City regions, polycentricity and the construction of peripheralities through governance

Abstract

City regions have become a key paradigm in current academic debates, and with them the notion of network-based, polycentric spaces. They have moved to the foreground of national (and EU) policies of creating economic 'champions' for successful national economies. No longer is such success perceived as being equal everywhere across a territory. Instead, economic and policy spaces are being subdivided into 'corridors of connectivity' and city-regional 'nodes' as key elements of a network-defined space. The nodes are loci of bundled, variably 'thick' connectivities. This paper argues that instead of contiguous economic territories as spatial 'containers', these are now becoming increasingly subdivided into bundles of separate linear territories, leaving 'in between' much less well connected, effectively marginalized spaces and actors, whose access to power and policymaking capacity is much more limited. The result is a reinforced, perpetuated inequality in opportunities, with regionalization in danger of creating more divisions and boundaries, rather than less.