Central Scotland as a Polycentric Urban Region - SAGE Journals

Urban Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4, 697 – 715, 2001

Central Scotland as a Polycentric Urban Region: Useful Planning Concept or Chimera? Nick Bailey and Ivan Turok [Paper received in nal form, November 2000]

Summary. Interest in the concept of the polycentric urban region (PUR) has been growing among planners and policy-makers in north-west Europe. PURs are believed to offer a means of promoting regional economic competitiveness while safeguarding environmental objectives. This paper interrogates the concept and examines its relevance to the central Scotland region. Central Scotland has a polycentric physical form, but the evidence that it is a single functional region in economic terms is much more mixed. The dominant pattern of interactions suggests two separate city-regions, although links between adjoining areas seem to be growing. Despite considerable rivalry between public organisations across the region, there appears to be increasing support for the development of some kind of strategic spatial framework to inform key investment decisions and to promote closer collaboration. This would not necessarily be based on the PUR concept, since it is too broadly speci ed at present to guide the kinds of decision that need to be made. Further work is needed to elaborate and re ne the concept.

1. Introduction Cities in many parts of the world are struggling to balance the pressures of economic growth and competitiveness, social inclusion and environmental protection. Different spatial arrangements and planning frameworks have emerged to deal with these often competing demands. The concept of the polycentric urban region (PUR) is a spatial planning tool or vision that has been developed and taken up primarily in northwest Europe. The concept has been advocated by commentators in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and employed in various national and regional planning frameworks in these countries (Priemus, 1998; Federal Ministry for Regional Plan-

ning, Building and Urban Development, 1993; Albrechts, 1998). The European Commission has also become interested in this idea. The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) argued for the need for balanced and polycentric patterns of urban development within Europe, and included as policy options: strengthening a polycentric and more balanced system of metropolitan regions, city clusters and city networks and promoting integrated spatial development strategies for city clusters (European Council of EU Ministers responsible for Spatial Planning, 1999, p. 21).

Nick Bailey and Ivan Turok are in the Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, 25 Bute Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8RS, UK. Fax: 0141 330 4983. E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. The authors are grateful to those who gave their time to take part in the interviews for this work and to Iain Docherty for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The authors would also like to acknowledge nancial support from the ESRC under the Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion programme (ESRC study no. L130251040). 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/01/040697-19 Ó DOI: 10.1080/ 00420980120035295

2001 The Editors of Urban Studies

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The PUR concept is alleged to offer a sound basis for strategies to promote regional economic competitiveness while safeguarding environmental objectives. It promotes the advantages of stronger interaction between neighbouring cities to develop specialised and complementary assets, while avoiding large-scale urban sprawl and destructive territorial competition. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the concept and to consider whether it could usefully be applied in a neighbouring but rather different context—the central belt of Scotland. The structure of the paper is as follows. The second section begins by offering a basic de nition of a PUR. It then reviews the underpinnings of the concept, arguing that it is at present only weakly justi ed on theoretical and empirical grounds. The third section examines the extent to which central Scotland can be described as a PUR. Four dimensions are explored: spatial form; identity and culture; functional relationships; and governance and planning. The fourth section explores the views of key actors in spatial planning in central Scotland, followed by some conclusions.1 2. The Bases of the PUR Concept 2.1 De ning PURs Before examining the arguments which have been made in support of the concept, it is necessary to de ne what is meant by the term PUR. In fact, the literature on PURs is relatively small and unconsolidated. There is no simple agreed de nition and many of the underlying ideas have not been developed in detail or scrutinised closely. The concept has its origins in European spatial planning. It has been promoted within the highly urbanised regions of north-west Europe which lack major centres with the status of ‘world city’. World cities are seen as key nodes in the global economic system which are becoming increasingly dominant by virtue of their roles as nancial centres and as centres for global command and control (Sassen, 1991, 1994; Dieleman and Hamnett, 1994).

By comparison with cities such as London, New York and Tokyo, the individual cities of north-west Europe are small. At its simplest, the appeal of the PUR concept is its claim to provide a means of gaining some of the economies of scale which world cities enjoy without incurring the costs or agglomeration diseconomies which their monocentric form entails. The focus of PURs is therefore at the intermetropolitan scale (Dieleman and Faludi, 1998). A PUR can be de ned as a region having two or more separate cities, with no one centre dominant, in reasonable proximity and well-connected. A question arising is the maximum distance apart that places can be and still be considered part of the same PUR. Geddes provided the classic rule of thumb for de ning the limits of a conurbation: broadly speaking, the main limit of the modern city is that of the hour’s journey or thereby, the maximum which busy men [sic] can face without too great deduction from their day’s work (Geddes, 1968, p. 41). This appears to have been adopted as the maximum centre-to-centre distance by most commentators on PURs, although Batten (1995) argues for the lower limit of half an hour so that travel between any two points in each city takes no more than an hour. This latter is a much tougher limit and would disqualify most groups of major cities in north-west Europe from being PURs, given current transport infrastructure. A region is ‘polycentric’ insofar as there are separate and distinct cities or smaller settlements which interact with each other to a signi cant extent. A PUR is normally distinguished from a ‘polycentric city’, which is characterised by the development of multiple sub-centres within one built-up area (Gordon et al., 1986). Indeed, there is a tension between the two concepts as there is a strong ‘anti-sprawl’ agenda built into the PUR idea. The focus on separate cities leads to an emphasis on the preservation of undeveloped or ‘green’ space between settlements in order to

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maintain the separateness of each centre and the polycentricity of the region. The ‘green heart’ of the Randstad is the classic example. The arguments used to justify this stem largely from research on environmental sustainability and urban form which emphasises the value of ‘concentrated deconcentration’, with development around activity nodes and along transport corridors (Breheny, 1995). This is argued to have the twin bene ts of providing critical mass to sustain public transport services while also preserving undeveloped land. This issue of physically separate but interacting settlements raises a further de nitional issue of how interaction should be measured and what minimum thresholds should be applied for a group of cities to qualify as a PUR. A wide range of measures are used in practice, labour market ows being the most common, and no clear thresholds have been de ned, as discussed below.

