Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This paper examines newly emerging forms of city-regional collaboration in Finland, UK, USA, and China. Despite conditions of urban austerity, such forms have enabled the strategic delivery of transportation infrastructure and related services by a combination of global and local providers. The management of the politics of collective provision by the state is thus a critical factor in the emergence of a new “geopolitics of capitalism,” producing variegated national political geographies of city-regionalism. Previous explanations have attributed such national variations to differences in political capacities and governance processes operating within city-regions. An alternative and arguably more powerful explanation suggests that emergent forms of city-regionalism enable national states to balance more effectively domestic political problems with growing pressures to compete globally and deliver investments in major infrastructure projects under conditions of austerity. The paper argues that the political challenge of raising capital for the collective provision of infrastructure under conditions of austerity is opening up new opportunities for the nation-state to (re)assert its geopolitical influence both domestically as well as internationally.