governance: Manchester as metropolis, city-region ...

The search for territorial fixes in sub-national governance: the politics of the city-region in Manchester, England

Iain Deas, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL UK Tel: + 44 161 275 6884 Fax: +44 161 275 6893 Email: [email protected]

Paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning fourth Joint Congress, 6-11th July, Chicago.

Abstract There is now an extensive academic literature detailing the dynamics of the ‘scalar’ interrelationships between institutions and policy initiatives organised at different geographical scales. Recent writings have emphasised the contingency and complexity of re-scaling, and the continuing importance (but changing territorial organisation) of the state. The emergence of an array of (city-)regional institutions in Britain is significant in terms of its indeterminate nature and uncertain territorial form, as the precise ways in which it is manifested is influenced by conflict between actors allied to ‘regions’ configured along differing lines. It is on the dynamics of the interrelationships between and within these ‘regions’ that the paper focuses. The paper, first, spells out the key arguments driving the development of city-region policy and institutionbuilding, before highlighting the main changes to national policy in England on cities and regions. Second, the paper assesses the particular ways in which these have been interpreted and applied in the Manchester city-region. The paper concludes by considering the degree to which this experience sheds further light on the dynamics of the re-scaling of governance and the territorial restructuring of the state.

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Background The period since 1997 has seen a variety of experiments in devising new arrangements for subnational territorial governance and local economic development policymaking in England’s provincial cities and regions. A succession of initiatives based initially on the English administrative regions, more recently on city-regional territories covering metropolitan areas, and latterly (and more tentatively) on supra-regional growth corridors have featured on the agendas of the Blair and Brown administrations. At the same time, underlying these innovations has been longstanding academic interest in interpreting the emergence of what, to some commentators, is a new form of territorial policy and politics, linked from some perspectives to a broader reordering of the geographical organisation of the state. Global economic restructuring, it has been argued, has been the driver for a process of re-territorialisation, in which nation-states have become progressively less well-equipped to meet the needs of internationally-organised capital, prompting the rise of a range of institutions organised at different geographical scales (see, for example, Scott, 2001; Scott and Storper, 2003), and, more fundamentally, a reorganisation of the broader political-geographical structure of the state (Brenner, 2001, 2004; Jessop, 1994, 2000). Some of these ideas have been criticised for their narrow focus on the diminishing power of the state and for their tendency to overstate its extent and significance, for a related propensity to exaggerate the potential for regional and city-regional institutions to revive stagnant economies, and for a lack of empirical evidence of this ‘glocalization’, beyond a few atypical cases (see, for example, Lovering, 2001; Jonas and Ward, 2007). Nevertheless, it is clear that this pattern of (city-)regional institutional-building is significant in terms of its magnitude, but also (arguably) in respect of what some view as a consensual neo-liberal agenda that underpins a substantial proportion of the policy interventions associated with these new institutions. Equally, this kind of institutional development is also significant because even if one can question the extent and rapidity of economic globalisation and the consequently diminished ability of the state to manage economic change, the overwhelming perception amongst policy actors, certainly in British cities, is that this process of glocalization is a reality to which they must respond by reshaping institutions and developing appropriate strategy and policy. It is also of relevance for the purposes of this paper that the proliferation of sub-national institutions is of indeterminate nature, certainly in territorial form, as the precise ways in which it is expressed is conditioned by conflict between actors allied to ‘regions’ configured along differing lines. It is the nature of the interrelationships between and within these ‘regions’, and the shape and form of policy initiatives pursued, which provide the two major elements on which this paper focuses. The existence of multiple axes of regional institution-building, while stemming in part from the same stimuli, has resulted in protracted conflict, and the experience of Manchester in North West England – on which the paper focuses as a case study – demonstrates the changing degree to which this has shaped (and in some cases constrained) the development of regionalism(s) to date. The paper explores the contention that while this conflict could be viewed largely as one about the precise definition of the geographical spaces around which regionallybased interventions are organised – pitting administrative region against city-region, for example – the reality is a more complex one in which apparent territorial tension is superimposed upon underlying ideological friction. The more recent literature on the re-scaling of governance is accurate, it is hypothesised, in its emphasis on the contingency and ambiguity of region-building efforts, but underplays the degree to which this is based not on conflict between what in reality 2

are socially-constructed territories and scales, but on a direction in sub-national economic development policy-making that is much more complex and less uni-directional than simplistic accounts of a shift toward straightforwardly ‘neo-liberal’ regionalism imply. The remainder of the paper, firstly, spells out the key characteristics of the changes to national policy in England on cities and regions and how they can be interpreted. Secondly, it explores the particular ways in which this has been translated and applied in Manchester – a city viewed by central government as having made exemplary progress in developing a voluntaristic model of flexible city-regional governance on which other cities could draw (Burch et al, 2007: 37; Lyons, 2007: 148, 188), and identified by a number of reports as an appropriate test-bed to pilot various forms of formalised city-regional governance (see, for example, Marshall and Finch, 2006; ODPM, 2006a). The paper concludes by considering the degree to which this experience sheds further light on the attempts to make sense of the dynamics of the re-scaling of governance. Regions, city-regions and supra-regions: the search for sub-national territorial governance solutions in England Devising more effective territorial governance arrangements through which to improve the social and economic fortunes of Britain’s cities and regions has long been a focus of policy attention. In response to a welter of evidence to suggest that cities in Britain, outside the buoyant South East region around London, have experienced sustained, structurally-rooted decline extending over many decades (for example, Robson et al, 2000a; Parkinson et al, 2004), a succession of governments have contributed to the development of an elaborate, multi-level geography of institutions and policy initiatives. Attempts to address the manifold problems evident, to varying extents, across virtually all of the major British provincial cities and in most of their regions have involved area-based policies that have extended across spatial scales, from the tightly-defined neighbourhoods that provided the focus for the Blair administration’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, to the much larger territories, containing millions of residents across extensive urban and rural areas, around which regional policy is based. Whereas English areabased policy at the scale of the neighbourhood has tended frequently (with the obvious exception of the 1980s and early 1990s) to focus in the main on ameliorating social distress and promoting community cohesion, the emphasis of policy at the scale of the city and region has been predominantly economic, encompassing both a desire to promote territorial equity by addressing interregional economic disparity, and a sometimes contradictory desire to facilitate growth and harness development opportunities. Since the election of the first Blair government in 1997, sub-national economic development policy in England has been pursued via the separate but linked axes of the city and the region. The latter, in particular, was initially the subject of high-profile policy-maker interest, influenced by the exemplary experience of other regions in advanced economies, in which ‘competitiveness’ was said to have been constructed through an emphasis on skills, technology and innovative working practices, underpinned by cohesive networks of regionally-based public and private institutions (see, for example, Cooke et al., 1998; Florida, 1995; Held et al, 1999; Ohmae, 1995; Morgan, 1997). Responding partly to the approaches pioneered in these ‘innovative’ regions, the mid-1990s saw a succession of high-profile reports conclude that the creation of a more robust regional institutional infrastructure was necessary for the English regions to engineer their economic revival (see, for example, Regional Policy Commission, 1996). In response, the 3