2.2 PURs and Economic Competitiveness The simplest argument for planning a group of neighbouring cities as a PUR is that they already form a coherent region based on economic criteria or that they are developing in that direction. Their interdependence and the advantages they enjoy from their polycentric form can then be used to justify the adoption of the PUR concept in planning to reinforce these characteristics. Dieleman and Faludi, for example, explain the level of interest in PURs in north-west Europe by the existence of a number of regions where the once separate cities of relatively similar and modest size have now coalesced into one functional urban region (Dieleman and Faludi, 1998, p. 366). The Randstad, the Ruhr region and the Brussels– Flanders region are cited as examples. Some writers have questioned whether these regions really operate as single functional areas, especially if labour market interaction is the key measure; Lambooy (1998) and

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GEMACA (1996) cast doubt on claims for the Randstad and the Flemish Diamond respectively. An alternative justi cation for the PUR concept is to argue that spatial planning policies should promote the integration of a group of cities so that they come to form a PUR because this will bring certain advantages, notably greater economic competitiveness. In academic writing, the argument often appears to be phrased in terms of the advantages of polycentric form over monocentric (Lambooy, 1998; Clark and KuijpersLinde, 1994), although this is a rather arti cial comparison since planners do not have the luxury of creating city-regions from scratch. In practical terms, the more useful debate is over the advantages of the PUR concept as a spatial development strategy for an existing group of neighbouring cities as opposed to some other spatial strategy for the same set of locations (Priemus, 1994). The alternative strategies which could be pursued, however, are rarely articulated. One set of arguments for promoting integration concerns the direct impacts on economic competitiveness. At its simplest, the argument is that integration enables a group of relatively small cities to form a larger entity, and so compete with larger cities for the high-income, high-growth sectors in nancial and business services (Dieleman and Faludi, 1998). As it stands, this argument is rather simplistic since size does not guarantee world city status, nor does promoting the integration of separate cities ensure that they will enjoy the competitive advantages of a similar-sized monocentric city. The links between integration and competitiveness need be made more explicit, as a number of authors have sought to do. First, it has been argued that the integration of separate cities may provide greater agglomeration or external economies for businesses within the region as the assets of each city are effectively pooled together. This can apply to the bene ts of sharing an enlarged labour market, major facilities such as seaports or airports (Priemus, 1994), or specialised services such as higher education

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or research and development establishments (Lambooy, 1998). Secondly, economic innovation and growth may be enhanced by closer co-operation between separate cities. This stems from the argument that regional creativity and innovative potential are related to the size and diversity of the region (Albrechts, 1998; Batten, 1995). This is because geographical proximity and interaction reduce transaction costs and foster the development of business networks, which promote inter rm trading linkages and facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise (Batten, 1995; Lambooy, 1998). Thirdly, and related to the previous two points, integration is said to allow cities to develop and exploit complementarities or synergies between different locations. Functional complementarity is a characteristic that can be used to identify the existence of a PUR (Albrechts, 1998; Vanhaverbeke, 1998). By encouraging interaction between neighbouring locations, the argument is that each will develop specialisations in areas in which it has a competitive advantage. Consequently, there will be some reorganisation of activity within the region which leaves individual rms and the region as a whole in a stronger competitive position. This follows the arguments of Porter (1990), among others, on the value of regional ‘clusters’ of related economic activities. There are several criticisms that can be made of these arguments. The PUR concept was developed by spatial planners, yet many of the arguments are economic and do not depend fundamentally upon the arrangement of the built environment. Interaction in the sense of building networks between rms in related industries can arguably be achieved more directly than through improvements in physical infrastructure connections. Priemus (1994) argues that the importance of physical planning should not be overestimated and that it can, at most, play a stimulating or enabling role in economic development. The literature on the PUR concept, however, says little about other elds of policy and the relative importance of spatial planning. One

must ask whether the types of infrastructure project which the PUR concept encourages are the most cost-effective way of promoting links between rms, compared with measures to foster connections directly, especially in an age of increasingly sophisticated information and communications technology. Seen in this light, an uncharitable interpretation of the PUR concept might be that it is a means of justifying traditional policies and spending priorities using new language. Speci c criticisms can also be made of the arguments about integration and specialisation. First, there is a tendency to view the growth of integration teleologically—as a one-way and inevitable process. In fact, some regions within north-west Europe have experienced a loss of integration in recent decades, notably those which have suffered most from deindustrialisation. The decline in their economic base has damaged local suppliers of goods and services and weakened local linkages. The assumption that integration must increase in future also appears invalid. While commuting elds have widened steadily across western Europe in recent decades, concern about the environmental costs of increasing car use could well lead to efforts to constrain personal mobility and reduce long-distance commuting. Regional planning policies may be needed to reduce the need to travel, including constraints on new dispersed settlements. This policy thrust appears to contradict the emphasis in the PUR literature on promoting integration and interaction. Another criticism is that there is insuf cient distinction made between different kinds of relationship between cities and other centres. If complementarity is taken as evidence of interdependence, it must be between locations of broadly equal status, and not merely re ect uni-directional and hierarchical relationships, such as those that exist between national or regional capitals and other centres. The concentration of European and national government functions in a city such as Brussels will inevitably lead to interactions with other cities, not just in the Flem-

