Vigar, Geoff, Stephen Graham, and Patsy Healey. "In search of the city in spatial strategies: past...

In Search of the City in Spatial Strategies: PastLegacies, Future Imaginings

Geoff Vigar, Stephen Graham and Patsy Healey

[Paper first received, November 2003; in final form, January 2005]

Summary. This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented incontemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflectedin diverse notions of ‘cityness’ in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality andterritoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word ‘city’ in arange of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the politicalwork done by diverse representations and invocations of ‘cityness’ in contemporary urbangovernance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities areconceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerableemphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on ‘joining-up’, ‘integrating’ andco-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do suchintegrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence fromthe case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change inmetropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as theystruggle to define what their ‘city’ actually might be these days. This tends to be to thedetriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.

1. Introduction: The City as ‘ImaginedEnvironment’

Representations inform our capacity, andour need, to imagine ‘the city’ (JamesDonald, 2000, p. 53).

This paper concerns itself with four questions.First, how is the word city actually used incontemporary policy discourse? Secondly,what spaces, trends and themes are presentand absent from contemporary policy dis-courses and portrayals of ‘cityness’? Thirdly,what meanings are invoked by the word‘city’? In particular, in contemporary govern-ance contexts where ‘integrating’, ‘co-ordi-nating’ and ‘joining-up’ policy is to the fore,

it is important to assess how far mobilisationsof the word ‘city’ are complementary and towhat extent they contradict and competewith each other in specific contexts. Finallyand relatedly, what institutional work doesthe ‘city’ word do in such ‘joining-up’efforts, in coalition building, agenda settingand the discursive production of both politicalpower and the meaning of place?

To address these questions, the paper hasthree parts which follow this introduction.First, we briefly analyse three key transform-ations that are changing the ways in whichcontemporary cities are being imagined. Wedo this by exploring socioeconomic, cultural,spatial and technological trends which may

Urban Studies, Vol. 42, No. 8, 1391–1410, July 2005

Geoff Vigar and Patsy Healey are in the Global Urban Research Unit, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University ofNewcastle, Claremont Tower, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. Fax: 0191 222 8811. E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. Stephen Graham is in the Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road,Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. Fax: 0191 334 1801. E-mail: [email protected]. The authors would like to thank Angela Hull,of the University of West of England, who contributed stimulating ideas to the early discussions on this paper.

0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=05=081391–20 # 2005 The Editors of Urban Studies

DOI: 10.1080=00420980500150730

influence conceptions of the city both in col-lective discourses and consciousness andpublic policy and planning arrangements.We are particularly concerned here with howsuch trends have undermined ‘modern’notions of the city as a unitary and internallyintegrated space that can be easily identifiedand separated off from the worlds around it.A key question, then, is whether it mattersthat strategies for the same place makesimilar points and have a similar conceptionof what the modern city is about. Whilst pastideas of the city were always as much discur-sive constructions as observable ‘realities’—often invoked and developed to constructdominant notions of order, scale and govern-ance—‘unitary’ conceptions of the city areconsidered to be no longer tenable in describ-ing the world for many reasons.

At the heart of these debates lies a centralparadox: proliferating spatial strategies tomanage, plan and govern ‘cityness’ co-existwith an inchoate series of meanings and rep-resentations of a city’s characteristics(Albrechts et al., 2001; Amin et al., 2000;Healey, 2002a). The widening efforts by awhole range of governance regimes, stake-holders and policy-makers who, eitherimplicitly or explicitly, are attempting tograpple with or invoke concepts of ‘cityness’co-exist uneasily with a widespread sense ofconfusion and contradiction about what such‘cityness’ might actually be about. Thismatters in the practice of spatial strategy-making especially and in the practice of‘joining-up’ governance efforts. However,we argue that, amidst such confusion, andwithin the context of increasingly complexsystems of urban governance, the notion ofthe ‘city’—if invoked in very flexibleways—could be a central coalescing force.Such a conception may provide a ‘lightningconductor’ which helps to integrate, andprovide collective meaning to, discoursesabout urban strategic spatial planning, urban‘regeneration’ and ‘renaissance’, urban cul-tural planning, city transport and accessibility,urban ‘sustainability’ and a whole gamut ofsocial, educational and health improvementinitiatives aimed at reducing ‘social

exclusion’. But does it help to have somekind of unified view and if so how can sucha view accommodate the difference that isincreasingly recognised within cities? Orshould a singular view be avoided? Donotions of ‘city’ help policy-makers at all ingovernance efforts?

