Intra-Regional Relationality and Green City-Regionalism: Placing the Role of ‘Secondary Cities’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter considers the implications of Pendras and Williams’s emphasis on ‘intra-regional relationality’ for work in city-regionalism (Moisio and Jonas, 2018), particularly where this work involves planning, growth and urban development practices around global climate action and the new politics of ‘carbon control’ (While et al, 2010; Granqvist et al, 2020). Selective empirical examples derived from my own past and forthcoming work (and the work of others) within the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Europe are briefly referenced throughout the chapter to emphasize how ‘intra-regional relationality’ sheds a different theoretical light on the politics, policies and practices of green urban and metropolitan action. ‘Greater’ Vancouver and ‘Greater’ Seattle, including Surrey and Tacoma, respectively, receive special consideration at the end of the chapter. Ultimately, the discussion explores how the central concept of ‘intra-regional relationality’ helps urban and regional scholars to place the alternately complementary and contradictory roles of regional secondary cities in multi-scalar urban development regimes now struggling to balance economic competitiveness with ecological resiliency and social cohesion, that is, urban sustainability. As more such cities – for example, Tacoma, Geelong, Long Beach, Malmo, Porto, Stellenbosch – adopt and implement green policies and also pursue global carbon control politics, the discussion considers how the concept of intra-regional relationality shifts our interpretation of these developments in urban studies and global affairs. The analytical focus on urban green policy adoption and global carbon geopolitics – or what I have elsewhere called ‘variegated urbanizations of green internationalism’ (Dierwechter, 2019: 50) – may seem arbitrary; but this empirical focus represents a useful way to explore the theoretical relevance of intra-regional relationality in studies of the ‘greening’ of city-regions, whether mapped through the piecemeal adoption of ‘local’ sustainability policies or, more recently, through transnational carbon mitigation efforts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".