Competitive City-Regionalism and the Politics of Scale

This chapter presents a critical perspective on the “new regionalism” debate that has swept through important streams of urban studies since the 1980s. A scalar analytics is mobilized to question mainstream political metanarratives regarding the prospects for putatively endogenous, bottom-up political strategies to stimulate urban regeneration. New regionalist programs have entailed a scalar recalibration of local financial, institutional, and regulatory failures, but without significantly impacting their underlying macrospatial causes, within or beyond major cities. Consequently, rather than counteracting the crisis tendencies of post-Keynesian capitalism, the market disciplinary spatial politics of the new regionalism have perpetuated or exacerbated the latter. Its enduring consequences have been the further splintering of urban governance arrangements, intensifying territorial polarization, and pervasive regulatory disorder, rather than stable capitalist industrial growth or coherent territorial development at any spatial scale.