Regional Development Agencies Act of 1998 facilitated new regional economic development bodies in each of England’s standard administrative regions. The publication in 2002 of a government White Paper, Your Region, Your Choice, responded further to these arguments, foreshadowing the 2003 Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act. A programme of referenda was instituted in 2004 to seek public assent for the creation of directlyelected Regional Assemblies in the three northern English regions. In the event, central government, concerned about the broader electoral consequences of the potential failure to secure a ‘yes’ vote, shelved the referenda for the two regions, the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber, perceived as least supportive of the Assembly proposal. A subsequent referendum in November 2004 in the North East, long considered to be the region in which support for greater autonomy was greatest and popular regional identity most pronounced, saw an unexpectedly decisive vote against the proposed Assembly. This was a result which postponed indefinitely the prospect of formal regional government materialising in the English regions. It signalled a halt to the apparently uni-linear growth trajectory of regionalism over the course of the preceding decade, reflecting a disquiet amongst key actors about the extension of regional governance beyond the very limited form that existed from the early-mid-1990s, and embodying a view amongst some that regional institutions ought to be modest in scale and loose and semi-formal in structure. But it would be wrong to conclude, however, that this represented the beginnings of the demise of regional governance. Even in the aftermath of the North East referendum result, regionally-based institutions – the Government Offices of the Regions and the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) – appeared likely to endure, at least until a future change of national government. Indeed, there continued to be support within government for economic, if not political, regionalism, with ministers closely allied to the then Chancellor (and future Prime Minister) arguing that RDAs ought to provide a basis for driving economic growth, and urging caution about the alternative of developing stronger city-regional governance and restructuring local government (Balls et al, 2006). And despite the apparent absence of any significant support for a formal tier of regional government, even the indirectly-elected Regional Assemblies established in 1999 were set to continue for a time, their future guaranteed in the short-term by the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act of 2004 and the resultant need to have in place a regional planning body to prepare the now statutory Regional Spatial Strategies. Yet despite the rejection of formal regional government, there continues to be evidence of a persistent desire amongst policy elites within the English provincial regions for some form of stronger sub-national approach to economic development policy-making and territorial governance. This explains the continuing sequence of innovations that have paralleled institution-building at the scale of the standard administrative region. These can be considered under two sub-headings: efforts related to the development of city-regional governance; and the more tentative and experimental forays in the development of broader supra-regional policymaking. The remainder of this section considers each in turn, before the paper moves on to consider how each of these axes of institution-building has been experienced in the Manchester case study.

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From regions to city-regions Alongside the growth of English regionalism from early 1990s until the 2004 referendum in the North East, the impetus underlying metropolitan governance – at the narrower scale of the cityregion – also began to grow, albeit more modestly and initially in a much less high-profile way than was the case for the larger administrative regions. Part of this again was as a result of the increasing appeal to policy actors of arguments that the (re)creation of new territorially-based initiatives and institutions, this time at the scale of the metropolitan city-region, could provide a means of helping to induce broader urban economic revival and contribute to wider national competitiveness. Such arguments were said to have particular potency in the English context in light not only of the pronounced inter-regional disparities that characterised the country’s economic geography, but also the acute lack of any major provincial urban centres with the dynamism of the likes of Toulouse, Munich, Stuttgart or other non-capital cities with the status genuinely to compete in the global economy with the established world cities. While many of the major English provincial cities had experienced some growth in the late 1980s and 1990s (for example, in relation to retail, financial and professional services, leisure and tourism, and city centre housing), the contribution to national competitiveness was weak and socio-economic problems within the cities remained as intractable as ever (Robson, 2001; Parkinson et al, 2004). With London regaining metropolitan government through the establishment of the Greater London Authority in 2000, and, uniquely in England, possessing its own geographicallycoterminous RDA (the London Development Agency) to help sustain an already robust economy, the case began to grow for instituting more coherent forms of city-regional governance for the major provincial cities. These arguments were central to the agenda of the Core Cities Group, established in the mid1990s and covering the local authorities of eight of England’s principal provincial cities. The case articulated by the Core Cities Group to central government was partly informed by arguments around the need to create and fund new sub-national intergovernmental economic development strategies. The crux of the argument was that territorial imbalances were detrimental to national economic well-being and that if England were to develop the kinds of thrusting provincial cityregions evident elsewhere in Europe, central government would have to empower major cities that had historically been constrained by weak local government. Sustained economic underperformance in much of the English North and Midlands (and particularly in their urbanindustrial heartlands) could only be addressed by augmenting existing flows of central government funding and, more cautiously, by creating new institutional configurations and policy interventions to take greater account of ‘real’ or functional city-regional boundaries. Jointly, they argued, the eight principal city-regions of England would accommodate close to one-third of the national population, and through increased funding linked to the development of more cohesive city-regional economic development strategies, could each represent more credible entities as competitors in the global economy. This could involve addressing their fragmentation across neighbouring local government jurisdictions, and correcting their under-bounding, through the creation of new inter-district alliances. New voluntaristic city-regional partnerships and networks of local authorities and other institutional actors – and other “city-regional solutions” (Parkinson et al, 2004: 75) – rather than a return to some variant of formal metropolitan government, they contended, would provide a way forward. At the same time, there was a need to work harmoniously alongside existing regional level bodies, and in particular the RDAs.

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This was an argument pitched almost entirely in terms of national competitiveness: in terms of growth rather than territorial redistribution. The aim was explicitly not to siphon economic activity from South East England, but to promote the development of the provincial cities whilst simultaneously providing more “‘space’ for London to develop its unique global city flagship role” (Core Cities Group, 2003a: 2). In this way, they argued, it would be possible to “‘add more cylinders to the UK’s economic engine’…[without] redistributing the wealth already created in London and the south east” (Core Cities Group 2002: 6). What was needed, the argument ran, was a redrawn institutional geometry which recognised the reality that core cities would be the motor for any future economic revival in the English provincial regions, and this would mean both responding to the weak-resource bases of the cities, and ensuring that RDAs began to give greater priority to their main constituent cities: …the governmental and institutional landscape of regions, cities and neighbourhoods [comprises a] spatial architecture of economic competitiveness [that] is complex – if not confused – and unstable. … [G]etting the right geometry for economic functions and institutions is … complex… [but] the evidence from continental Europe is that increasingly the city is regarded as too small and the region too large a platform on which to base economic competitiveness. The trend is to develop city-regional solutions, most often on an informal basis, although occasionally and successfully, on a formal basis. This suggests that what is good enough for the successful urban economies of continental Europe ought to be good enough for our under-performing cities. There is an incentive if not an imperative for places to develop and implement strategies, policies and instruments that pull core cities and their economic hinterlands together rather than apart (Parkinson et al, 2004: 75).

The Core Cities case had instant resonance with local and national policy elites. Although it had little if any tangible effect on the governance of metropolitan areas in the short term, it was one that began to receive an increasingly sympathetic hearing from central government, beginning with the Cities, Regions and Competitiveness working group, established in 2002 and drawing its membership from the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Treasury and (significantly) the Regional Development Agencies (Core Cities Group, 2003b). Thus, while the restoration of formal metropolitan government, Greater London excepted, remained on the peripheries of the debate, the case for stronger city-regional governance grew apace during the tenure of the Blair governments from 1997. The growing influence of this argument that city-regions represent the political geography best suited to narrowing the disparities between the provinces and London and the South-East has largely coincided with the two related sets of idea. The first is the re-discovered notion that it is cities which drive national economic growth (for example, Core Cities Group, 2004; HM Treasury, 2006) – an argument used repeatedly by proponents of city-regional governance. Thus, there is apparently “growing recognition of the pivotal role cities play in modern economies” (Core Cities, 2004: 7); rising awareness that “cities drive prosperity” (Urban Task Force, 2005:9); and an increasing appreciation that “cities matter for regional and national economic performance” (HM Treasury, 2006: 17). Second, alongside this argument is the related view that institutional capacity at the city-regional level ought to be expanded in order to allow cities to benefit from the increasingly agglomerative tendencies evident in contemporary economic activity. Such a view holds that those cities that have profited most from this to date have tended to be those that are large, diverse and highly integrated – all characteristics that city-regional governance should be tasked with promoting (Harding, 2007a: 450). In this vein, the Urban Task

