Re-structuring Competitive Metropolitan Regions in North-west Europe: On Territory and Governance

Abstract

This paper intends to build a bridge between academic debates on the conteporary rescaling of political economy, with regard to urban governance, and the strategic approaches produced by policy makers and planners with a view to establishing region-wide governance-structures for metropolitan regions. To do so, the authors use empirical evidence from several north-western metropolitan regions, namely London, Paris, Randstad and RheinRuhr, which were under study in the framework of two research projects, namely, EURBANET and GEMACA. The paper commences by discussing whether ‘places’ can actually compete, and this will be followed by a short historical survey of the nation state’s interest in developing global cities and metropolitan regions as competitive territories.
After taking into account their specific ‘spatial configurations’ we will then focus on the territorial shapes of such regions. The authors present a rather simple method to demarcate city-regions as comparable ‘Functional Urban Regions’. It will then be argued that to optimise their development and to exploit their potentialities, political focus should be directed towards upgrading the economic, institutional and social base, which is a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success. The article chiefly deals with the issue of establishing appropriate city-regional ‘organizing capacities,’ and provides a critical overview of the situation in four exemplary regions. In the concluding section this perspective will be extended by discussing in what sense these ‘Functional Urban Regions’ are actually ‘regions’?