State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester

In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environment and infrastructure. We explore this issue in the context of state redesign of sub-national space in England and focus on Greater Manchester, as the de facto exemplar of ‘devolution’ to English city-regions. We argue that though re-scaling in Greater Manchester is a long-term historical process this has been punctuated by the UK state’s process of ‘devolution’ since 2014, this has involved a re-design and formalisation of Greater Manchester’s governing arrangements. It has also involved invoking a long dormant role for city-regional planning in articulating the future design of the material city-region over the next two decades as an attempt to formalise and continue a pre-existing, spatially selective growth trajectory by new means. Yet, the disruption of new hard governing arrangements also provides challenges to that trajectory. This produces tensions between, on the one hand, the pursuit of a continuity politics of growth through agglomeration, material transformation of the city-region and narrow forms of urban governance and, on the other hand, a more disruptive politics of the future of the city-region, its material transformation and how it is governed. These tensions are producing new political possibilities and spaces in the transformation of Greater Manchester. The implications of this are discussed. 在全球化的背景下，城市地区的出现以及与其组建相关的政治和动态的争论已经持续了将近二十年。最近的著作将这一关注点扩展到了将城市地区视为晚期资本主义的地缘政治项目，其中国家在城市地区的重新设计中发挥关键作用，使其适应国际竞争并确保对建筑环境和基础设施的战略性内向投资。我们在英国重新设计其次国家空间的背景下探讨这个问题，并重点关注大曼彻斯特，将其作为英国城市地区“权力下放”的事实上的典范。我们认为，尽管大曼彻斯特的重扩规模是一个长期的历史过程，但自2014年以来英国的全国性“权力下放”强化了这一过程，这涉及大曼彻斯特治理安排的重新设计和正式化。它还涉及启用一项长期“休眠”的城市-地区规划功能，即阐明重要城市-地区未来二十年的设计，以通过新方式使预先存在的空间选择性增长轨迹正式化并得以持续。然而，新的硬性治理安排带来的断裂也为这一发展轨迹带来了挑战。这造成了多重张力：一方面是通过集聚追求增长的连续性政治、城市地区的物质转型和狭隘的城市治理形式；另一方面是城市地区未来更加断裂性的政治、物质转型及其治理方式。这些张力正在为大曼彻斯特的转型带来新的政治可能性和空间。我们还讨论了这方面的影响。