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Force (2005:17), for example, argued in support of “city region mayors to integrate the city region strategies and investment plans for regeneration, planning, housing, economic development and transport”. Other proponents of city-regional governance, such as the Work Foundation, have argued that the best hope for revitalising provincial urban economies lies in developing them as vibrant centres rich in highly-skilled knowledge-based industries, and that the creation of these ‘Ideopolises’ requires stronger city-regional governance (Jones, 2006). As it is, provincial cities are typically seen as lacking the institutional infrastructure to capitalise upon the potential afforded by agglomerative tendencies. The State of the Cities progress report (ODPM, 2005a:10), for example, argues on the basis of the experience of a sample of 56 areas that there is widespread “support for the current moves to greater scale and the focus on city regions”, with the only caveat that, “the policy thrust … present[s] challenges related to multiple strategies, overlapping boundaries and a shortage of local political delivery systems.” In other words, an absence of institutional capacity, linked to the dispersion of power amongst functionally and territorially overlapping institutions, is the most significant obstacle to the establishment of effective city-regional governance. By contrast, the advent of strengthened metropolitan governance in Greater London is said to have been effective in underpinning the continued growth of the capital’s economy (ODPM, 2005b) and could conceivably facilitate that ‘super-region’ to grow still further, relative to provincial cities and regions (Harding, 2007a). Clearly, the notion of English city-regions with effective governance structures and the corresponding potential to contribute more to national economic growth and fulfil a role similar to those of their European counterparts has grown in importance. However, questions remain about the detail of how such city-regions are to be defined and configured. Amongst the increasingly diverse range of proposals for, and definitions of, city-regional governance in England (Parr, 2005), contemporary suggestions fall broadly into two groups. The first centres on those which advocate various kinds of formal city-region government, from Senior’s (1969) proposed alternative to the Redcliffe-Maud commission (Redcliffe-Maud and Wood, 1974), to the Institute for Public Policy Research proposal for directly-elected city-region mayors targeted at the largest cities, armed with substantial budgets devolved from RDAs and with control over EU Structural Funds, backed with modest amounts of locally-raised revenue (Marshall and Adams, 2006; Marshall and Finch, 2006). The OECD (2006), similarly, argued in a report on Newcastle that a London-style elected mayor be extended to the city-region as the best way of managing economic development. The alternative is for one of a number of less formalised models, which as the State of the English Cities final report (ODPM, 2006b: 103) notes, has a strong measure of support amongst local policy elites because it minimises the potential for major institutional upheaval. Such approaches could involve some form of indirectly elected mayor or executive office at the city-regional scale to manage issues of strategic supra-district significance, linked to variable geographies based on differently constituted and delimited partnerships for different types of service delivery (ODPM, 2006a). Alternatively, control over budgets could be transferred to local authorities from a range of quangos (LGA, 2006), or a variety of locallyagreed mechanisms (such as Local Area Agreements or Local Strategic Partnerships) could be employed to develop sub-regional coordination of labour market, planning, housing, transport and economic development functions devolved from other institutions (PACEC, 2007). This could also involve inter-district metropolitan area pacts – multi-area agreements (MAAs), as outlined in the 2006 Local Government White Paper – to allow constituent local authorities to ‘join-up’ their interventions with each other, and with central government spending departments 7

(Taylor and Wilson, 2006). Or it could involve different institutional forms in different places, dependant on specific local circumstances, desires and capacity (NLGN, 2005). As Foster (2001) notes, it is the ‘fuzziness’ of regionalism – its versatility as a concept and its ability to be interpreted in quite different ways – that in part explains its portability and the persistence of its appeal to policy-makers. But the co-existence of multiple models of regionalism has prevented any clear consensus about what form city-regional government should take in England. This was an issue considered by the government-commissioned Lyons Inquiry into Local Government (Lyons, 2007), and which also fed into the Local Government White Paper in 2006. The thrust of both documents was to continue to encourage city-regional governance to develop in a flexible, organic way, linked to local specificities and evolving through long-term voluntaristic inter-district collaboration, using MAAs developmentally, where there is demand. Part of this view drew on the underlying notion of ‘double devolution’, in which powers and responsibilities were to be devolved ‘to the town hall’ (from Whitehall departments and local quangos) and ‘from the town hall’ (to neighbourhood-based organisations and citizens) (DCLG, 2006a; Mulgan and Bury, 2006). But as a result of the lack of any clear consensus about how best to organise city-regional governance, and because of reluctance on the part of central government to impose any kind of blanket one-size-fits-all solution across cities with differing views on how best (or how far) to develop new forms of governance, both the Lyons Inquiry and the Local Government White Paper skirted around the issue. The inconclusive outcome, in the words of Lyons (2007: 148), was simply to reiterate that “it would be desirable to locate a greater proportion of relevant resources and decision-making power on the economic issues at the sub-regional level, by devolving more powers to ensure decisions are aligned with the needs of the local economy”. The White Paper similarly reiterated support for a process of bottom-up development that would build on central government’s earlier series of city-region summits, but with structures to be agreed locally. Subsequent parliamentary scrutiny of this proposal was critical of its vagueness, contending that: “the lack of clear detail…on the future development of city-regions [is] disappointing. While the Government’s determination to allow governance models to evolve from the ‘bottom up’ is…laudable, it has failed either to set clear parameters for, or to express a specific vision of, what is achievable…Unless further statements clarifying the potential for, and limits on, city-regions are made soon, the city-region movement will again lose momentum” (House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee, 2007a: 69).

Few concrete proposals built on the general growth in ‘city-region-mindedness’ that had accompanied the White Paper. Central government’s response to the Local Government White Paper, the Lyons report and the Select Committee critique, was to reflect, draw upon earlier HM Treasury (2006) work and commission a wide-ranging review of sub-national economic development and regeneration, which in turn would feed into the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2007, setting spending priorities and agreeing targets across Whitehall ministries for the next three years (DCLG, 2007a). Proposals in this sub-national review (SNR) continued the cautious and conservative process of developing city-regional governance incrementally, doing little more than reiterating the need to “explor[e] the potential for allowing groups of local authorities to establish statutory subregional bodies for economic development policy areas beyond transport”, again linked to intergovernmental MAAs about spending and performance targets, to be established in 2008 (HM Treasury, 2007: 3). There was also encouragement from central government for the use of MAAs to pilot city-regional governance arrangements for 8

transport, as a precursor to the establishment of formal London-style authorities (DCLG, 2007b: 47). Suggestions that central government might in future apply greater force in encouraging, if not compelling, local authorities to develop MAAs came in the form of plans for the new system of Comprehensive Area Assessment scrutiny of local government performance to identify instances in which local authorities should establish MAAs (Walker, 2008a). Most of these proposals, then, were focused narrowly on the creation of cross-authority multiagency partnerships in economic development and transport. For example, responding to the desire for better coordinated urban economic development strategy that had informed demands for city-regional governance, city Economic Development Companies, to be based either upon cities, contiguous city-regions or groupings of linked towns, were proposed (DCLG, 2006b: 11). Beyond this, however, there was the potentially far-reaching suggestion that more extensive reorganisation of local government might be a possibility in the future, but only in the event that local actors wished to move beyond the narrow focus of existing city-regional efforts: “some sub-regions may wish to go beyond MAAs and other existing mechanisms for sub-regional collaboration. Some sub-regions have already established joint committees to strengthen partnership working. However, there may be advantages in strengthening the statutory basis for sub-regional collaboration where there is demand from local authorities and it is appropriate to do so…[I]n circumstances where co-operation is proposed that extends significantly beyond economic development to cover a large part of local authorities' activities, councils may wish to consider whether an appropriate way forward, perhaps using the processes under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, might be to merge, or to propose some well-targeted and clearly focused reorganisation” (DCLG/DBERR, 2008: 45-46; emphasis added).

Overall, though, the future envisaged by the SNR was that for the most part change in territorial governance would continue to be modest and exploratory, and continue to be conditioned by local desires (and therefore constrained by local conflict and uncertainty).