A dominant tactic of many strategies devel-oped for and about urban issues is to invoke‘cityness’ through the use of metaphors, bothimplicitly and explicitly (see Fischer, 2003).Cities are often constructed as machinic, sys-temic, corporeal or organic. Their problemsand assets are often compared with the pathol-ogies or attributes of bodies or technologicalsystems (Donald, 1999). Such metaphorshelp the ‘city’ to do political work by tying(or attempting to tie) together multiple actorsinto governance coalitions. Such metaphorsare also invoked to legitimise certain urbangovernance agendas (while inevitably obfus-cating others). This discussion provides thebasis for the third part of the paper, wherewe analyse in detail the ways in which theword ‘city’ is used in contemporary urbanand regional policy discourses related to thearea of the City of Newcastle upon Tyne inNorth East England. Through an analysis ofpolicy documentation in urban governance,spatial planning, urban regeneration, healthand transport policy in this particular metro-politan region, we seek to identify the insti-tutional work done by the wide-ranging andvarious invocations of cityness.

The city has always been an “imaginedenvironment” (Donald, 1999, p. 27; Healey,2002a). Ways of seeing cities have longbeen critical in shaping the form, experienceand governance of urbanity. Such conceptionshave proved exceptionally important histori-cally in land use planning. More recently,throughout Europe and beyond, this policydomain has broadened and redefined itself ina new form of ‘spatial planning’. Such con-ceptions carry great significance as it is inthis policy domain where the contemporarygovernance for much ‘joining-up’ effort isproposed to occur (Albrechts, 2004; Albrechtsand Healey, 2003; Faludi, 2002; Harris et al.,2002; OECD, 2001; RTPI, 2003; Salet and

1392 GEOFF VIGAR ET AL.

Faludi, 2000). Thus, conceptualisationsbecome more significant due to the possibleincrease in importance of the policy field.But to perform institutional work, conceptionshave to be seen to carry meaning and politicalauthority across policy communities. Suchissues, alongside the recognition that manyrepresentations of city will exist, is estab-lished in academic debate. It is less well estab-lished how such ideas permeate governancepractice, however, and this is exploredthrough the case study.

The concluding section draws together thetheoretical and empirical material to discusshow cities are represented in contemporarypolicy-making; how far these representationsreflect/relate to the contemporary problema-tising of the nature of the city; and how thechallenges arising from these concerns mightbe addressed in future governance efforts.

2. Problematising the Contemporary City

There exists no privileged vantage-pointfrom which to attain panopticity in rep-resentations of the city (Flusty, 2000,p. 157).

What is a contemporary city? How can thenature of cities be invoked or described inpolicy discourses to connect meaningfullywith the collective consciousness of urbandwellers and build meaningful urban govern-ance coalitions? Our starting-point is that allsuch efforts to make the word city do politicalwork will inevitably involve what Rob Shields(1995, p. 245) has called “treacherous selec-tive vision”. Because the multiple time-spaces, processes and subjectivities of citiescannot be generalised with one representation,efforts to attach meaning to the word citythrough words, maps or images will inevitablyprioritise certain spaces, people, metaphorsand discourses over others. Invocations ofthe nature of contemporary cityness are there-fore inevitably power-laden acts. They willpick out and highlight a small subset of theunknowable totality that constitutes an urbanplace in an effort to support particular norma-tive notions of urban re-ordering, urban

politics and urban redistribution over others.This, of course, has always been so. But thedangers of such “treacherous selectivevision” are now multiplied in the contempor-ary context by rapid geographical, socio-tech-nical and cultural transformations in thenature of urban places, which tend to under-mine the value or resonance of classical ormodern norms and representations of what itmeans to be a city. We discuss three dimen-sions to this challenge below.

2.1 Spatial Sprawl, Technological Mobilities,and the Collapsing ‘Coherence’ of CitySocioeconomies

The idealised structures of classical urbanismand urban geography—centre and periphery,urban fringe, inside–outside, city–country-side—are increasingly at odds with the poly-centric and dispersed forms and landscapesof most contemporary urban areas (Ascher,1995; Bertolini, 2000). At the same time,massive increases in technologically mediatedflows—of people, goods, waste materials,information, services, ideas, images, capitaland labour—challenge the notion of urbanboundaries. Socioeconomic processes incities have never been entirely separablefrom those operating more widely but thelevels to which they are integrated and‘exposed’ to the ‘outside’ are unprecedented(Virilio, 1989; Roberts et al., 1999). This, inturn, challenges the modern tradition ofurban planning and governance that tendedto see cities effectively as unitary objects,coincident with specific administrative juris-dictions and amenable to physical interven-tion at the local level. As Painter puts it,new ‘relational’ ontologies of the city involve

starting with the assumption that cities andregions (and indeed states) are not unitary,cohesive or integrated, and that any coher-ence that does emerge will be unstable,fleeting, and probably unintended and unre-producible (Painter, 2000, p. 13; see also,Amin and Graham, 1998; Graham andHealey, 1999; Graham and Marvin, 2001).