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ish Diamond but also across Belgium and Europe. The specialisation of Brussels in government functions and the relationships which this creates between Brussels and, say, Antwerp, cannot be taken as evidence of a PUR. In addition, the development of functional specialisations must involve mobile activities that have a choice where they go, not immobile ones that arise from basic physical advantages (for example, port functions or extractive industries). The process of interaction between centres leading to the reallocation of activities between them is portrayed as bene cial for the region and hence an argument in favour of PURs. In practice, the outcome is likely to be uneven with winners and losers. Some centres will lose particular types of employment and some may experience an overall decline in employment, with potentially severe impacts on particular social groups. In debates over the merits of PURs, the distributional impacts of urban integration are neglected in the focus on overall growth. Such impacts generate political tensions which undermine regional coherence and consensus, so they cannot be ignored. More generally, the PUR concept can be criticised for its neglect of social issues. In the UK, for example, many of the major cities have experienced a persistent net decentralisation of jobs and economic activity to surrounding towns and rural areas. Labour market adjustment through out-commuting and out-migration has been incomplete, leading to severe concentrations of urban unemployment (Turok and Edge, 1999). While stronger urban economic growth is clearly necessary, it is also important to consider the types of economic activity which core cities need to attract to meet the needs of the unemployed. PURs may be a means of addressing polarisation within a region at the same time as promoting competitiveness, but this has not been articulated or discussed within the literature. 2.3 Governance and Planning There is a second and related set of arguments for the promotion of PURs which

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concern governance and its impact on the competitive advantage of locations. In general terms, the ‘organising capacity’ or ability of a location to make the most of its assets is seen as increasingly important in the competition for mobile investment (van den Berg et al., 1997; Dieleman and Faludi, 1998). One argument for planning at the scale of a PUR is that the governance arrangements this necessitates provide the region with greater organisational capacity. Finding evidence for this is not straightforward, partly because a particular set of formal institutional arrangements does not necessarily generate effective governance. At the highest level, it is argued that a fully edged PUR should have its own regional tier of government. None of the three main examples of PURs in north-western Europe has such an arrangement. Instead, they are characterised by complex and fragmented structures operating at lower levels. Even city-level government arrangements appear weak, and problems of competition between neighbouring authorities are widespread (Dieleman and Faludi, 1998). In the Rhein– Ruhr, for example, there are four tiers of government within the PUR, as well as regional or national tiers above the PUR which have some involvement in planning matters (Blotevogel, 1998; Knapp, 1998). Less ambitiously, local authorities co-operating through voluntary arrangements has been taken as evidence of a PUR. At least two types of bene t may arise from this kind of collaboration or partnership-working (Mackintosh, 1992; Hastings, 1996). First, there may be ‘resource synergies’ from combining expenditure or co-ordinating programmes. This may enable partners to undertake new or larger projects by pooling their resources and avoiding duplication. The cost of projects which bene t all partners could be shared between them, overcoming ‘free-rider’ problems and generating ef ciency gains. Secondly, partnerships may generate ‘policy synergies’ as the processes of joint-working and knowledge-sharing lead partners to come up with a different understanding of problems and new solutions.

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Cross-fertilisation of ideas and expertise should lead to greater creativity and innovation. In much of the literature on PURs, excessive emphasis is arguably placed on the creation of a new tier of government at the level of city-regions—i.e. between local authorities and regional government. This could simply result in an additional, poorly resourced layer of bureaucracy with marginal bene ts. In relatively poor and isolated cityregions, it may be more important that wellresourced national or regional governments take the lead in ensuring that a coherent development framework is approved and then implemented. The regional focus may also distract attention from the need to establish effective arrangements at lower levels, notably between local authorities covering individual cities. Achieving meaningful collaboration between authorities to gain the kinds of synergies mentioned above is extremely dif cult, particularly in the prevailing climate of competition for investment, jobs and public resources. Greater consideration needs to be given to mechanisms to promote stronger co-operation, including encouragement from national and regional governments. 3. Central Scotland as a Polycentric Urban Region These ideas and arguments can be assessed and illustrated in a more concrete manner by considering the case of a particular city-region with the potential to be considered or planned as a PUR. Two central questions are addressed: to what extent can central Scotland be de ned as a PUR? And should it be planned as such? First, the spatial form of the region is examined, to show that it meets the basic prerequisite for being considered a potential PUR. Secondly, the section examines whether central Scotland can be considered a single urban region in terms of its identity and culture, the functioning of its economy and its governance and planning arrangements. Here the evidence is much more mixed. Central Scotland has a strong external