City-regions and supra-regions Alongside efforts, both nationally and within urban areas, to develop stronger city-regional institutions and policies, experiments in territorial governance have also occurred at the broader supra-national scale, and this too has had implications for metropolitan scale policymaking. Part of this is linked to the Sustainable Communities plan (ODPM, 2003a), launched in 2003, in an attempt, first, to revitalise declining ‘low demand’ housing market areas in many of England’s northern cities, and second, to support the development of new settlements in the buoyant South East, most ambitiously along a new Thames Gateway intended to accommodate housing development pressure spilling eastwards from overheating London. The advent of the Sustainable Communities plan has been interpreted by some as illustrating government’s view that national spatial policy ought to be geared in large measure towards facilitating further growth in London and its region, reflecting an underlying argument that the wellbeing of the capital is critical to national competitiveness (see, for example, Raco, 2007, 2008). The Thames Gateway has been justified in these terms, its Chief Executive arguing that “unlocking the Gateway’s potential could contribute up to £12bn annually to the UK economy” (DCLG, 2007c).

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This kind of apparently incipient consensual view emerging within central government at the inception of the Sustainable Communities Plan in turn prompted a response from policy-makers outside London, which held that greater effort ought also to be devoted to resurrecting the economies of the principal cities in England’s North and Midlands (see, for example, Core Cities Group, 2002, 2003a). There was concern, for example, that while the resources directed to the Thames Gateway and the three ‘growth areas’ of South East England involved direct central government resource of £610 million (in addition to transport infrastructure spending of £2.2 billion and a further £3 billion levered from other agencies and the private sector) (ODPM, 2003b: 4), the monies allocated to the cities and regions of the North and Midlands were comparatively meagre. Initial funding of £500 million from 2003-2006 for Housing Market Renewal (HMR) in the nine pathfinder areas was later augmented by increased annual funding, reaching £450 million for 2007/08 (Cole and Nevin, 2004), but this contrasted with the £7 billion government later claimed to have invested in public sector resources for the Thames Gateway (DCLG, 2007c). And at the same time, there was also concern from some that HMR could become concerned principally with narrowly-defined supply-side physical regeneration of housing, reducing the overall supply of stock and reorienting the form of provision to put it more in line with prevailing demand, rather than reviving urban economies and stimulating demand for housing (Cole and Nevin, 2004: 70). Government’s response to this provincial policy-maker critique, outlined in Manchester in 2004, one year after the publication of the Sustainable Communities plan, was to propose what appeared initially to be a series of alternative inter-regional growth corridors outside the South East: the Northern Way, linking the principal cities of the three northern English regions, together with similar initiatives for the Midlands regions (‘Smart Growth’) and the South West (‘The Way Ahead’). The mechanisms for inducing economic revival in the Northern Way initially extended little beyond the commitment to develop a growth strategy utilising a range of existing budget streams, mainly a variety of urban regeneration, infrastructure and training initiatives, targeted towards the main cities within the growth corridor (ODPM, 2004). A £100 million ‘growth fund’ was allocated in 2004 to assist initial developmental efforts to produce a strategy directed at the “£29 billion challenge” of narrowing the interregional disparity in output (Northern Way Steering Group, 2004). As the Northern Way initiative evolved in the lead-up to the publication of an action plan in 2005, the emphasis was increasingly on city-regions as the building block for the corridor – partly as a result of a conscious decision that this was the scale best suited to developing institutional capacity through which to bolster economic growth (Harding, 2007a), but also because of inter-city rivalries and a deeply ingrained go-it-alone mentality borne of received wisdom about urban competition. Critics argued that the entire initiative was developing as a series of discrete city-regional strategies, rather than the polycentric, inter-linked pan-regional growth corridor envisaged by some at the outset (González, 2006: 11). By 2006, central government had announced that direct, ring-fenced resourcing, through the growth fund, to help develop the Northern Way was to end. By that point, however, it was already clear that the entire initiative, with the exception of collective lobbying and marketing efforts, had come to be based almost completely on developing separate strategies for each of the constituent areas, prompting many to call into question its whole future (Goodchild and Hickman, 2006). Beyond that, pan-regional activity was broadly restricted to collective lobbying of central government (especially in relation to the SNR and the Spending Review of 2007) and feasibility research on issues such as knowledge-based economic development and improvement in transport

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infrastructure (the latter the focus for the £45 million committed by the three RDAs from 200811) (Northern Way Steering Group, 2007). There have, then, been several, often overlapping efforts to develop institutional and political spaces best suited to revitalising England’s provincial cities and regions. The remainder of this paper assesses the experience of efforts to create new forms of territorial governance, in a context beset by complex politico-geographical conflicts. The next sections consider in greater detail the case of Manchester, as an illustration of the tensions accompanying efforts to develop appropriate territorial institutions and policy initiatives with which to boost economic performance.

Inventing and reinventing territorial governance: Manchester as metropolis, cityregion or (supra)regionally-embedded city? Efforts to agree an appropriate territory around which to organise the governance of Manchester encapsulate many of the wider issues that have confronted local government in Britain over the last three decades and more. Since the abolition of metropolitan government with the disbandment of Greater Manchester County Council (GMC) in 1986, local policy actors have embarked upon a lengthy sequence of experiments in supra-district governance (Hebbert and Deas, 2000). The rationale has been concern about institutional fragmentation and a lack of anything approaching local government extending across the functional city as a whole, let alone its wider city-region. Using data from 2005, the State of the Cities database – central government’s online tool for providing basic city-regional socio-economic and demographic data – shows the population of Manchester’s ‘primary urban area’ (an approximation of the functional city) as 1,769,300, in comparison to an estimated 442,000 for the City Council in the same year. Other efforts to delimit a functional city-region geography have generated still greater populations that extend across the wider polycentric array of towns that encircle Manchester, and which illustrate even more starkly the extent of under-bounding (Robson and Rees, 2008). This has prompted longstanding concern about the consequent constraint upon effective policymaking around issues that transcend district council boundaries, such as strategic land-use planning, economic development and infrastructure. These concerns have been accentuated by a growing sense that this under-bounding has left Manchester, as with other British cities, at a disadvantage in trying to develop policy aimed at reviving its economic fortunes – a concern exacerbated still further by received wisdom about the need for cities to compete with each other. The result from the early-1990s has been a succession of efforts to develop different forms of territorial governance for Manchester, superimposed on the existing residue of more formalised metropolitan governance arrangements that emerged in the wake of the demise of the GMC (see Hebbert and Deas, 2000 for a detailed account). The first significant innovation was the launch in 1994 of City Pride, a short-lived initiative driven in part by managerial questions around the co-ordination of different competitively allocated urban regeneration initiatives, but also, more significantly, by a view that if the economy of Manchester was genuinely to be revitalised in the apparent context of heightened international inter-urban competition, there would be a need to build strategic policy-making capacity that extended across a number of the unitary district authorities of Greater Manchester (Harding, 1999). As a result, the City Pride partnership embraced a variety of public and private sector bodies, led by local authorities but also including a representative business organisation and an array of other government agencies. Its initial 11