THE CITY IN SPATIAL STRATEGIES 1393

For centuries, the scale and spread of thegreatest cities have far exceeded the percep-tive reach of their inhabitants. And yet, themore recent physical spread of cities into mul-ticentred urban regions increasingly rendersobsolete the traditional notion of the physicalcity as a bounded, traversible space with adefined limit and surrounded by countryside(van Houum and Lagendijk, 2001). ToSkeates, the very distinctiveness of a placecalled the ‘city’ is now threatened by periph-eralisation, sprawl, the blurring of urban–rural distinctions and accelerating technologi-cal mobilities (especially information technol-ogies and the automobile) (see Boeri, 1998/99). He argues that

we can no longer use the term city in theway it has been used to describe an entitywhich, however, big and bloated, is stillrecognisable as a limited and boundedstructure which occupies a specific space.In its place we are left with the urban:neither city in the classical sense of theword, nor country (Skeates, 1997, p. 6).

2.2 Globalisation, Scale and UrbanGovernance

The second challenge to representations ofcityness, which follows from the first, comesfrom this continued ‘rescaling’ and reconfi-guration of cities as economic spaces withinglobalising capitalism. The idea of the cityas an arena of political representation for abounded, internally integrated array of econ-omic interests is gradually being unbundledby contemporary trends. There are two sidesto this challenge. First, local economies are,in many cases, becoming more fragmentedas sectors become more tied to non-local cir-cuits of exchange than to neo-Marshallianinteractions within local space.

Secondly, processes of globalisation areleading to an increasing spatial selectivity ofurban, regional and nation-state governanceprocesses. This is occurring as redistributive,strategic and Keynesian models of territorialmanagement give way to the entrepreneurialpackaging of ‘competitive’ strategic spacesselected and partitioned from the urban

whole (Jones, 1997). As Gleeson and Low(2000, p. 275) point out, the deregulation ofKeynesian, strategic spatial planning that hasoften parallelled processes of neo-liberal glo-balisation coincides, paradoxically, withintense state fiscal, legal and discursivesupport to privilege certain investmentnodes. Such ‘entrepreneurial’ urban planninghas supported state-backed redevelopment ofwaterfront spaces and major urban festivals,events and ‘glocal’ infrastructural and techno-logical developments. Rather than orchestrat-ing the development of a city’s territory as awhole within regional and national hinter-lands, the emphasis has been on using publicfunds to subsidise and equip selected strategiclocal spaces to emerge to anchor a city’s pos-ition within national and international circuitsof exchange. Such projects, which Brenner(1998a) labels ‘glocal scalar fixes’, generallyemphasise the construction of intense local–global (or ‘glocal’) connectivities of strategicspaces, allowing them, in effect, to bypass thesurrounding hinterlands of the spatially adja-cent, but relationally distant, city spaces (seeGraham and Marvin, 2001),

Thus, such processes tend to undermine andproblematise the notion of a city as a territo-rially coherent economic space to bemanaged, regulated and governed as awhole. In such environments, a spatial strat-egy for a city is frequently merely an envelopefor packaging together these elements along-side others that may emphasise greaterdegrees of protection for areas from develop-ment or promote a more relaxed planningregime. It may thus perform a useful integra-tive function for policies within these spaces,but falls short of what a spatial strategymight potentially achieve in a broader sense.

2.3 Multiculturalism and the ChangingUrban Politics of Difference

Thirdly, many writers on the contemporarycity emphasise the cultural diversity of con-temporary urban life. This diversity is mostobvious where it is represented in the culturaldemands and practices of different ethnicgroups. But the concept of the multicultural


city can also be extended to include a widerange of other fractures in society, such asclass, gender and sexual differences, and, morewidely, the diverse cultural practices associ-ated with lifestyle ‘choices’ (Sandercock1998a, 1998b). Understood in this way, citydwellers typically have multiple identityresources. This may sometimes generate theenjoyment and creativity which is oftenassociated with positive notions of ‘cityness’.But it may also lead to tensions and segre-gations between groups and psychologicalangst for individuals.

Many contemporary metaphors of ‘city-ness’ thus seek to address the increasing cul-tural heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism ofurban spaces, partly because urban spacesare the key sites and attractors within interna-tionalising flows of people, cultures and reli-gions, sexual and consumption practices.How urban governance discourses and ideasof the city respond to the tensions and oppor-tunities raised by growing heterogeneity andmulticulturalism have become key concernsin the urban policy and planning literatures(Sandercock, 1998a, 1998b). This isespecially so as such transformations chal-lenge the modernist principles at the heart ofurban planning that tend to favour acting ina definable singular ‘public interest’, withrational ‘coherence’ and urban public orderimposed on the city ‘from above’ throughthe expert powers of the usually White,middle-class, middle-aged and heterosexualmen who, invariably, were the planning‘experts’ (Holston, 1998). Such traditions ofmodern city planning tended to favour

rationality, comprehensiveness, planninghierarchy, positivist science with its pro-pensity for quantitative modelling andanalysis, belief in state-directed futuresand in the existence of a single ‘publicinterest’ that can be identified by plannersand is gender and race neutral (Baeten,2001, p. 57).