identity as a region although this is not re ected in the form of a unifying culture or shared sense of belonging. In terms of economic functioning, the different parts of the region appear reasonably interdependent in certain respects, although hard evidence on other indicators is dif cult to obtain. In administrative and political terms, the region is fragmented and divided. The idea that the two main cities of central Scotland would merge to form a single urban region has a long history. Writing in 1915, Patrick Geddes argued that, with the continued expansion of Glasgow and Edinburgh and the development of transport connections between them, it is clear that we shall have a linking up of these two great cities and their minor neighbours of central Scotland into a new conurbation—a bi-polar city-region indeed, which is more and more uniting into one vast bi-regional capital—Clyde– Forth, as we may soon learn to call it (Geddes, 1968, p. 40). Moreover, Geddes’ vision went beyond physical form to anticipate some of the arguments for the PUR concept relating to functional specialisation: He argued that Clydeforth was a ‘city group’ composed of specialised and complementary elements, which in combination could aspire to rst-rank status: “We have to prepare for a great and living city … which would be second to none” (Glendinning and Page, 1999, p. 123). Nearly a century later, the vision has not become reality, not least because Geddes did not foresee that central Scotland would go from rapid growth to long-term decline shortly after the time he was writing. 3.1 Spatial Form The prerequisite for a PUR is polycentric physical form and central Scotland clearly meets this basic requirement. Development is spread along an east– west axis, dominated by the two cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh

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together with a number of secondary centres. At 65 km (40 miles) apart, the centre-tocentre travel time is well under an hour by rail or road (outside peak times). The cities are clearly separate in physical terms, as the map of built-up areas shows (Figure 1). Indeed, from Coatbridge, Airdrie and Motherwell in the west to Livingstone and Bathgate in the east (a distance of 20 km), there are no sizeable settlements. In the past, Glasgow was dominant by virtue of its size and economic importance, if not its status; Edinburgh was the capital, but Glasgow had the capital, as the saying went. The core of Glasgow, however, has lost over half its population since its peak in 1951. This decline, coupled with Edinburgh’s slow steady growth, has meant that the two cities have become more equal in weight. The city of Glasgow (de ned as the continuous built-up area) is home to 0.8 million people, while Edinburgh has 0.5 million. In terms of overall population, central Scotland (3 million) is considerably smaller than either the Randstad or the Rhine – Ruhr (7 and 12 million respectively), but of the same order as the Flemish Diamond (4 million). In terms of population distribution, the region is becoming more polycentric over time. Glasgow is surrounded by a number of secondary centres. Many of these— Greenock, Paisley, Hamilton, Motherwell, Coatbridge and Airdrie—expanded quickly along with Glasgow as the region industrialised in the 19th century. Like Glasgow, they have suffered signi cant economic decline and restructuring in the post-war period, but this has been offset to some extent by gains in population and employment through decentralisation from the core. Two expanding centres—East Kilbride and Cumbernauld—are New Towns and owe their present situation to major public investment and development programmes pursued by successive governments from the 1950s to the 1990s. In the east, Edinburgh is more clearly the dominant centre in its city-region, with Livingston New Town the only signi cant secondary centre. All three New Towns have been consistently among the

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fastest-growing areas in central Scotland. To the north lie Falkirk (another industrial centre) and Stirling (an historic town). The region is reasonably well connected internally, although there are a number of critical gaps or missing links in both rail and road infrastructure. A rail link from Edinburgh to Glasgow has existed since the 1840s. The main route, looping north through Falkirk, can be completed in around 45 minutes, although it is not electri ed. Trains from the east terminate at a station in Glasgow where there are also rail connections to suburban stations in the north of the city. Train routes serving destinations to the south of the Clyde depart from another station in the city centre. The main east– west road connection is mostly of motorway standard, running from the Edinburgh by-pass to the heart of Glasgow. A short section remains two-lane dual carriageway. Stirling has a motorway link to Edinburgh but the route to Glasgow is incomplete. Glasgow is particularly well served by its metropolitan railway network and this has contributed to the city centre’s success as an of ce, retail and leisure centre. The region is served by three airports: Glasgow, Edinburgh and Prestwick in Ayrshire to the south-west. From 1962, the government pursued a strategy of developing all three lowland airports, controlling the distribution of routes in order to balance business between them. Prestwick enjoyed a monopoly on international ights to or from Scotland until deregulation in 1990 (Murphy, 1999), but is now primarily a freight airport. Glasgow and Edinburgh have rapidly come to dominate passenger ows since deregulation, serving essentially two separate catchment areas. In the year to June 1999, for example, 76 per cent of passengers at Glasgow airport originated from the Strathclyde region, with just 7 per cent from Lothian. At Edinburgh airport, 65 per cent of passengers originated in Lothian, and just 4 per cent in Strathclyde (BAA, 1999). Neither airport is served by a rail terminal although in both cases a railway line skirts the airport. Although the process of separate development

Figure 1. Built-up areas in central Scotland. Source: boundary data from UKBORDERS (ESRC/JISC purchase). Crown copyright.

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Figure 2. River basins and hill systems in central Scotland. Source: Mears (1948, plate 5), based on Ordnance Survey maps.

