Competitiveness AND Sustainability: Can 'Smart City Regionalism' Square the Circle?

Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existenceor fusionof these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the right' scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. New regionalism' has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces smart (new) city-regionalism', derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of smartness', as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of smart' as in smart growth'. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective smart' has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting smart city regionalism' is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting smartness' in the scalar positioning of policy-making.