On the one hand, new metaphors and rep-resentations of the city may be invokedwhich celebrate, construct and nurture a posi-tive politics of difference, as Harvey (1996)

and Swyngedouw (1999), amongst others,have urged. David Harvey argues that in thecontemporary multicultural city

The tensions of heterogeneity cannot andshould not be repressed. They must be lib-erated in socially exciting ways—even ifit means more rather than less conflict,including contestation over the sociallynecessary socialisation of market processesfor collective needs. Diversity and differ-ence, heterogeneity of values, lifestyleoppositions and chaotic migrations are notto be feared as sources of disorder. Citiesthat cannot accommodate the diversity,the migratory movements, the new life-styles and the new economic, political, reli-gious and value heterogeneity, will dieeither though ossification and stagnationor because they will fall apart in violentconflict (Harvey, 1996, pp. 437–438).

On the other hand, however, a repressive poli-tics of multiculturalism can easily emergewhich discursively challenges and under-mines the legitimacy of the multiculturalcity (Robins, 1999). Idealised metaphors ordepictions of urban ‘order’ and nationalist orurban-regional collective memory have longbeen used to hide or undermine progressivepolitics of difference (Boyer, 1986). Withincities, immigrants are often reviled becausethey challenge accepted notions of order,modernity and the city and ‘contaminate’male, White order, and particular notions ofnational, cultural and sexual identities(Robins, 1995). The exodus of White middleclass citizens from city cores is often depictedas a crisis, while an influx of migrants to theinner city is cast as an inner-city ‘problem’rather than a solution to the fiscal and physicalimpacts of out-migration. Speaking of suchdebates in the Brussels context, Baetenwrites that

The perpetuation of dystopian urban gov-ernance discourses has profound politicalimplications. It contributes to the persist-ence of anti-urban sentiments and to thereinforcement of paternalistic, sexist andracist policies that will do more harm than


good for the problems it sets to tackle . . .We are in need of a new armature ofurban governance concepts that empowersthe disempowered (Baeten, 2001, p. 65).

A distinctive characteristic of the threetrends discussed above is that they reflect amultilayered, relational view of cityness(Amin and Graham, 1998; Amin et al.,2000; Graham and Healey, 1999; Healey,2000). Thinking in this way highlights theincreasing size and spatial reach of cities. Itis a perspective which emphasises thatincreasing linkages between the ‘contents’ ofcities and the spaces beyond the administra-tive boundaries of urban regions can bemore important more than internal relation-ships in relational terms. Coupled with this,increasing diversity makes a singular publicinterest impossible to locate and define in gov-ernance practice. Yet taken-for-granted rou-tines, ideas and discourses may continue toembody more traditional notions of theunitary, integrated city and, as a consequence,may poorly reflect what is actually happeningand reinforce existing power relations andasymmetries. We now further explore thesetensions in governance practice and discoursethrough a case study.

3. Searching for the ‘City’ in SpatialStrategies: A Case Study of NewcastleUpon Tyne, 1997–2002

Given the above discussion, how do agenciesand actors in urban governance deal withthese broader processes and ideas whichtogether so effectively seem to problematiseand undermine modern notions of coherent,ordered, bounded and unitary city spaces?How, in other words, are the dynamic trans-formations above reflected in invocations of‘cityness’ in discourses of urban governance?What meanings are invoked about the ‘city’amidst these turbulent conditions and whatinstitutional work is the word city mobilisedto do?

In what follows, we present the results of ananalysis of spatial referents in documents pub-lished in a five-year period that were intended

to express some kind of strategy within thecity of Newcastle upon Tyne, the regionalmetropolitan capital of North East England.Our starting-point is that such discourses,and the metaphors mobilised within them,have both a descriptive and a performativepurpose (Sayer, 2000). Our analysis coversdiscourses of urban ‘regeneration’, ‘sustain-ability’, mobility, health and urban planning.This section examines in detail how notionsof cityness are being invoked in these contem-porary policy discourses.

The documents were selected to represent arange of policy areas. Some, such as theUnitary Development Plan, are activelycharged with generating a future vision forthe city. Others are interesting because ofthe ways in which they do and do not invokeideas of cityness to do institutional work.Some strategies are chosen that are concernedwith broader spatial scales. In these cases, wealso look for how ideas of cityness are rep-resented and used to perform institutionalwork. In line with the importance attributedto them in the analysis in section 1 of thepaper, we look particularly for the metaphors,storylines and tropes that are invoked and howthese reflect how practitioners interpret thedimensions outlined in section 2 of thispaper. This section is ordered according tothe metaphors uncovered in the analysis.

There are a number of issues associatedwith using Newcastle upon Tyne as a casestudy that are important to note. Newcastleupon Tyne is not a free-standing city. Itforms part of a conurbation that has exhibiteda strongly polynuclear urban form for severalcenturies, largely achieved through aggrega-tion and coalescence (see Figure 1). And, asindicated in Figure 1, development proposalssuggest that polynodality will, if anything,increase in the near future. To focus oursearch for representations of the city, we usethe area defined by the administrative bound-ary of the Newcastle City Council. However,these administrative boundaries cut throughthe urban fabric, with North Tyneside Metro-politan Borough abutting Newcastle to theeast, and Gateshead, South Tyneside andthen Sunderland across the river Tyne to the


south. Even within the city boundary, thereare many individual places with strong localidentities that can make agreements withinand among administrations difficult.