has gone too far to be reversed now, one could argue that a decision to consolidate investment in a single common airport would have produced various scale economies and ef ciencies, leading to more frequent ights to a wider range of destinations. On the other hand, with air travel continuing to increase, the availability of three separate airports might prove to be more of an asset in future, as expansion will be achieved more easily. 3.2 Identity and Culture of the Region Physical geography has played a major role in both encouraging and hindering the development of central Scotland as a single integrated region. From a broad perspective, it has given the area a clear identity as one of four sub-regions of Scotland. The name ‘central Scotland’ or the ‘central belt’ is well recognised and describes the lowland strip or isthmus between two regions of higher country—the Southern Uplands to the south and the Highlands to the north (Figure 2). A fourth Scottish region may be identi ed in the north-east, comprised of Aberdeen and surrounding areas, and based around the oil and gas industries (Hague, 1999). This topography means that central Scotland is rela-

tively isolated from other major population centres in Britain. The nearest conurbation (Tyneside) is 160 km away, while the nearest heavily urbanised region (the trans-Pennine region covering Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Shef eld) is 320 km to the south. Physical geography was also a key factor in the development of a highly integrated regional economy from the middle of the 19th century, as discussed below. Within central Scotland, identities and interests are shaped by an east– west divide, based around two parallel river valleys, the Clyde facing west and the Forth facing east. Glasgow and Edinburgh are classic examples of neighbouring cities with distinct identities and a strong rivalry, re ecting the different development paths they have followed. Edinburgh has been the seat of power in Scotland since late medieval times, and the centre for government, the law, the church and banking. Manufacturing was never as important as it was in many other British cities, partly because it was actively discouraged by the city’s e´lite. This is apparent, for example, in the city development plan produced by Abercrombie and Plumstead (1949). Until the late 1980s, Edinburgh’s politics were dominated by its large middle class, with

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conservationist or preservationist groups opposed to radical change or new development. Even now that a more pro-development group has gained control of the council, the preservationists remain a powerful force (Hague and Thomas, 1998). Glasgow, by contrast, was the classic city of the Industrial Revolution. It grew explosively over the course of the 19th century with massive immigration from the Highlands and Ireland leading to some of the most severely overcrowded housing in Europe. The interests of industrialists and, subsequently, working-class groups have dominated city politics, with municipal provision of services a priority, especially in relation to housing (Maver, 2000). In the post-war period, the city carried out a massive slum-clearance and redevelopment programme to become the major provider of housing in the city. It also prevented almost any development by private housebuilders, so fuelling out-migration to the suburbs by more prosperous groups. At its peak in 1981, 63 per cent of households in Glasgow rented from the local authority and even today half of all households rent from a social landlord, including housing associations and co-operatives. Another factor limiting the development of a central Scotland identity is the existence of a strong national/regional identity at the level of Scotland as a whole. In Euskadi (the Basque country), it has been argued that this can form the basis of efforts to plan the region as a PUR (van Houtum and Lagendijk, 1998). In Scotland, the national/ regional identity undermines arguments about the common interests of central Scotland or the complementary resources of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The central belt is such a large proportion of Scotland— accounting for over half of the total population and economic output—that it is perceived as a threat by other areas. In interviews with key actors involved in spatial planning in the region, interviewees were asked about their ‘mental maps’ of central Scotland and, in particular, whether they thought it functioned as a single region. Most respondents felt that there were over-

laps between the two city-regions and signi cant interactions between them, but that they should nevertheless be considered two separate city-regions for most purposes. Both were said to have a high degree of internal coherence or interaction, particularly in labour market terms. Falkirk and Stirling were thought to have links to both cityregions, but also a fairly high degree of self-containment. There were certain relationships which spanned the east– west divide (such as Falkirk and Cumbernauld, West Lothian and North Lanarkshire), but these were considered less signi cant than the connections within each city-region. One exception to the general pattern was industrial property. Several respondents thought that the region constituted a single market area, especially for inward investors. Some expressed the view that the physical distance between Edinburgh and Glasgow was exaggerated in most people’s minds: it was “the longest 45 miles in Scotland” according to one respondent (Bailey and Turok, forthcoming). 3.3 Functional Relationships The question of whether central Scotland functions as a single integrated region in economic terms can be approached in several ways. The narrowest test for functional integration is whether a region forms a single local labour market area. Beyond this one can assess the strength of supply chain linkages and commercial interdependencies between businesses, so that patterns of trade become an indicator. Broader still, there is the concept of networks or ‘clusters’ linking rms through traded and untraded interdependencies (i.e. customers, suppliers, collaborators, competitors, research establishments and so on). The existence of functional specialisation or a division of labour between centres can also be taken as evidence of integration. Central Scotland as a whole clearly does not constitute a single integrated labour market. The revised travel-to-work areas (TTWAs) produced by the government using

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1991 Census data show the region divided into 6 areas (ONS and Coombes, 1998). Flows between the two main city-regions were very small in relation to ows in the rest of the labour market. Just 1 per cent of the workforce of Greater Glasgow comes from the east, while the ow in the opposite direction makes up just 2 per cent of Greater Edinburgh’s workforce (Bailey et al., 1999). Traditional radial ows from the suburbs to the two core cities continue to dominate travel patterns. There has been a trend for TTWAs to grow larger over time, re ecting the growth of personal mobility and the decentralisation of population and jobs from the cities, but there is a considerable way to go before central Scotland is covered by one TTWA. There is also evidence from studies of migration that the two labour markets operate independently of each other. People migrate into and out of both city-regions from and to other parts of Britain, but migration ows between them are relatively small: The east and west of Scotland have disconnected migration streams; they relate separately to the South of England but not to each other. Migration losses from the Clyde Valley are losses to Scotland not gains to the East (Webster, 2000, p. 46). One of the consequences is that high levels of unemployment in the west co-exist with relatively low levels in the east. Commuting and migration propensities vary by gender and by socioeconomic group. According to 1991 Census data, unskilled manual workers travelled an average distance to work of 6 km but professional and managerial workers travelled an average of 11 km (Bailey et al., 1999). Some of the most highly paid workers do travel widely across the region, so for selected groups it may constitute a single labour market area. It may also be perceived as such by some inward investors, particularly those employing high proportions of skilled technical and professional staff. There are several examples of companies in semi-conductor design, optoelectronics and pharmaceuticals that have lo-

