City-Regionalism as a Contingent ‘Geopolitics of Capitalism’

This paper argues that it is intellectually unsustainable to separate the new economic geography of city-regionalism from its geopolitical context. The neo-liberal competition state is centrally implicated in how the city-region scale is politically orchestrated so as to bolster international competitiveness. Yet the diversity of national and sub-national forms of city-regionalism cannot be attributed to economic development considerations separately from ongoing struggles around the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. Drawing upon selected examples from the United States, the paper demonstrates how city-regionalism expresses the contingent geopolitics of capitalism. Its overall aim is to advance theoretical knowledge both of the internal political geography of the competition state and of its external territorial relations.