In addition to these administrative factors,the economic transformation of the area andwider sub-region provides an important back-drop to policy-makers’ attempts to constructmetaphors that promote the area in arenaswithin and beyond the immediate locale. Incommon with many European conurbationsthat owe much of their contemporary formto 19th-century industrialisation, the Tynesideconurbation has suffered from major employ-ment loss in manufacturing industry, in thisinstance particularly due to the decline ofship-building and heavy engineering. Newemployment has tended to be in service indus-tries: financial services’ back offices, IT andcall centres in particular. For over 30 years,there has been a steady level of out-migrationfrom Newcastle, much of it to the surroundingrural hinterland. Thus, some development,particularly of new housing, has, in common

with many British provincial cities, leap-frogged the conurbation’s green belt andoccurred in smaller rural settlements. Therehas, however, also been a considerableamount of infilling of land within city bound-aries, but beyond traditional settlements, forhousing development, often at low density.

However, in contrast to many other UKcities, most new employment, retail, officeand leisure development occurred withinexisting urban boundaries in the 1980s and1990s. Central Newcastle has retained its pro-minence in retail, commercial and administra-tive terms, despite the development of newlocations beyond traditional central areas,although less robust secondary retail, leisureand office locations have been damaged byperipheral developments. All these trendshave contributed towards a greater dispersalof travel patterns across the conurbation andwider (sub)-region, in a symbiotic relationshipwith a growth in car ownership.

So Newcastle is not a free-standing city atthe top of a hierarchy of urban centres. Nor

Figure 1. Newcastle in its sub-regional context.


is it an administrative area co-terminous witha discrete labour market. Like other cities, ithas experienced decentralisation within andbeyond its boundaries and a complex restruc-turing of urban space in line with much of thediscussion in section two. It is also strugglingto accommodate ethnic and cultural differ-ence, albeit from a base as a very White,working-class place. As in other places inEngland, the various policy actors are alsostruggling to co-ordinate a range of strategicinitatives to join up governance effortsaimed at improving the economic and socialdevelopment of the territory and making thesum of the strategies greater than the valueof the individual parts. It is to these effortsthat we now turn.

3.1 Constructing Place through Metaphor

In general terms, areas will always be (re)in-venting themselves both in a material senseas the physical fabric is renewed and devel-oped but also mentally as representationschange. Thus, at any one time, a huge arrayof complementary and sometimes contra-dictory discourses about a city is underformation, challenge and dissemination. New-castle is no exception. In broad terms, a sharedgeneral storyline exists in policy documentsthat the City is in a transition from an indus-trial past to a post-industrial future. Beyondthis, a range of diverse metaphors, tropes,storylines and discourses are being used toinvoke and promote the new landscape.Some of these are primarily opportunist—totake advantage of funding opportunities, forexample. Others are homegrown, coming outof particular policy or cultural communities,often given a helping hand by local agencies.Sometimes the audience for the discourse isexternal to the city—an inward investmentcommunity, for example. On other occasions,the discourse is primarily internal—a localauthority communicating with its citizens forinstance. In most of the policy documentationthat is analysed below, the ‘City’ appears asmerely a backdrop, a descriptor for wherethings are. But in other instances ‘City’ andother spatial conceptions are invoked to do

policy work, to communicate a message orpromote a particular argument. It is theselatter instances that we focus upon. Table 1summarises the documents examined, theirrole and the institutions responsible for theirpreparation.

In the discussion that follows, we identify arange of metaphors and meanings derivedfrom the documents outlined in Table 1 thatconvey how the City was being mentally con-structed and conveyed in strategic policydocumentation at this time. We recognisethat this is only a partial representation ofthe different ways a city may be constructedat any one moment, but it provides a way touncover how a key constituency—public-sector stakeholders—were conceiving of andrepresenting both the city and their role as‘city-shapers’, in the course of their effortsto develop strategic policies.

The remainder of this section explores howthe three trends outlined in section 2 arereflected in policy documentation in the casestudy.

3.2 Globalisation, Scale and UrbanGovernance: Representing the ‘City’ asAsset Store

The first identifiable storyline from our analy-sis promotes the ‘City’ as an asset or store ofassets useful in creating and maintaining‘regional attractiveness’. In the RegionalEconomic Strategy (RES)—for example, alanguage of protecting and improving theenvironmental asset base is promoted. It isclear that the primary motivation to do so isto attract inward investment, reflecting thedominance of an economic competitivenessdiscourse in policy-making in the localityand the wider region. This discourse is alsoexpressed in talk of a ‘confident region’.This storyline emphasises the asset of astrong sense of regional identity. It uses thisto attempt to build inclusiveness in govern-ance processes and also in justifying effortsat drawing all citizens into mainstreamemployment. In this context, there is muchdiscussion of communities and building


them. This is a rare example in the region of agenuinely visionary statement, but it remainsmostly aspirational with little sense of howits aims are to be achieved.