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cated in West Lothian recently because it is considered to offer access to the whole central Scotland labour market. Some of these rms have also been keen to have access to the research and training facilities in the universities located in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. As noted above, there is a tendency to see the growing interactions between neighbouring cities as a recent and inevitable process. The extent to which central Scotland has formed a single economic region has varied over time. The development of coal, iron, steel and heavy engineering industries in the 19th century formed the basis of a highly integrated economy covering almost all of the region. This was clearly expressed in the regional plans for central Scotland produced in the 1940s. Separate plans were commissioned for the Clyde valley (Abercrombie and Matthew, 1949) and the Forth valley (Mears, 1948), but broader regional issues linking the two were a major consideration. Maintaining coal production levels in central Scotland was considered to be of national strategic importance. With deposits around Glasgow increasingly worked out, the plans envisaged relocating 200 000 miners and their families to other parts of central Scotland. Most were to move east to the coal elds of the Lothians, Clackmannan and Fife. Only Edinburgh City appeared detached from this economy, partly as a result of the planning policies pursued there. The green belt proposals in the city development plan of the same period (Abercrombie and Plumstead, 1949) were designed explicitly to keep mining and manufacturing from encroaching on the city. Since the 1960s, industrial decline and the loss of coal mining have given the region a set of common challenges. These trends have also fuelled competition between areas for private investment and public resources. Central government recognised the common problems in its 1963 White Paper on the regeneration of central Scotland (SDD, 1963). The strategy which this heralded—of targeting investment into the most attractive business locations or ‘growth areas’—may

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well have helped to undermine the core city of Glasgow by depriving it of resources for physical reconstruction, economic development and job creation (Robertson, 1998; Webster, 2000). Statistics on industrial specialisation within the region do not provide strong evidence for economic integration or the emergence of a division of labour between cities across the region. Rather, the picture is dominated by a contrast between the two core cities on the one hand and the rest of central Scotland on the other (Figure 3). Manufacturing is disproportionately strong in locations outwith the core cities and this tendency has been increasing over time. This partly re ects market processes of net decentralisation associated with lower density, more extensive plant lay-outs. It is also linked to government efforts to facilitate industrial investment in these locations through physical infrastructure programmes and the failure (at least until recently) to invest in decontaminating and servicing vacant and derelict land within the cities, particularly Glasgow. Electronics manufacturing has been by far the most important sector in inward investment over the past decade, but its linkages with Scottish suppliers of components and materials remain weak (Jackson and Patel, 1996). Both core cities have strengths in nancial and public services. Business services employment appears to be comparatively low throughout the region, although this mostly re ects the very high concentrations of such activities in London which distort national averages. This should not disguise the important role which the core cities play in providing business services within the region. Several specialisms re ect Edinburgh’s historic role as capital of Scotland; especially the concentrations of government and nancial services. Others, such as shipbuilding in Glasgow, re ect the presence of immobile physical features. The statistics in Figure 3 are based upon industrial classi cations and so do not reveal whether there is any more detailed functional division of labour between the two cities. In nancial services, for example, Glasgow and

Edinburgh may be tending to serve slightly different markets and to perform different functions. In particular, the high property rents and labour shortages which Edinburgh has experienced in recent years as a result of its strong growth may encourage some rms to relocate certain functions towards the lesscongested west. There is no substantial evidence of this at present, but it would be an important indication of closer economic integration, providing evidence that central Scotland was beginning to function as a PUR. Among key actors in planning, particularly those in the east, there is a strong belief that Edinburgh’s rising demand for labour, coupled with its tight land market, has led to a signi cant growth in in-commuting from surrounding areas. Current projections by the city council suggest that net inward commuting to the city will rise by nearly one- fth between 1999 and 2015 as employment growth exceeds population growth in an already tight labour market (CEC, 2000). This will result in a need to draw in increasing quantities of labour from the surrounding areas and a widening of Edinburgh’s catchment area. This will result in stronger transport links with surrounding districts and will possibly encourage closer institutional co-operation. 3.4 Regional Governance and Planning The last level at which to consider evidence that central Scotland constitutes a coherent region is governance. Central Scotland has never had its own tier of government and this is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. The region is too large a part of Scotland to make this feasible politically. Powers at the Scottish level have recently been greatly strengthened through devolution from London to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. This new body is unlikely to want such a powerful potential rival, and public opinion may be wary of another level of public administration. Having said this, institutional arrangements at the local level are characterised by increasing spatial and functional fragmen-

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Figure 3. Industrial specialisation. Note: average full-time-equivalent employment, 1996 – 98; gure shows total employment less amount there would have been had local employment been distributed in same proportions as nationally. Source: Annual Employment Survey via NOMIS.

