scholarly journals Engaging ‘Future Generations’ in Meaning Making through Visual Methods: An Alternative Approach to Defining City-Regions

2021 ◽  
pp. 391-416
Author(s):  
Lorena Axinte
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
City Region ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

AbstractCity-regional planning has gained significant attention and funding in the UK, as national and local authorities decided that an intermediary level—the city-region—would be the appropriate one to drive economic development. Nonetheless, city-regions have long been criticized for their undemocratic and closed structures, enlarging the engagement barriers especially for young people. Encouraged by Wales’ innovative legislation, The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, this research tried to fill the gap in the city-regional youth engagement literature. Specifically, it asked: How could a research project stimulate a conversation with the future generations about the areas where they live, and how could it encourage meaningful reflections on previously unfamiliar concepts, such as city-regions? Two creative participatory research methods, web-mapping and Photovoice, helped explore young people’s lived experience within a newly created administrative layer—Cardiff Capital Region. Results show that despite failing to emancipate the participants’ voices and needs, the two methods employed helped to attract participants, facilitated the understanding of the city-region concept and enabled young people to reflect on their surrounding environment.

The new political economy of city-regionalism: renewed steps in Glasgow

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
David Waite
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Local Control ◽  
City Region ◽  
Targeted Interventions ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City

The resurgence of city-regionalism has been a dominant theme in sub-national policymaking over the last decade. Underpinned by narratives of growth engines waiting to be unlocked through greater local control coupled with targeted interventions, city-regions are now a privileged spatial arena in the UK for seeking economic development agreements with higher orders of government. This chapter brings into focus Glasgow’s experience of city-regionalism and notably the re-emphasis brought about by the City Deal. In doing this, multiple political tensions hinging on a series of local, national and UK-wide relationships are sketched out. The chapter - in referencing the wider city-region literature and taking cognisance of the local post-industrial trajectory - poses a series of considerations concerning how and in what form city-regionalism may evolve in Glasgow.

scholarly journals State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Hodson ◽  
Andrew McMeekin ◽  
Julie Froud ◽  
Michael Moran
Keyword(s):  
Urban Governance ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
City Region ◽  
National Space ◽  
Future Design ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environment and infrastructure. We explore this issue in the context of state redesign of sub-national space in England and focus on Greater Manchester, as the de facto exemplar of ‘devolution’ to English city-regions. We argue that though re-scaling in Greater Manchester is a long-term historical process this has been punctuated by the UK state’s process of ‘devolution’ since 2014, this has involved a re-design and formalisation of Greater Manchester’s governing arrangements. It has also involved invoking a long dormant role for city-regional planning in articulating the future design of the material city-region over the next two decades as an attempt to formalise and continue a pre-existing, spatially selective growth trajectory by new means. Yet, the disruption of new hard governing arrangements also provides challenges to that trajectory. This produces tensions between, on the one hand, the pursuit of a continuity politics of growth through agglomeration, material transformation of the city-region and narrow forms of urban governance and, on the other hand, a more disruptive politics of the future of the city-region, its material transformation and how it is governed. These tensions are producing new political possibilities and spaces in the transformation of Greater Manchester. The implications of this are discussed.

scholarly journals Priority sectors in city regions? Some issues from a study of the Cardiff Capital Region

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 576-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Crawley ◽  
Max Munday
Keyword(s):  
City Region ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Capital Region ◽  
Functional Regions ◽  
Economic Development Policy ◽  
Special Support ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

The City Region is becoming the spatial focus for economic development policy across many parts of the European continent. But these functional regions have taken on a new impetus in the UK with the introduction of ‘city deals’ aimed at improving network and coordination of actors in local authorities. One of the goals of city regions is to improve industrial policy particularly lacking since the abolition of many of the Regional Development Agencies across the UK. However, city regions in developing policy appear to be following in an unquestioning manner the industrial priorities of earlier institutions, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the identification of priority industry development sectors. Too often the selection of industries and clusters for special support has been undertaken in an unquestioning manner. In this paper we focus on the case of the Cardiff Capital Region. We review approaches to identify priority sectors in this case and the problems associated with this policy approach.

