Making space: Putting politics back where it belongs in the construction of city regions in the North of England

Abstract

This article tackles a double orthodoxy that has emerged in the recent debate over city regions in the UK. The first, in the realm of policy and politics, held that city regions were the most appropriate scale at which to govern processes of economic development. The second, in the academic literature, posited that city-regional thinking was founded on purely economistic rationales and that there was a need to insert ‘more politics’ into analyses. A very real disjuncture emerged between the initial visualisation of extensive and ‘fuzzy’ city regions and institutional outcomes which often reflected older metropolitan geographies. Underpinning this was a profoundly political process of cross-boundary coalition building in which neighbouring local authorities formed uneasy partnerships in the hunt for resources and forms of ‘constrained autonomy’. The article draws attention to the relationships between two conceptions of ‘making space’: the process of visualising city-regional spaces, and the grounded and political process of carving out the space for city regions in the congested inter-scalar institutional landscape.