A long-standing discourse of concern to aneconomic development community is that of‘peripherality’. It is clear that policy-makersare aware of the importance of linkages exter-nal to the region in the economic and spatial

planning strategies. The North East is seen inboth the RES and RPG as a region lying atthe periphery of core markets in Europe and,to a lesser extent, nationally. Regional policyactors interestingly try to recast this debate toshow that the region is not that peripheralthrough the use of visual material (seeFigure 2) and by highlighting the importanceof knowledge and skills rather than distance

Table 1. Strategies for the City of Newcastle

Document/policy area Aims Institutional responsibility

Tyne and Wear LocalTransport Plan 2001–06(published 2000)

To identify and prioritisetransport investment in thewider metropolitan area

Produced by political andofficer groupings derivedfrom the five metropolitandistricts in the conurbation

‘Realising our potential’ NorthEast England RegionalEconomic Strategy(published 1999)

To identify priorities foreconomic development inthe North East region

Produced by One North East,the regional developmentagency (a central-government-directedquango)

Draft Regional PlanningGuidance for North EastEngland (1999)

To provide a context for thedevelopment of localdevelopment plans as well asother strategies produced atregional level

Produced by the Association ofNorth East Councils (ANEC)and then subject to an inquirypanel and formal approval bycentral government

Grainger Town Strategy(various documents)

To regenerate the 19th-centurycore of Newcastle city centre

Grainger Town Partnership (aformal public body from1997 to 2003, at ‘arms-length’ from direct politicalcontrol)

Newcastle and Gateshead Cityof Culture Bid 2008(published 2003)

To harness the cultural identityand dynamic of thetrans-Tyne metropolitan areato gain official designationas a first-class Europeancultural space

‘NewcastleGateshead’—asmall partnershiporganisation between the twolocal authorities

A Fair Chance in Life ActionPlan: Tackling HealthInequalities in Tyne andWear (1999)

To tackle health inequalitiesand modernise and improveservices, especially throughlinks to other initiatives suchas New Deal forCommunities

Tyne and Wear HealthAlliance: a quango toimplement a ‘Health ActionZone’ strategy across theconurbation

City of Newcastle UnitaryDevelopment Plan (1998)

To provide policy principles forthe guidance of detailed landuse regulation decisions

Newcastle City Council

Competitive Newcastle (1999) To revitalise the City’seconomy throughconstructing 10 self-sustaining ‘high-tech’clusters

Newcastle City Council

‘Going for Growth’ (mainstrategy document published2000)

To reverse population loss fromNewcastle through theregeneration of ‘rundown’areas

Newcastle City Council (withinputs from Richard RogersPartnership)


and physical contiguity in the knowledgeeconomy. The implication for urban policyactors in the City is that they must invest inskills and knowledge development, but thereare links here to the ‘attractiveness’ storylinenoted above. In a knowledge economy wherekey workers need to be attracted and retained,a quality urban environment is noted as being

critical. Within this discourse, Newcastle CityCouncil promotes itself as a ‘City of Europeanimportance’; a position reiterated in someregional policy statements also (see ANEC,1999). This positioning, in a European spacein particular, emphasises the asset base ofNewcastle, particularly cultural assets andinfrastructure, and especially its connectedness

Figure 2. The North East and Europe.


through scheduled air links to ‘similar’ Euro-pean cities (ANEC, 1999; NCC, 1999). New-castle is thus promoted as a regional asset,underpinned by the notion that it is the onlysettlement in the region with the capability ofcompeting on a European/world stage.

The region’s cities in particular are referredto as key ‘assets’ both for the existing people ofthe region and in terms of drawing people andinvestment into them. The cities act as focalpoints for various social, cultural, economicand educational activities (ANEC, 1999).This storyline translates down to a focus on‘attractive places’ at the urban scale and alsoto individual places as attractive locales. The‘city’, then, becomes a (highly selective) col-lection of locales for such purposes mirroringthe concerns expressed by Brenner (1998b)of mobilising ‘glocal scalar fixes’, thuspouring resources into premium spaces. Here,‘livability’ as well as environmental quality isemphasised, again primarily as an asset fordrawing in inward investment. Newcastle isseen as an economic driver for the region asa whole. In policy terms, such aspirationslink with central government concerns topromote an ‘urban renaissance’ in the UK forsocial, economic and environmental reasons.This supports a focus on town and citycentres as well as certain local communities.

Newcastle City Council also promotes itselfas a competitive city within an explicitlybroader context, with the City described asbeing ‘a competitive, knowledge rich spacein a global economy’. Nearby Sunderland,by contrast, is not promoted in this way,even though in population terms it is a largeradministration. Sunderland is promoted atregional and more local levels as a ‘centre ofadvanced manufacturing’. Implicitly, this isa more targeted positioning within a narrowerconstituency, thus differentiating differentroles for cities in a global marketplace.