scholarly journals Connected growth: Developing a framework to drive inclusive growth across a city-region

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 565-575 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beel ◽  
Martin Jones ◽  
Ian Rees Jones ◽  
Warren Escadale
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Future Research ◽  
City Region ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Health And Social Care ◽  
Region Scale ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Manchester City ◽  
The City

This ‘in perspective’ piece addresses the (re-)positioning of civil society within new structures of city-region governance within Greater Manchester. This follows on from the processes of devolution, which have given the Greater Manchester City-Region a number of new powers. UK devolution, to date, has been largely focused upon engendering agglomerated economic growth at the city-region scale. Within Greater Manchester City-Region, devolution for economic development has sat alongside the devolution of health and social care (unlike any other city-region in the UK) as well. Based on stakeholder mapping and semi-structured interviews with key actors operating across the Greater Manchester City-Region, the paper illustrates how this has created a number of significant tensions and opportunities for civil society actors, as they have sought to contest a shifting governance framework. The paper, therefore, calls for future research to carefully consider how civil society groups are grappling with devolution; both contesting and responding to devolution. This is timely given the shifting policy and political discourse towards the need to deliver more socially inclusive city-regions.

scholarly journals Beyond the city region? Uneven governance and the evolution of regional economic development in Scotland

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
David Clelland
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
City Region ◽  
Rural South ◽  
Regional Economic ◽  
Regional Equity ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Fiscal Austerity ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

The sub-national governance of economic development in the UK has, since 2010, been reconfigured towards city-regions and ‘place-based’ approaches at least notionally embedded in specific local needs and resources. In the context of asymmetric decentralisation and fiscal austerity, this raises questions about places outside or peripheral to this framework, and the risk of further divergence in relative capacities to ‘do’ economic development. While changes in England are subject to extensive critique, institutional arrangements in Scotland have received less attention, having avoided comparable dramatic restructuring. The governance of economic development has however undergone significant evolution, with elements of both centralisation and regionalisation apparent. This paper maps emerging sub-national geographies in Scotland through the lens of state rescaling and multi-scalar governance. Analysing processes of change, it argues that the UK Government’s extension of ‘City Deals’ to Scotland made more explicit tensions within an existing city-regional approach and prompted greater attention to implications for peripheral and non-city regions. The introduction of Deals for non-city regions, a system of regional economic partnerships, and a new enterprise agency for the rural South, can all be seen as attempts to reconcile this focus on city-regions as drivers of growth with a desire for ‘regional equity’, and as the latest developments in an ongoing search for the appropriate scales for policy.

scholarly journals “Disorganised Devolution”: Reshaping Metropolitan Governance in England in a Period of Austerity

2017 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Shaw ◽  
Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Keyword(s):  
State Level ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
Metropolitan Governance ◽  
City Region ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Spatial Narrative ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

Abstract After 2010, the UK Government’s espousal of a Localist agenda reflected a rejection of the regional level as the most appropriate scale for sub-national governance. The development of a more explicitly city regional level of governance is illustrated in the creation of City Deals which have given some of England’s largest cities increased autonomy to allocate the dividend of local economic growth. More recently, Combined Authorities have been formed, within which larger city-regions such as Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool and the North-East of England have been tasked to undertake transport, economic development and other functions. In assessing this contemporary reshaping of metropolitan governance this article draws upon political economy, spatial and institutional approaches that highlight how austerity, competing spatial imaginaries and the historical evolution of central-local relationships within the UK state have combined to produce a particularly ‘disorganised’ approach to contemporary devolution in England. It contends that while the city region remains the dominant spatial narrative, the ongoing process of rescaling at the sub-national state level falls well short of being a coherent, clearly thought-out and permanent transfer of powers and fiscal responsibilities to a uniformly defined scale of governance.

