Urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western Europe, 1960-2000

Against the background of contemporary debates on globalization and the crystallization of a post-Westphalian world order, this article develops an interpretation of state spatial restructuring in post-1970s western Europe. While many analyses of globalization and the changing state have focused on the construction of new supranational political regimes, such as the European Union, it is argued here that subnational scales, particularly those of major urban regions, represent strategic institutional arenas in which far-reaching transformations of state spatiality are unfolding. I suggest, in particular, that processes of urban governance represent a key mechanism for the rescaling of state space. First, managerial-welfarist forms of urban governance are shown to have played a major role in the consolidation and eventual crisis of Keynesian welfare national states between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. Second, the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that have proliferated during the post-1970s period are interpreted as significant expressions and catalysts of 'glocalization strategies' oriented towards a fundamental rescaling of national state space. In contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states, glocalization strategies promote the formation of Glocalizing Competition State Regimes (GCSRs) in which (a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to subnational institutional levels and (b) major socioeconomic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts. Urban governance therefore represents an essential institutional scaffolding upon which the national and subnational geographies of state regulation are configured as well as one of the major politico-institutional mechanisms through which those geographies are currently being reworked. The article concludes by underscoring the ways in which GCSRs exacerbate intra-national uneven spatial development, leading in turn to the introduction of new crisis-management strategies that further differentiate the institutional and scalar landscapes of state regulation.