boundaries extended beyond Manchester City Council to include the inner areas of the neighbouring districts, giving a population approaching one million – meaningful in terms of the functional local labour market and seen as plausible in comparison with the city’s international peers. Two prospectuses produced in 1994 and 1998 set out a pro-growth agenda for the cityregion’s development over a ten year time span, with the aim that Manchester would become a “European regional capital, a centre for investment growth, an international city of outstanding commercial, cultural and creative potential” (Manchester City Council, 1994: 5). By the late 1990s, the momentum underlying the initiative had begun to dissolve in the wake of the election of the Blair government. Its last significant act was the publication of an Economic Development Plan for the four constituent districts (City Pride Partnership, 2001). For the most part, the documents produced under the City Pride aegis were predictably glib, deliberately sidestepping sensitivities around controversial issues like the distribution of inward investment across the constituent districts or the location of out-of-town retailing, in order to preserve the integrity of what was potentially an unstable coalition of separate, parochial and sectoral interests. Nevertheless, City Pride had some lasting significance in terms of the city-region-based model it offered for pursuing economic development policy. What was of especial significance, rather than the detail of the proposals the strategy contained, was the recognition amongst actors that there needed to be a broadly-based multi-agency strategy and that it should encompass a wider territory than simply the constricted district of Manchester. This initial experience of developing a city-regional growth coalition informed the response of the city’s policy elites to the agenda for city-regional governance developing from the late 1990s. The Core Cities agenda nationally for a time prompted a largely favourable reaction within government, particularly under the tenure, until 2006, of David Miliband as Cabinet minister with responsibility for rejuvenating big city government and continuing the ongoing programme of ‘modernisation’ of local governance. In the years immediately after the election of the Blair government in 1997, support for stronger city-regional governance amongst the city’s leading policy actors – and in particular within Manchester City Council – was fuelled in part by hostility towards formal, elected regional government. But even after the prospect of regional government for the North West receded as the Blair government opted not to pursue elected assemblies, demands for an alternative city-regional model continued. However, while amongst Manchester’s policy elites there was a broad consensus that city-regional governance ought to be pursued as a means of garnering extra resources and (where necessary) building institutional capacity in relation to issues of pan-district significance, there remained little support for the restoration of some form of successor to the metropolitan government of old. On occasion, this put the city at odds with thinking within central government and amongst some of its closest allies. Suggestions that the city, along with Birmingham, was best-placed amongst England’s major cities to be a ‘trailblazer’ for the introduction of a city-regional mayoralty (Marshall and Finch, 2006; IPPR and NWDA, 2006) met with, at best, a lukewarm response in Manchester – and in some cases direction opposition from the city’s leaders (Papas, 2006). It was this desire for loose, informal and flexible city-regional governance, rather than what had come to be viewed as monolithic metropolitan government, that was to dominate the demands of Manchester’s policy elites. But the transition towards city-regional governance has not been one that has gone uncontested, in terms either of the composition of institutional structures and their geography, or of the substantive emphasis of policy. The most instructive illustration of this is 12

provided by the Knowledge Capital initiative, launched in 2003. Bearing the imprimatur of both the City and the North West Development Agency (NWDA), the Knowledge Capital partnership comprised another broad ranging but loose coalition which also included city-regional actors such as MIDAS (the city-regional inward investment promotional body); the then four universities of Greater Manchester and their joint development vehicle, Contact; the local authorities of Manchester, Salford, Trafford and Tameside (but none of the remaining six Greater Manchester districts); the Manchester Local Strategic Partnership (a multi-agency forum responsible for the coordination of neighbourhood renewal activities in the city); two Primary Care Trusts representing health service interests; Greater Manchester Learning and Skills Council; and Manchester Enterprises, an umbrella agency bringing together many of the aforementioned public and private bodies and coordinating the development of economic development policy for the city-region. The central aim was one of stimulating further economic growth by promoting the Manchester city-region as a centre of ‘learning’ and ‘innovation’. This would mean extending and enhancing the range of ‘assets’ – higher education, transport infrastructure, architecture, leisure attractions, cultural industries and the like – perceived to underpin Manchester’s competitiveness as an international city. The documentation produced as part of the initiative was based on what could be viewed as an optimistic narrative of the city-region as a key international actor, arguably under-playing the structural weaknesses that have long characterised its economy (see, for example, Peck and Emmerich, 1992; Turok and Edge, 1999; Giordano and Twomey, 2002). Following a more general trend evident in British cities (González and Ribera-Fumaz, 2006), this involved much in the way of hyperbole linked to the vision of a future Manchester that “[marries] the enhanced economic competitiveness of Helsinki with the urban renaissance of Barcelona to create a truly world class city…” (Manchester City Council/KPC, 2003: 2). By contrast, the specific means by which such a vision might be realised was more sketchy, but followed the established approach of linking together and augmenting a series of existing initiatives: connecting a series of physical regeneration masterplans for inner Manchester to create what was vaguely referred to as an ‘arc of opportunity’; developing links with the central government programme of Housing Market Renewal in Manchester and Salford; or extending and re-branding existing cultural and leisure facilities such as a proposed ‘Manchester Broadway’. With equal predictability, there was also a focus on the usual economic sectors – information and communications technology, biotechnology, (private) professional and financial services, and (public) education and health services – as a way of propelling further growth. More concretely, there was a particular focus on harnessing the asset of the city’s higher education institutions: what May and Perry (2002), in a report for the Knowledge Capital partnership, describe as ‘knowledge factories’. Drawing on the usual reference points for knowledge-driven new industrial spaces – the Cambridges of Massachusetts and England and so on – the approach views universities as playing a critical role in underpinning future growth via technology transfer, commercial exploitation of research, the physical remodelling of university estates and the development of specialisms in modish areas like nanotechnology or systems biology. Through graduate retention, there would also be a link to another plank of the strategy: the aim of what is referred to as ‘genius generation’, through encouragement for entrepreneurs, for example in cultural industries and digital technologies. But with 22% of Manchester’s working-age residents lacking any qualifications in 2005 (and 17.8% of Greater Manchester’s), there were obvious questions about the viability, in the short-term at least, of the intention to become an internationally competitive ‘ideopolis’ (Hutton, 2002; Westwood and Nathan, 2002). 13

Manchester’s input to the Northern Way initiative built upon the initial Knowledge Capital strategy. Reflecting the city’s hesitance about forming alliances with others outside the immediate city-region – as evidenced in the consistently lukewarm support it had given to efforts to build capacity for the North West region – Manchester’s leading policy actors showed little enthusiasm for the Northern Way as a genuine effort to develop inter-city synergies within a broader pan-regional growth corridor. Instead, perhaps to a greater degree than for the other constituent cities, the dominant view amongst leading politicians and officers in Manchester City Council was that, as the largest city in functional terms within the Northern Way, its contribution to the wider initiative would be to prepare a freestanding city-regional growth strategy, with exploratory work to develop links with other cities (notably Leeds, as recommended by one report (ODPM, 2006a)) of much more marginal importance. Manchester’s was one of a series of City-Regional Development Programmes (CRDPs) published in 2005 for the Northern Way. This again emphasised the need for stronger collaboration in relation to initiatives to help to develop growth sectors seen as significant in global terms. While the substance of the CRDP was in line with the foci of the original Knowledge Capital documentation, its geography was rather different. It envisaged a much broader spatial coverage than before, moving beyond the core set of districts around which most of the city-regional initiatives – from City Pride to Knowledge Capital – had been based. Indeed, extending beyond the ten districts of the old Greater Manchester, the CRDP proposed a territory embracing the former new town of Warrington to the west, and even stretching outside the North West region to the commuter towns of High Peak, beyond Stockport and eastwards to the edges of the Peak District National Park in the East Midlands region. Significantly, the CRDP territory was also proposed to cover three further districts to the south in Cheshire, in the Manchester suburban commuter belt for so long resistant to attempts to include them, and their base of affluent local tax payers, within the metropolitan area (Wannop, 1995). But this time, the inclusion of the swathe of commuter districts was driven not by the politically combustible logic of fiscal consolidation, but by a desire to create a loose partnership covering a territory in which assets – developable land (especially greenfield sites), skilled ‘knowledge’ workers, and appealing neighbourhoods in which to house them – could be maximised and managed more effectively, in the interest of enhanced competitiveness. Indeed, it was probably only on this semi-formal basis that the Cheshire suburban districts would ever have agreed to enter into an alliance with the core Manchester districts and potentially compromise their autonomy as self-governing jurisdictions. Viewed in the context of historical efforts, many of them frustrated, to develop a more meaningful space for metropolitan governance, this city-regional geography therefore marked a significant step forward, uniting the core city with the bulk of its suburban hinterland. It marked a significant turnaround in core-periphery relations within the city-region in that in the past, Manchester City Council had been floating the possibility, to the annoyance of many of its neighbours, of seeking government support to annex part or all of their territories within an expanded core city local authority (Deas and Ward, 2002). But continued tensions between Manchester City Council and the other districts at the core of Greater Manchester, on the one hand, and to an even greater extent the suburban authorities, on the other, have continued to limit the scope for translating collaborative inter-district goodwill into meaningful city-regional governance structures that have any degree of formality or permanence. By 2006, the result was that protracted debate about the shape and form of city-regional governance culminated in a 14