scholarly journals Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 1171-1194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Thompson ◽  
Vicky Nowak ◽  
Alan Southern ◽  
Jackie Davies ◽  
Peter Furmedge
Keyword(s):  
Local Economic Development ◽  
Social Enterprises ◽  
Original Research ◽  
City Region ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Entrepreneurial Strategies ◽  
Alternative Sources ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in developing local economies, generating alternative sources of revenue or financialising existing assets. Rooted in a Polanyian perspective and building on the concepts of the entrepreneurial state and grounded city, we identify an embryonic alternative approach – what we call ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ – as a policy pathway towards resolving enduring socioeconomic problems where neoliberal urban-entrepreneurial strategies have failed. We situate entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing on original research on the Liverpool City Region, we explore how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which de-commodify land, labour and capital and re-embed markets back into society. Finally, we draw upon Polanyi as our guide to disentangle differences in approach amongst divergent forms of municipalist statecraft and to critically evaluate entrepreneurial municipalism as a possible trajectory towards the grounded city.

City-region governance in transitional contexts: the case of the BRICS

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Philip Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Extended Period ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
City Region ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Path Dependencies ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Abstract The bulk of the scholarly literature on city-regions and their governance is drawn from contexts where economic and political systems have been stable over an extended period. However, many parts of the world, including all countries in the BRICS, have experienced far-reaching national transformations in the recent past in economic and/or political systems. The national transitions are complex, with a mix of continuity and rupture, while their translation into the scale of the city-region is often indirect. But, these transitions have been significant for the city-region, providing a period of opportunity and institutional fluidity. Studies of the BRICS show that outcomes of transitions are varied but that there are junctures of productive comparison including the ways in which the nature of the transitions create new path dependencies, and way in which interests across territorial scales soon consolidate, producing new rigidities in city-region governance.

scholarly journals Improving Educational Outcomes through Getting It Right for Every Child in Glasgow

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (S1) ◽  
pp. S86-S92
Author(s):  
Maureen McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Outcomes ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Prior Experience ◽  
Universities And Colleges ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

This article sketches the context of education in Glasgow, which is Scotland’s largest local authority, serving some of the most deprived communities in Scotland and the UK. It considers the ways in which we work with our schools to raise aspirations and extend young people’s horizons, and explores some of the successes and some of the challenges we have faced and continue to face in bridging the gap between school and higher education. In Scotland, higher education can be delivered through colleges as well as universities. This is an important dimension for our young people, as colleges offer a different learning experience for them and, for some, this can be a more successful learning pathway. There are also other pathways to higher education, for example through work-based learning, such as apprenticeships. Our partnerships with universities and colleges is very strong. Through this partnership there is a range of programmes which support young people across the city to learn about life in university. This is especially important for young people from deprived communities as, often, their families do not have prior experience of higher education. The means of funding and planning these programmes can be viewed as both an enabler and a barrier in certain contexts.

City regions and the cities within them: Connecting two overlapping scales

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-98
Author(s):  
John Sturzaker ◽  
Alexander Nurse
Keyword(s):  
City Region ◽  
City Regions ◽  
The City ◽  
Collective Goals ◽  
Regional Agenda

This chapter charts the demise of the regional agenda and the shift towards city-regional thinking which has underpinned much of the recent devolution agenda. Considering the similarities to the metropolitan architecture of the 70s and 80s, this discusses the emergence of Local Enterprise Partnerships through to Combined Authorities. This sets the scene for a broader discussion of the Devolution Deals being agreed at the city region level. In doing so, the chapter takes a broader look at how city regions function and, in particular, how districts can cooperate towards collective goals. This draws down recent examples from the emerging devolution deals, including how new metro-mayors are exercising their powers within their city regions, as well as lessons that can be learnt from the now nearly 20-year-old London Mayoral post.

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