The City-Region: In Retrospect, in Snapshot, in Prospect

As the distribution of economic activity has gone global, the city-system has also gone global -meaning that cities now compete on a global terrain.That means that bigger and more competitive economic units … have superseded cities as the real engines of the global economy.(Florida 2008, 42) Introduction: In what sense a city-regional world? 1The past decade has been dominated by discourses affirming a resurgence of city-regions in globalization.Part and parcel of this discourse is a growing appreciation that city-regions are emerging as the primary spatial scale at which competing political and economic agendas are convened, not least those pertaining to increasing competitiveness, while simultaneously tackling entrenched inequalities, encouraging progressive planning, and enabling piecemeal democratic rights.Ever since Allen Scott's (2001a) edited collection Global City-Regions -Trends, Theory, Policy conceptually mapped and empirically demonstrated the emergence of "global" city-regions as a new kind of critically important geography and institutional phenomenon on the world stage, city-regions have been revered as the pivotal societal formation in advanced globalization.According to Scott and his acolytes city-regions represent a new scale of urbanisation and city-regionalism a new phase in capitalist territorial development -a belief fuelled by recognition that while accelerating processes of global economic integration and rapid urbanization are resulting in the resurgence of cities in globalization, substantive expressions of urbanization result in metropolitan landscapes stretching far beyond their traditional territorial boundaries.One only has to look at the exceptional rate of city expansion into larger city-regions comprising multiple functionally interlinked urban settlements in China,for example, to appreciate how "the city" as traditionally conceived no longer adequately reflects the underlying structure of how urban life is being organized in globalization.Cognizant with this is the recognition that city expansion into globalizing city-regions is serving to increasingly challenge existing urban economic infrastructures and urban-regional governance (Harrison 2011).Reliant on increasingly outdated and inadequate institutional structures, infrastructures, territorialities, statutory frameworks, and supports, the requirement for more "appropriate" -generally accepted to mean more flexible, networked, and smartforms of urban and regional planning and governance arrangements has seen the new cityregionalism mutate over the past ten years to be proxy for the officially institutionalised task of constructing policies, strategies, and institutions at a city-region scale. 2 Stirred into action by these developments, accounts documenting the rise of city-regions have gone a long way to advance claims of a city-regional world (cf.Storper 1997), where cities at the heart of major urban-regional industrial production complexes constitute the "dominant leading edge of contemporary capitalist development" (Scott et al. 2001, 4).Synonymous with much of this work have been a series of normative claims relating to how city-regions (1) function as the basic motors of the national economic within which they are located, (2) are fundamental to economic and social revitalization, and (3) are vital in establishing effective and progressive planning and policymaking.Moreover and heavily inscribed in interpretations supporting notions of a city-regional world is the idea that cityregions are quasi-autonomous functional economic spaces, increasingly acting and operating

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