proposed settlement characterised, it could be argued, by conservatism and compromise. Within Manchester City Council, there was deep-seated reluctance to lobby for a city-regional mayoral model, with formal powers and resources and an associated bureaucracy that could come to constitute a rival power base to the city itself. Outside the city, in Greater Manchester and beyond, there continued to be little appetite for the creation of new structures, beyond the selective, voluntaristic approach that had fuelled the CRDP. The upshot was the compromise of a new city-regional structure which reflected the consensus about the need for some form of supra-district approach in respect of local economic development ‘big issues’, but which avoided what was viewed by policy actors as the upheaval entailed in establishing a new bureaucracy that could draw resources, powers and status from the districts. Following ‘city summits’ convened by central government for all of the core cities in 2005 (AGMA, 2005), and subsequent submission to government of ‘business cases’ by each of the cities in 2006 (Manchester City Council and AGMA, 2006a), Manchester and Birmingham were invited to prepare more detailed submissions. Manchester’s proposed a city-regional executive board, comprising the leaders of the constituent district local authorities, which would exercise strategic decision-making powers. The board would be drawn from the leaders of the ten Greater Manchester districts, but – significantly – would not include representation from the wider set of suburban districts included in the CRDP (or the alternative geographies proposed by, for example, Marshall and Finch, 2006 or Robson et al, 2006). The executive board would be assisted by a business leadership council, and would oversee six strategic boards coordinating service delivery for economic development and skills, transport, crime, health, planning and housing, and the environment (Manchester City Council and AGMA, 2006b). In some cases, the expectation was that service delivery, overseen by the city-region executive board, would be coordinated by existing, specialist agencies with city-regional coverage (such as Greater Manchester Learning and Skills Council). In other cases, however, the intention was that Multi-Area Agreements could provide a means of formalising inter-district and inter-agency service provision. In 2007, it was announced that Manchester, defined as the ten AGMA districts, was to be one of 13 sub-regions invited by government to prepare bids to prepare MultiArea Agreements. The focus of the Manchester agreement, approved in 2008, was on developing a cross-district approach for tackling worklessness and labour market exclusion by developing skills, linked to the broader strategy for promoting economic growth in the Manchester cityregion (DCLG, 2007d). This followed the designation in 2006 of Greater Manchester as one of a first wave of 15 City Strategy pathfinders, with the aim of improving skills levels, boosting employability in deprived areas and meeting national targets for labour market participation by 2009. In Greater Manchester, this involved efforts to develop an employer-led Employment and Skills Board, to coordinate training provision across the city-region (Manchester Enterprises, 2007). This emerging city-regional structure began to be given some degree of permanence (albeit still in a relatively low profile way) from 2007, with the announcement that a new statutory authority was to be created to oversee city-regional policymaking. Using powers under the 1972 Local Government Act – the legislation under which the old Greater Manchester County Council had been created – this was again to adopt a senatorial model of representation from the leaders of each of the ten districts. Explicitly ruled out from all of this, however, was the suggestion of a London-style directly-elected city-regional mayor (as suggested by IPPR and NWDA, 2006, for 15

example), on the grounds that, “in Greater Manchester, identification is more with individual towns…[and] we have a long history of joint working [since the abolition of GMC in 1986]” (AGMA, 2006: 6). Instead, the structure was to be one in which power would continue to reside with the leaders of the constituent districts – an agreement formalised from 2008 through the new AGMA constitution, based on the executive board of ten district leaders, advised by a business leadership council and six sectoral commissions led by local policy officials (Figure 1). This structure would be used to manage, or exert influence over some NWDA resources (totalling some £10m annually), European Regional Development Fund (approximately £60m per annum), housing regeneration monies (of up to £260m each year), as well as unspecified skills and worklessness initiatives and, in the future, potentially other area-based regeneration funds. Figure 1: Formal structure for the Manchester city-region, 2008

Source: author The emergence of a formal, explicit structure for city-regional governance was significant. It represented an apparent challenge to the hitherto dominant view amongst local policy actors that city-regional governance ought to be flexible and adaptable, and therefore impermanent in form and shape and only semi-formal in constitution. This preference for a relationship amongst cityregional partners that might be characterised as ‘engaged but not married’ proved difficult to sustain because central government increasingly required greater permanence in terms of structures with which to engage over elements of the agenda for territorial policy that emerged in the wake of the Sub-National Review of 2007. In relation to Multi-Area Agreements, for example, the presence of a single city-regional point of contact clearly offered potential benefits to the centre, especially over locally contentious issues where conflict could be resolved within the city-region without the centre’s involvement. This applied, for example, to the issue of future transport infrastructure. Government approval in 2008 for a Transport Innovation Fund bid for up to £2.7 billion of additional grants and loans, principally to extend the city-region’s tram network, was conditional upon the introduction of a London-style congestion charge for

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motorists. While the injection of government resource was welcomed, implementation of the scheme, under AGMA’s formal constitution, required the approval of seven of the ten Greater Manchester districts. In the event, three districts opposed it, while a further authority deferred support pending a referendum, presenting an immediate challenge to the coherence of the interdistrict coalition on which the fledgling system of city-regional governance had been developed. The changing substance of city-regionalism in Manchester Alongside the continuing uncertainties about the geography of the city-region and the precise structure of city-regional governance, the substance of the approach emerging has also been of note, not least in respect of the contrast between contemporary efforts and earlier metropolitan initiatives in terms of the stress given to resolving the area’s social problems. Preoccupation with international competitiveness notwithstanding, the CRDP acknowledged the continued existence of wider socio-economic difficulties, reflecting Manchester’s (and, in particular, its inner area’s) position as consistently one of the most deprived areas in successive indices of deprivation published by central government (AGMA, 2008). These – as checks on the city’s economic growth potential and its desirability as a ‘liveable’ destination for skilled knowledge workers and the ‘creative classes’ – sat uneasily alongside the main thrust of the CRDP and its vision of Manchester as a future epicentre of knowledge-based economic wellbeing. This was subsequently emphasised by Manchester Enterprises in its support for a high-profile programme of research, the Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER), commissioned in 2008 in part to consider the consequences of issues such as labour market exclusion and socio-spatial segregation of residents for the city-region’s competitiveness (McKillop, 2008). The point, however, is that while the CRDP and the MIER recognised the severity of these longstanding social problems, their resolution, it can be argued, was viewed largely in terms of the beneficial knock-on effects for the city-region’s competitiveness – as means rather than ends. Under this agenda, intra-metropolitan territorial equity – part of the logic for city-regional government in earlier incarnations – is barely acknowledged, subordinated to the more important goal of creating a politico-economic space of appropriate size in comparison to international urban peers. This is an agenda which gives a high-profile role to business in the development of policy (even if state actors exert de facto control); it is one based on a loose and informal network approach to governance (although Manchester City Council occupies a pivotal position in reality); it is one that attempts to manage and give coherence to a range of existing initiatives and meld them to fit to the wider knowledge-based vision – to “join up dots” in the words of Ward (2003: 206); and it is one which advocates a cluster of supply-side measures to attract and retain corporate investors and affluent, highly-skilled residents. Although there remains an up-front commitment to social justice – the Knowledge Capital document refers 15 times in its 35 pages to social equity and inclusion (Manchester City Council/KPC, 2003) – this is framed in the context of the objective of promoting competitiveness. Echoing Peck and Tickell’s (2002: 388) argument that the ‘shallow neo-liberalism’ of the 1980s has given way to more pervasive and interventionist forms that see the amelioration of social distress as a critical contributor to economic vibrancy, the Knowledge Capital initiative aims to create a Manchester city-region “where inclusion meets innovation” (Manchester City Council/KPC, 2003: 31). Thus, the evolution of city-regional governance structures, and the thrust of the associated policy initiatives set in train, betray a consensus amongst local actors in which the unifying thread is a 17