3.3 Spatial Sprawl, Technological Mobilitiesand the Collapsing ‘Coherence’ of CitySocioeconomies: ‘City’ as Critical Node

The ‘City’ was also often invoked as adescriptor in all of the documentation

analysed in terms of containing nodes ofactivity and hubs to connect into whenpassing through, due to the concentrations oftransport links, etc. Newcastle City Centre ishighlighted as being the key nodal point inthe City and indeed often the region, due toits density of connections. This area is oftenportrayed by Newcastle City Council asbeing the centre of a hub and spoke radialmodel of urban form, rather than as part of apolynodal, multiplex urban region. This rep-resentation fails to acknowledge changes inthe spatial form of the City during the pasttwo decades as well as a tendency to see theCity as a far more discrete container than inreality it is. Although the City Council’spolicy statements acknowledge the existenceof overlapping development markets, in onesense it appears to believe its own hype thatits area is the only one that matters in certaindiscourses surrounding business development(see later). In contrast, other parts of the con-urbation such as North Tyneside are portrayedin similar documentation, perhaps more rea-listically, as being located within

a complex conurbation with a significantdegree of interdependence in work place,housing, transport, social and leisure activi-ties . . . [influential factors] can arise fromlocal, regional, national and increasinglyinternational considerations (NTMBC,1996, para. 3.3).

In this context, Newcastle city centre is per-ceived as an important destination amongmany. There are thus different visions of func-tionality for particular spaces within the con-urbation. These can give rise to contestation,however, when questions surrounding trans-port funding or regional priorities areconsidered.

3.4 Multiculturalism and the ChangingUrban Politics of Difference: ‘City’ asCultural Artefact

While economic competitiveness concernsdominated much strategic policy discussion,cultural issues, often linked to this agenda,were strongly emergent in the public-sector


documentation examined. How far do thesedocuments reflect the diverse or multiculturalcity in policy discourse outlined in the earlierpart of this paper? We focus especially on abid from Newcastle City Council and theneighbouring borough of Gateshead to beEuropean City of Culture in 2008. The bidwas constructed to build on ‘jointly heldvalues’, on the area’s ‘unique genetic code’,as the documentary material termed it. Thebid provided the opportunity to develop exist-ing cultural activity in the conurbation, sogenerating new events and material. It alsohelped to construct a metropolitan view thattranscended individual local authority bound-aries and long-standing rivalries. In terms offlagship events and projects, the emphasisagain reflected Brenner’s notion of the‘scalar fix’ deploying particular spaces, par-ticularly the regenerated quayside, wheremajor new arts facilities were opening in2002 and 2003, with other major projectsalso located in Newcastle City Centre itself.Acknowledged in some of the policy docu-mentation was a danger that, despite itsattempts at inclusivity (references to historicalfigures and local specificities) much of theCity and the wider conurbation would bebypassed and/or matters of cultural signifi-cance within certain communities notaddressed. That said, there was evidence ofincreasing attention to such inclusivity ques-tions as the bid developed.

Linked to the cultural agenda, NewcastleCity Council mobilised its cityness in twofurther ways. First, widespread efforts weremade to construct Newcastle as a ‘partycity’. This storyline builds on a traditionalworking-class culture of ‘going out’ in atightly defined, although now expanding,area of the city centre (Chatterton andHollands, 2001). The listing of Newcastle asone of the 10 top global city travel desti-nations by a US travel magazine in the early1990s did much to promote this discourseand city authorities have latched onto itspotential in attracting visitors, as have otherEuropean cities with traditionally smalltourist populations. The use of the party citymetaphor garnered negative associations in

the late 1990s, however, as a small butincreasing city-centre population began toquestion the wisdom of the expansion offacilities catering for groups attracted by thetag and by the resultant noise and other extern-alities generated. Certainly, the party city dis-course focused on a small part of the City anda narrow range of interests and groups. Inescaping the confines of this context, New-castle City Council has also sought to defineits area as a ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (NCC,2000). There are some tensions here betweenthis storyline and the ‘party city’ storylinewhich is largely aimed at a single domi-nant cultural group and tends to alienateother users of particular spaces at particulartimes.

These conceptions collide in the experienceof the Grainger Town Project (GTP), a part-nership initiative to promote the regenerationand conservation of the 19th-century histori-cal core of Newcastle’s city centre. In themid 1990s, consultants envisioned the city interms of a cosmopolitan ‘European city’,with urban quarters with different character-istics. Critical to a dynamic, lively city wasthe notion of a mix of activities intertwiningin a ‘24-hour city’ (EDAW, 1996). Thisincreasingly came to mean combining city-centre living with the lively entertainmentenvironment of a northern ‘party city’. Asthe numbers of more affluent residentsincreased, the strategic approach had topay more attention to the fine-grain of thisdifficult combination (Healey et al., 2002).GTP did much to tackle these conflictingconcerns and showed how small areas canbe useful as a focus for integrating policyconcerns.

