Abstract

Amid the fallout from the global financial crisis, ensuing economic downturn and onset of austerity politics, repeated calls for greater private sector involvement in spatial governance have been met with a new body of work examining the role of business within urban and regional development. Rather than accept the mainstream view that we need to bring the state back in, this paper takes as its departure the argument that the state – and our analysis of it – is now preventing important insight into wider processes of urban regional change. To achieve this the paper reflects on over forty years of literature on growth-oriented regionalism, revealing important intellectual blind spots in our approaches to researching contemporary processes of region (and other forms of place) making. It then presents a comparison of two current spatial governance projects to argue that business orchestrated regionalism is an empirical reality clearly distinguishable from state orchestrated regionalism, however, it is a new and highly significant spatial phenomenon we are ill-equipped, both conceptually and methodologically, to understand. Arguing that we need to start ‘seeing like a business’, the paper goes on to reveal the motivations and strategies of state and non-state actors in contemporary region-making. In undertaking this, the paper reveals the practical politics and pragmatism by which actors are having to consolidate state and business interests as complementary alternatives to mobilise new regional (and other spatial) imaginaries for planning and governance. In so doing this paper seeks to animate broader debate about the theories, methods, and concepts we possess for thinking cities and regions geographically.

Bio: John Harrison is Reader in Human Geography at Loughborough University, UK, and an Associate Director of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network. He is an urban-regional geographer interested in how metropolitan regions are conceptualised and mobilised politically. His recent publications have focused on global urban and regional governance. He is an editor of the journal Regional Studies and his recent books include Megaregions: Globalization’s New Urban Form? (Edward Elgar, 2015), Doing Global Urban Research (Sage, 2018), Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories (Routledge, 2018), and Metropolitan Regions, Planning and Governance (Springer, 2020). His current work is focused on “Planning Regional Futures”.