desire to bolster the areas’ international standing via an agenda that is overwhelmingly progrowth, and employing institutional arrangements that are viewed as ‘light touch’ and flexible in form. This reflects a view amongst local policy elites that the future of the North West region and, the now more widely defined Manchester city-region, is functionally dependent upon the core city and its capacity to remodel the North West as a Floridian ‘learning region’, rich in knowledge-based industries and home to vibrant creative and scientific communities (see, for example, Georghiou and Cassingena Harper, 2003; Westwood and Nathan, 2002). Further it reflects a view that, in the context of a paucity of formal metropolitan government, there is a need for some form of strategic thinking in order to revive urban, metropolitan and city-regional economic fortunes, responding, as Marvin et al (2002: 9-10) drolly put it, to a consensus amongst policymakers at that time that “[t]here have been no reported instances of long-term thinking within Greater Manchester…strategic thinking at the sub-regional level is largely absent”. Manchester as (supra)regionally-embedded city-region Manchester’s experience of institution-building at the scale of the city-region illustrates intrametropolitan tensions; but there have also been important extra-metropolitan conflicts over the relationship with the region (RDA and Assembly) and, latterly, a more embryonic supra-region (the Northern Way). These illustrate the multidimensionality of the scalar politics that have emerged in the wake of the demise of formal metropolitan government and the rise of less permanent, more disparate forms of governance in its place. Yet it is also possible to argue that Manchester’s experience suggests something of a rapprochement between institutions organised around different geographical areas, despite the obvious potential for conflict that their differing spatial coverage provides. The growth of city-regional thinking – and the emergence of a particular consensus based around a shallow but inclusive variant of the city-regional model – has been one that has involved not only Manchester’s leading policy actors, predictably espousing a ‘Manchester First’ philosophy. The looseness and shallowness of the relationships implied by the model of city-regional governance proposed has been sufficient to draw into the coalition actors previously suspicious or hesitant about the emergence of a Manchester-dominated Greater Manchester. This has included actors within, but also outside, the city-region. It is significant that many of the recent innovations around city-regional governance have drawn support from a grouping of bodies that included the NWDA and AGMA – both bodies that in the past were at loggerheads with Manchester City Council (Deas and Ward, 2000; Hebbert and Deas, 2000). Regional bodies, perhaps recognising the reality that momentum for territorial institutionbuilding had shifted to the city-regional scale, have become progressively more supportive of the notion of a revived Greater Manchester. The NWDA, in particular, has championed Manchester’s status as regional capital, arguing that its wellbeing, as provider of some 48% of the region’s output, is critical to the economic health of the wider region, and that its future can best be safeguarded through stronger city-regional governance (see, for example, IPPR and NWDA, 2006). Reflecting this, the NWDA implements part of its Regional Economic Strategy through Manchester Enterprises, as a formal sub-regional partner. This increasing recognition of city-regions within the broader North West region continued following the Sub-National Review in 2007, which advocated that formal acknowledgement of sub-regions ought also to be supported by concrete devolution of funds to city-regional bodies. In the North West, such a suggestion – which in the past might have been seen to a greater degree as potentially undermining regional cohesion and eroding the power of the RDA – received cautious 18

welcome. In part, this reflected the viewpoint that had emerged within the NWDA that Manchester’s ascendance as regional economic capital should not just be recognised for pragmatic reasons, but that actively encouraging the growth of the North West’s principal cityregion could be justified as a means of promoting regional competitiveness in a rapid and concerted way, regardless of the consequences for intra-regional economic disparity and regional political cohesion. The result of this view, as articulated in a joint response by regional institutions to government’s consultation exercise on the implementation of the SNR, has been an acceptance that inter-district local authority working should be supported by RDAs – and that defined city-regions should be formalised (NWDA/NWRA, 2008). In part, such a view represented a pragmatic compromise, sacrificing residual unease at the regional level about the degree to which regional bodies would be undermined by stronger city-regions, simply because dealing collectively with sub-regional groupings of local authorities would be preferable to liaising with individual districts. This, though, was not a view shared by the Local Government Association, which, while accepting the need for liaison with local authorities collectively through sub-regional and other groupings as part of a “‘spectrum’ of delegation” (LGA, 2008a: 2), remained keen to emphasise the central role of local authorities as RDA interlocutors (LGA, 2008b). It would be wrong, however, to infer that this accord about the RDA’s role in promoting the cityregion represented a complete dissolution of conflict between region and city-regional actors. Some of the conflicts evident at and before the launch of the NWDA in 1999, but which had increasingly appeared latent as economic development actors in different institutions developed working relationships through which to work towards a commonly understood goal of promoting competitiveness, periodically resurfaced. By 2008, while the chief executive of the NWDA was arguing that the devolution of powers and resources anticipated a year earlier after the publication of the SNR ought not to mean “us doling out money” to city-regional bodies, the chairman of AGMA was insistent that “we do see [the NWDA] letting go of the purse strings” (quoted in Walker, 2008b: 1). Such standpoints again represent the kind of rhetoric typically associated with institution-building. But they are also symptomatic of a more fundamental tension that, partial rapprochement notwithstanding, continues to characterise the model of sub-national territorial governance pursued in England. Conclusion Two principal conclusions can be drawn from the empirical experience of city-regionalism in Manchester: one relates to the institutional and political geography of regionalism, the spatial configurations that have emerged and the interrelationships apparent between different ‘regional’ actors; the other relates to the form of policy pursued as part of efforts to develop city-regional governance. The experience of Manchester is illustrative of the complex and contingent way in which topdown national policy for cities and regions has been interpreted in England. It reflects the interplay between local and central branches of the state, embodying the contested dynamics of the reorganisation of territorial governance and policy-making in relation to economic development. It reflects a widespread consensus in Britain that cities should strive to extend their ambit beyond their formal jurisdictions by developing new territorial coalitions, especially in light of what is viewed by policy-makers as the ever-growing imperative for cities to compete in 19

a global arena and harness new agglomerative opportunities. But although the notion of building institutions and developing strategy around more meaningful geographical entities is, for most policy actors, uncontentious, what is in dispute is the precise nature of the city- and/or regional spaces through which economic development policy can be administered. At times, this has been reflected in conflict between attempts to construct new territories based around the boundaries of flexibly-defined city-regional institutions that can change over times, vary according to the issue being addressed and co-exist with each other; and those founded on the longer established formal areas, whether they be local authority districts or metropolitan or administrative regions. Such disputes that reaffirm that what has been described, somewhat inelegantly, as the reterritorialisation of the state is a much more complex, tension-ridden process than some of the initial, occasionally reductionist theoretical accounts might be interpreted as implying. In part because of the happenstance of the disjointed, stuttering nature of national policy for city and regional governance in England, but also because of the legacy of competing institutional loyalties and resultant disagreement amongst sub-national policy actors, a variety of forms of region have struggled to emerge. At the same time, however, it is also critical to recognise that some city policy actors in Manchester are relaxed about the existence of these multiple, overlapping (city-)regions, viewing this not just as preferable to the outdated bureaucratic behemoth of formal metropolitan government, but also as somehow creative in its confusion, chiming with the wider spirit of pioneering attempts to develop a knowledge-based economy. As one study, by the Work Foundation, commissioned by Manchester City Council, put it: “there is not a ‘neat’ solution to the architecture for Ideopolises: different policies will require decisions and funding at different levels in different places. This ‘institutional messiness’ can be a source of innovation: the most successful cities are those that have had a range of solutions and been able to evolve how they work over time” (Williams et al, 2006: 3). The point is that this ‘institutional messiness’ – the transience and unevenness of the structures developed – is at odds with broader ‘grand narrative’ accounts of global urban and regional restructuring, which foresee the inexorable emergence of new regional institutions, reflexively created as a result of global economic restructuring and representing a broader reorganisation of the territorial structure of the state. Instead, what we see are regions not constructed impassively by exogenous economic forces, but instead which result from socio-political pressures, both nationally and locally, that are by no means straightforward. In this sense, the complex local and national politics underlying the construction of the Manchester city-region as a political and institutional space reaffirms the argument, for example, of Jonas and Ward (2007) that reterritorialisation ought not to be viewed as a response to external change in the global spaceeconomy (a view usually based on the unrepresentative empirical experience of a few major cities), but as a characteristically conflict-ridden political process. As Peck (2003: 223) notes, rescaling is “not perfectly linear and symmetrical…as one form of state intervention is displaced by another in a clean process of binary succession, but the dynamics of change are proving to be inescapably uneven – spatially, temporally, institutionally, politically and socially”. In this respect there is support from the case study of Manchester and North West England for Brenner’s (2004: 106) contention that changes in the nature and form of territorial governance, and their unevenness, are part of a shift away from the “scalar similarity” – the broad uniformity and relative simplicity of institutional arrangements associated with spatial Keynesianism – and towards a contemporary “scalar multiplicity”.

