Scales, Regimes, and the Urban Governance of Glasgow

ABSTRACT:

Over the last two decades, urban regime theory has become one of the most dominant paradigms of thought in urban studies. In particular, regime theory offers a complex account of urban governance, or how local governments, the business communities, and community organizations gain the capacity to shape the policies that affect cities, that is, govern. Although regime theory is a dominant theory in urban studies, it does, nevertheless, have its share of detractors, and one criticism has been its failure to take into account geographical scale. While there is an acknowledgment in urban regime theory of wider economic processes, such as the broad transformations in international and national trade, investment, finance, etc., or the role played by federal or state governments, the bias has remained mostly local, particularly in regards to urban governance. In urban regime theory literature the policies and actions of international and national institutions either nicely conjoin with local interests or are nearly totally absent. Due to this oversight, urban regime theory tends to underemphasize how the capacity to govern a city effectively is sometimes the result of the interaction of actions of people at multiple scales. This article attempts to address this oversight in an analysis of Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1980s. By focusing on the role of the European City of Culture in the revitalization of the city, this article demonstrates how the capacity for a ruling coalition to transform the city and to govern effectively was the consequence of the policy and administrative actions undertaken at other geographical scales.

Notes

1 Glasgow Action should not be confused with the official local branch of the Scottish Development Agency, the Glasgow Development Agency, set up around 1988. In 1987, the centralized bureaucracy of the Scottish Development Agency, which consisted of executive officers assigned to particular tasks, was changed. Under this new system, local area agencies were created to handle the development of specific areas. For about two years, from 1988 to 1990, the Glasgow Development Agency ran alongside Glasgow Action. Norman MacFarlane was the director of both the Glasgow Development Agency and Glasgow Action. The difference was that the Agency had an institutional framework, whereas Glasgow Action was merely a sort of clearing house. The two were finally merged in 1990 in the creation of Scottish Enterprise (Gulliver, 2002).

2 It is important to note that the agency was established on the heels of a revival of the Scottish Nationalist Party. Therefore, not only was there a strong Labour Party statist intention behind the SDA, but many believed at the time that politically the agency was established as a way to woo voters away from the SNP and back into Labour’s camp.