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tation, and there is a strong case for greater co-ordination. Local government reform in 1975 created strong city-regional authorities which combined strategic planning across a broad territorial base with responsibility for major services including education, social work, roads and transport, police, water and sewerage. They were the strongest form of regional government that Britain has seen, although even these authorities were undermined by the increasing number of competing government agencies (Wannop, 1995). Below the regions were district councils responsible for housing, local planning, refuse collection, leisure and recreation. Subsequent reform in 1996 abolished the regions and districts, and replaced them with unitary authorities. The 2 regions of Lothian and Strathclyde became 16 single-tier authorities. The core authority for Glasgow City was actually reduced in size, despite already severely underbounding the physical and functional city. With no regional tier to redistribute resources from prosperous to declining districts, the new arrangement created considerable incentives for authorities to compete against each other for population, investment and jobs. Many of the new unitary authorities were considered too small to have responsibility for strategic planning and were required to collaborate with neighbours in strategic planning areas (SPAs) de ned by national government (Scottish Of ce, 1994). Four SPAs cover central Scotland, with one for each of the metropolitan regions, one for Falkirk and one for Stirling. For Glasgow city-region, eight authorities were brought together. Collaboration was to be achieved not through a formally constituted joint board with majority decision-making, but through a weaker joint committee arrangement whose recommendations had to be agreed unanimously. The smallest suburban authority thus has the same power of veto as the core city which contains half the region’s population and more than half of its jobs. With no control over major services or investment to implement its plans, and reliant on the voluntary agreement of its partners,

the strategic capacity of these committees appears greatly weakened. Whether this brings longer-term bene ts by forcing the planning process to become more participative and inclusive—weaker policy but stronger implementation through greater commitment of local stake-holders—remains to be seen. The concern must be that policy will re ect the ‘lowest common denominator’ of extreme compromise in the effort to secure unanimous backing. The region also faces dif culties in co-ordinating the work of many different agencies of the Scottish government that have emerged over the past 30 years. The Scottish Of ce set up the Scottish Development Agency (SDA) in 1975 with a remit to promote economic development and urban regeneration. In 1991, the SDA was divided into 13 Local Enterprise Companies (LECs), with 1 covering Greater Edinburgh but 4 for Greater Glasgow. Other agencies have been added or given expanded roles, including the Scottish Special Housing Association, the Housing Corporation (merged to form Scottish Homes in 1989), new water companies, transport authorities, education and training organisations and local development companies. To address this fragmentation, there are a number of collaborative arrangements being put in place. Multiagency partnerships have been formed in Glasgow City, Lanarkshire and Edinburgh City to promote economic development and social inclusion agendas (Bailey et al., 1999). These arrangements are limited to comparatively small areas for which it is relatively easy to establish a set of common interests. The only broader partnerships are engaged in allocating European structural funds and in transport planning. Two examples of the former cover the previous Strathclyde region and a disconnected set of districts in eastern Scotland. They lack the powers and time-horizon to be properly strategic (Danson et al., 1999). The latter involve groups of authorities from different structure plan areas beginning to collaborate on transport policy. The need for such bodies re ects the limited scale of the structure plan

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areas. Separate transport partnerships cover the east and west of central Scotland. No arrangements exist to cover the whole of central Scotland. If formal governance structures are weak, one can also look for evidence of a regional perspective in collaborative arrangements established for particular purposes or projects. These may act as catalysts for further co-operation or by starting a dialogue over regional issues. The one example of a truly central Scotland project at present is the Millennium Link—a project to re-open the Glasgow – Edinburgh canal route. This can be portrayed as a successful example of partnership working across the region, having involved a wide range of agencies and £80 million of capital investment. The signi cance of this voluntary partnership should not be overstated, however. It has had a relatively simple and uncontroversial task; the route for the canal is already determined and the project has a de nite lead agency, British Waterways, which owns the canal along its entire length. Substantial European funds were also available to support the project. The interdependence of neighbours is obvious and necessitates a common approach, while every participant will derive a direct bene t on completion which they could not have achieved acting on their own. There has been little need for detailed negotiation and compromise on the part of different areas. Few strategic projects have outcomes which bene t every partner so directly. Competition between areas is the norm rather than the exception. In recent years, the core cities have competed directly for a variety of national attractions or facilities: the former royal yacht Britannia, the National Gallery of Scottish Art and Design, Scotland’s rst Harvey Nichols (an up-market department store), its rst Ikea store (the Swedish furniture giant), designation as UK City of Architecture and Design for 1999, and even the temporary home for the new Scottish Parliament. Resources for urban regeneration, housing, transport and other capital projects have also been increasingly allocated through competi-

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tive bidding processes rather than negotiated according to criteria of need which may have fuelled the competitive ethos and made collaboration more dif cult. Conference centres, tourist attractions and science centres have been duplicated when the region might have bene ted more from large consolidated facilities. A recent book on Scottish architecture and planning, provocatively titled Clone City, characterised the increasing competition between Edinburgh and Glasgow as “a bare-knuckle ght for investment and the building of cultural institutions” (Glendinning and Page, 1999, p. 113).

4. PURs as a Strategic Vision for Central Scotland? The extent to which central Scotland can be described as a PUR at present is mixed, although there are grounds for viewing it as economically integrated and becoming more so over time. A separate issue is whether spatial planning policies should attempt to promote closer integration in the future. This raises questions about the value of the PUR concept as a spatial planning tool. Unfortunately, evidence of the bene ts of PURs is weak at present, as the discussion above shows. An alternative approach is to consider the views of the ‘key actors’ engaged in spatial planning in the region. Interviewees were asked for their considered views of the PUR concept and its applicability to central Scotland. Some wellinformed respondents thought that the concept was loosely speci ed and were wary of a ‘sound bite’ concept becoming policy. They felt that the potential bene ts of polycentric forms of development, compared with monocentric, needed to be demonstrated more clearly. Several suggested that the planning problems in central Scotland were different from those facing locations in the ‘core’ of Europe. There, the agenda was driven by the need to manage growth in the ‘central and capital cities region’ in a way that was economically and environmentally sustainable. In central Scotland, particularly