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In this sense, it is clear that there is no ‘scalar settlement’: a period of instability and conflict about the precise geography of the sub-national governance of economic development has not now reached a stable, consensual end-point. Indeed, at a national level some policy-makers are resigned to the evolution of city-regions as a difficult and drawn-out affair, taking “decades...to come to fruition” – a process that to some is seen as a virtue in that it relies upon the brokering of local agreement and avoids central government imposition of ‘artificial’ territories of governance (House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee, 2007a: 65). But with institutions and policy initiatives continuing to be organised around differently configured territories in the more immediate term – the administrative regions and established local authorities, as well as emerging city-regions and other non-standard spaces of the type documented, for example, by While et al (2004) in relation to land-use planning or Deas and Lord (2006) in relation to European regionalism – the likelihood is that some degree of conflict will endure, and remain a potent check on efforts to develop city-regional governance on any kind of permanent footing. A second conclusion centres on the lessons that can be derived from the case study experience in respect of the wider substantive emphasis of policies pursued by city-regional institutions. While some tension continues to characterise efforts to construct institutions based around differently defined city(-regional), (administrative) regional and supra-regional territories, there is also evidence of the consolidation of different institutional agendas, at different and otherwise competing spatial scales, around a core of ideas about the goals underlying spatial policy. The Manchester experience, in this respect, might be seen as testimony to Peck and Tickell’s (2002) widely employed notion of ‘roll out’ neo-liberalism, as a more interventionist, broadly-based successor to the ‘roll back’ agenda of the 1980s comes to comprise a pervasive consensus extending across most aspects of spatially-based economic development policy. The Manchester experience, at least in respect of broad approaches to territorial governance and economic development policy, provides some support for this interpretation. Across the different (city)regionalisms evident in Manchester, there are clear signs of convergence around the fundaments of local economic development orthodoxy: that intervention is needed to help create the conditions in which international investors can prosper; that policy should actively support a dynamic regionally-based research and development capacity; that ‘assets’ like the education and skills base are critical to the production of ‘knowledge’ and its use to enhance place competitiveness; and that policy in its most general sense should be geared towards making cities and regions internationally significant actors. These are notions which extend across institutions based on differently configured regional territories. They can be discerned at the supra-regional scale, given the overwhelmingly economic focus of the Northern Way (Goodchild and Hickman, 2006). They are evident at the regional scale, where the RDA has long focused on economic issues (Deas and Ward, 2000). And they are prominent, the case study demonstrates, at the cityregion scale, where a multi-level coalition involving Manchester City Council and its city-based allies, linked to the NWDA and within the framework of the pan-regional Northern Way, have coalesced around a vision of the city as future epicentre of knowledge-based economic activity. Indeed, that initial moves towards city-regional governance are driven largely or exclusively by concerns about economic development, rather than about modernising governance in a much more general sense or about tackling social inequality, is acknowledged unashamedly within Whitehall and viewed as a virtue: “city-regions are an essentially economic proposition…it is not about a new form of governance”, as one senior civil servant has commented (Neil Kinghan,

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director general of local government, Department of Communities and Local Government, quoted in House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee, 2007b: 7). But while the focus of policy activity is squarely on economic growth, informed by a broader world view (about the role and form of policymaking) to which it is not overly simplistic to attach the often lazily-applied adjective ‘neo-liberal’, there remains some acknowledgement of the need to address social problems (in line with conceptions of hybridised neo-liberalism, some variants of which retain an emphasis on resolving social barriers to economic growth). As Harding (2007: 456) notes, “explicit city-regionalism…is not intrinsically devoid of progressive intent or possibilities”. Nonetheless, whatever ‘possibilities’ exist for policymaking ‘not intrinsically devoid’ of a redistributional element, the empirical experience of Manchester and North West England is significant, in broader historical terms, in that it illustrates the striking degree to which the role and purpose of spatial policy has been redefined. Policy for regions in Britain, back to the 1930s, had its roots in concerns about redistributing economic growth and denting interregional social and economic inequality (see, for example, Robinson et al, 1987). City-regions, likewise, are historically rooted in concerns about facilitating effective and progressive physical, labour market, transport and social planning (see, for instance, Geddes, 1915) – and, by connecting core city and suburban satellites, providing a more stable fiscal base through which to achieve this. The limited and diminishing emphasis given to these kinds of concern in approaches from the late 1990s onwards, it can be concluded, is evidence of a wider shift in the focus of regionally-based policy, at whatever spatial scale and for whatever type of region. In the context of larger administrative regions, for instance, Morgan (2001) has argued that a “new territorial politics” has emerged, which whilst important in developing regional ‘voice’ has a ‘dark side’ in the form of institutionalised interregional competition. As part of this new politics, the approach of the English RDAs cannot be considered as an extension of a lineage of regional policy efforts, based principally on a desire to narrow inter-area disparity; instead, it is an approach that is more properly defined as one of pursuing regional economic growth across the board, regardless of interregional redistribution concerns. Robson et al (2000b) argue along similar lines, questioning the appropriateness of an RDA in every English region, regardless of levels of economic or social health, arguing that this is difficult to reconcile with a commitment to diminish regional differentials in economic or social wellbeing (or as Morgan, 2001: 345 puts it, “one cannot reduce inequality by treating unequals equally”). These kinds of view, when précised, perhaps overstate the case. Although the spatial coverage of RDAs is comprehensive, the per capita budgets available to each vary significantly and are more divergent than at the agencies’ inception. And while it is undoubtedly the case that addressing inequality is a much less central priority than before, the existence since 2002 of a national PSA target committing government to pursue a convergence in regional growth rates, although different to a narrowing of economic prosperity, is nevertheless symptomatic of some degree of commitment to regulate the space economy (Harding, 2007a). Nonetheless, the view that contemporary city-region-based policy can be considered part of a ‘new territorial politics’, the Manchester experience suggests, is a compelling one. In contrast to the original vision of regionally-based institutions or policymaking as a means of contributing to economic equality, social justice or equitable fiscal resourcing, the agenda underlying contemporary efforts to develop city-regional policy is one driven almost entirely by a concern to induce further economic growth and which, if not quite blind to redistributional issues, is generally sanguine about them. That applies both to (city-)regions of existing prosperity – for instance, through 22

efforts to create a London ‘super-region’ (Harding, 2007b) – to ones, like Manchester, where the objective is one of revitalisation and regeneration. Yet while it is possible to dismiss the kinds of contemporary city-regional efforts discussed here on the grounds of their overly constricted focus on economic growth, and their insufficient emphasis on tackling social problems, it is important not to lose sight of the continuing potential for city-regional policy and governance to provide an effective means of promoting social and environmental justice, as well as economic advancement.

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