requires the adjustment of development strategies to widely varying contexts, leading to much greater policy diversity and innovation. It also involves a more complex governance structure, characterized by the horizontal and vertical coordination of numerous institutional public and private actors, and enables experimentation with bottom-up and participatory policy-making. This paper evaluates these changes and critically addresses their normative implications, especially in light of the facts that there is still little agreement on how the city-region is defined, that the term has become appropriated by urban elites, and that the problems faced by city-regions may not be that different from those operating at other geographical scales.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Alan Harding, Susan Loughhead, Kevin Morgan, Rachel Phillipson, Richard Sandall, Tony Venables, to the editor of the journal, Phil Cooke, and to three anonymous referees for constructive comments to earlier versions of this paper. The author also benefited from comments by participants at seminars in London and Madrid. A Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award provided financial support during this reaserch. The author alone remain responsible for the views expressed in the paper.

Notes

This expansion of city-regions and metropolitan areas in space is referred by Lang (2003) as the “edgeless city”, that is, swathes of territory along major transport networks with office centres and free-standing buildings that sprawl at varying densities linking metropolitan areas.

The very factors that bind together a city-region may also work in the opposite direction contributing to its demise. Common interests of actors in any given territory can lead to cooperation, but also promote conflict; the core of the city-region may be an economic locomotive but, in other cases, a hindrance for economic development; and the reasoning behind the dimension of the city-region as the ideal economic unit for policy intervention may also be applied to other territorial scales.

Many World Bank policies include a strong decentralization component (Litvack et al., 1998)