What is the "strategic city-region"?
My dissertation is titled "The Strategic City-region", and for a reason. My understanding of the nature of city-regions stems from Johan Andersen's and Jon Pierre's 2010 writing "Exploring the Strategic Region: Rationality, Context, and Institutional Collective Action" that delineates what they coined the "strategic region". They saw the strategic region as a bottom-up inter-municipal cooperation structure. As my understanding of the city-region coincides with their relational view of the regional scale and scope, I wanted to paraphrase and amend their concept and see if it would fit the idea of the city-region.
I have been influenced by two major discourses, those of city-regionalism and agonism. City-regionalism tells us that state reorganization and transformation under the neoliberal and, if you will, the postpolitical conditions is very much a function of state-local relations that both subordinate and liberate the city-regional actancy in the search for the most viable "spatial fix" for localized competitiveness and growth. As e.g. Christian Olesen (2014) writes, strategic spatial planning has been seen to increasingly cater for this development. Agonistic planning theory, then, has been seen as a counterpunch to postpolitical planning, through its bringing forth the innate and unavoidable antagonisms in society and its apparent celebration of the politicization of planning.
What city-regionalism and agonism combined present is an imagery of the city-region as a relational site for the dialectics of fixation and fluidization of contested planning issues. In line with Patsy Healey's (e.g. 2007) conceptualization of city-regional strategic planning consisting of levels of "conscious attention" that deal with how power and action unfold in practices, I see the "strategic city-region" as a relational emergent of horizontal and vertical collaborations in the city-regional space. The fixings and the fluidities create a strategic landscape that is in many ways framed by power relations, even naturalizations reminiscent of the postpolitical, yet constantly finding new local coordinations for providing different fixes, or "temporary restings" – a concept originating from Richard Rorty's "Consequences of pragmatism" and later adopted by John Pløger (e.g. 2017) – that serve to both fix a mutual understanding and keep open the possibility of further contestation.
What is there to be learned from this? For one, that the complexity of the city-regional sphere means comprehensive governance efforts are extremely difficult if not impossible to come by. Instead, what seems to do the trick is finding these temporary restings, by working non-consensually with local hotspots and creating coordination, learning and transformation without altogether cooling them down. This, I believe, is the potential of the city-region: keeping it uncomfortably out of control yet getting things done in practice means releasing the true innovative and imaginative capacities of the urban emergent that would otherwise be petrified into a planned lowest-common-denominator oblivion.
Andersen, J. & Pierre, J. (2010). Exploring the Strategic Region: Rationality, Context, and Institutional
Collective Action. Urban Affairs Review 46:2, 218–240.
Healey, P. (2007). Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for
Our Times. London: Routledge.
Olesen, C. (2014). The neoliberalisation of strategic spatial planning. Planning Theory 13:3, 288-303.
Pløger, J. (2017). Conflict and Agonism. In Gunder, M., Madanipour, A. ja Watson, V. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory, 264-275. New York: Routledge.