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in the west, the main challenge was to raise the level of growth. There was some doubt, therefore, whether the same planning tool or ‘vision’ could be of value in these rather different contexts. In spite of these reservations, many respondents could see the value in thinking more broadly about the form and functioning of the region as a whole. Current institutional arrangements for structure planning, economic development and transport planning reinforced east– west divisions. Yet economic changes were leading to greater interdependence and many respondents could see a value in having a single strategic framework or vision for the future development of central Scotland. It could, for example, begin to address the current imbalanced economic and demographic trends between the east and the west. Some of their problems are complementary—for example, congestion and labour shortages in Edinburgh; unemployment, vacant land and underutilised infrastructure in Glasgow. The advent of the Scottish Parliament offers an important opportunity to develop a more strategic perspective. This broad agreement covered a wide range of different views on the scope and content of such a framework, and its relationship with existing arrangements for structure planning. Support for a common strategic planning framework also did not mean that it should take the form of a PUR. Other possibilities should be considered as well. There was also considerable scope for closer collaboration between the two cities outside a spatial framework given their complementary assets, institutions and cultures. Several respondents felt that an overarching vision for central Scotland was essential to provide the basis for strategic infrastructure decisions, but there was little or no support for a traditional structure plan to be prepared for the region. This process was seen as too cumbersome and in exible. There were questions too about the relationships between any new framework and existing planning arrangements. Given the importance of the two city-regions in functional terms, some interviewees stressed the

need to rebuild strategic capacity at the level of the metropolitan areas. They were wary of undermining this by creating a planning organisation at a higher level. Two tiers between Scottish and local authority levels would make the region ‘overplanned’. 5. Conclusions This paper has addressed two main questions: to what extent does central Scotland operate as a PUR at present; and should it be planned as such in future? On the rst question, while it is reasonable to view central Scotland as a single region, the evidence that it forms a fully integrated PUR is weak. It meets the basic prerequisite for being considered a potential PUR—its physical form. It has two separate cities reasonably close to each other with neither dominant. The proximity of the cities, combined with their relative isolation from the rest of Britain and Europe, must make them interdependent in many respects, even though evidence on this is patchy at present. The clearest evidence (on labour markets) shows the region divided into two city-regions with only weak connections between east and west, although some respondents consider this evidence to be outof-date. Business linkages may provide stronger evidence for functional integration. These have yet to be properly studied, although it is clear that some companies already treat the region as a single functional area, accessing labour or technical expertise from both major cities. The region does appear to be treated as a single destination by many industrial investors. Travel ows across the region for shopping or leisure purposes are also likely to be increasing. Yet, the region does not display the strong patterns of specialisation predicted by PUR theory. The industrial structure reinforces the view of a region composed of two increasingly similar city-regions with similar core– outer contrasts. Further research on functional differentiation within industries might provide stronger evidence of complementarity emerging. The region lacks a common cultural or

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political basis to identify it as a coherent PUR. While it has a strong external identity based on its physical geography, there is no unifying culture or shared identity among residents which is unique to the area. Government structures are spatially and functionally fragmented. There has never been a tier of government at this level, nor is this on the agenda given the recent creation of the Scottish Parliament. The city-regional tier disappeared with the last local government reforms and has been further weakened by the creation of an increasing number of separate local agencies involved in economic development, urban regeneration, housing, tourism and other elds. Multi-sectoral partnerships have begun to develop, but it is too soon to expect them to engage in serious negotiation and compromise over strategic issues. Their territories are also too small to address central-Scotland-wide challenges. On the second question, the basic argument that any group of neighbouring cities should plan as a single PUR is not very persuasive at present. The idea has some general ‘commonsense’ appeal. The interactions between cities in close proximity are increasing with the growing mobility of people and goods. The economic arguments for this particular form of collaboration, however, do not appear strong, and do not lead to the conclusion that the key policy interventions should be in the eld of spatial planning. The concept of the PUR may end up merely justifying existing transport infrastructure policies. Many important strategic questions, such as the most appropriate settlement structure for the region, and ways to reduce the uneven character of development, are left open. There is a strong sense in which the arguments for this ‘balanced’ or polycentric approach re ect historical or cultural preferences of particular regions within north-west Europe, rather than a ‘rational’ analysis of alternative strategies. Finally, many practitioners support the idea of a strategic vision for central Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament is the obvious body to take this forward. There is also emerging support for the idea of closer col-

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laboration between the two cities on speci c policies and projects that solve common problems and that generate mutual bene ts through economies of scale. Regional issues are not the only ones on the agenda, however. There are also strong arguments for strengthening arrangements for planning at the metropolitan scale. Note 1.

The paper draws upon material gathered through interviews with key actors engaged in spatial planning in central Scotland. These interviews were conducted as part of a research project funded under the European Commission’s INTERREG IIC programme, within the North West Metropolitan Area of Europe. The study is designed to provide a better understanding of the functioning and dynamics of this type of region. In late 1999 and early 2000, 20 interviews were carried out with representatives of the Scottish Executive, local planning authorities, economic development agencies, the national housing agency and transport and electronics industries. While not constituting a representative sample of opinion, the interviewees were selected to give a range of perspectives—geographical as well as sectoral or institutional. The results of these interviews are reported in greater detail in Bailey and Turok (forthcoming).

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