Other policy documentation was a little lessculturally sensitive. From 2000 onwards, forexample, Newcastle City Council engaged inan interesting process of spatial selectivitythrough its regeneration strategy Going forGrowth (NCC, 2000). This was partly anattempt to position the authority in line witha national emphasis on regeneration policy.Locally, a key driver was continued popu-lation loss from the City as a whole. Theselosses were particularly focused on certain


neighbourhoods. This led Newcastle CityCouncil to focus on areas where the viabilityof key services was under threat. Using avariety of often highly innovative methods,the Council arrived at a classification ofareas into three using a metaphor of thetraffic light. ‘Red’ areas were those consideredproblematic and were grouped together as the‘middle city’. This consisted predominantly ofareas of working-class, low-cost housing,sometimes with significant concentrations ofethnic minorities. Such a construction, alongwith tales of the ineffectiveness of past inter-ventions, was used to create an argumentthat there was only one option for suchareas—a large strategic intervention. Theintervention selected, partly derived throughthe use of consultants, was to position newand remodelled ‘urban villages’ in or adjacentto ‘problematic’ areas (Byrne, 2000; Healey,2002b). Visually, the document showedpeople carrying tennis rackets and in newopen-top cars (see Figure 3). Such represen-tations are explicitly not the people who livein these areas currently. There are two issueshere. First, this policy represented a signifi-cant attempt at gentrification—a kind ofsocio-demographic cleansing of these areas.

Secondly, there was a real danger that theinitiative would fail as the people targeted byit would not move back to the ‘middle city’simply “because there is no need for them todo so” (Byrne, 2000, p. 4). While there aresome examples of this process occurring inthe conurbation—heavily linked to land subsi-dies—there are no precedents of quite thistype or scale within the Newcastle area.

Where arguments about spatiality and city-ness did arise, they occurred where justifica-tion of policy seemed necessary. Thus, theInner West End was described as ‘run-down’(JTCG, 2000, p. 72). This provided justifica-tion for a long-standing road scheme to openup the area for development even though thesignificant dereliction arises in the areapartly as a result of the planning blight associ-ated with a 20-year proposal to put a roadthrough it.

Seeing ‘problematic’ inner urban areas inthis way is a feature of UK policy discussionsand reflects a need by local policy actors tomake a case for diverting funds and attentionto small areas. The continual drip-feed ofmoney into problem areas led an outgoingChief Executive of Newcastle City Councilto say that, for central government civil

Figure 3. Regeneration images of Newcastle’s West End.


servants, cities were “places that problemswent to get big”. Central government officialsappeared to local actors to have no strategicconception of what a city was and how it mat-tered as an entity. This reinforced a patchworkapproach at local level and did little to breakout of a highly sectoral approach to main-stream service provision. In part, ‘Going forGrowth’ was a local attempt to bridge thisdeficit by developing a strong statement ofcity-wide, joined-up strategy. Unfortunately,as we have seen, it was thin in its represen-tation of the city and quickly resorted to fam-iliar segregations and area targeting.

4. The Diffuse and Rarified Represen-tation of a City

What, then, does the above analysis tell usabout how the word ‘City’ is mobilised inmetaphor and representation. As expected,spatial referents are more explicit in urbanand regional development documents than insectoral documents—such as in healthpolicy, for example. In these latter cases, aweak spatial consciousness was in evidence.This has some similarities with analysis con-ducted by Harris and Hooper (2004) inWales. However, these authors were moreoptimistic that in Wales implicit spatial refer-ents did capture something of the spatialimplications for sectoral policy.

In Newcastle, even in documents such asthe Unitary Development Plan, designed toexpress a spatial strategy, little sense of theparticular qualities of cityness of Newcastlecomes across. Rather, there are foci on smallareas and a lot of thematic discussions aimedat guiding the City Council’s regulatorydevelopment control function. The small-area focus was also a feature of other policydocumentation. Currently, Newcastle CityCouncil is required by new planning legis-lation to prepare a core strategy as part of aLocal Development Framework. It will beinteresting to see whether this contains astronger representation of the ‘city’—i.e. beless focused towards the regulatory aspectsof ‘town and country planning’ and more

focused on creating a geo-political spatialstrategy (see Harris and Hooper, 2004).

The use of the ‘city’ term was absent inother respects, too, in that labels that wemight expect to find from readings of the aca-demic literature were weak in policy discus-sion. Terms such as ‘healthy city’, coinedoften by the World Health Organisation, and‘sustainable city’ were actually deployedonly in marginal ways in Newcastle. Despitethe origins and potentials of such discourses,they were not holistic attempts in our case tolook at the city. The ‘city’ was an etherealreferent but without any meaningful contentor use as a mobilising force for change. Thisreflects the engrained power of policysectors in local government and their closeties vertically to central government wheresector activity is regulated and funded. Ourcase study suggests that the strong, verticalpolicy ‘silos’ linking urban governance func-tions to the highly centralised UK state workto detract from a consciousness of the spatialdifferentiation of the locales into which thepolicies are delivered.

Overall, a disjunctive set of metaphors,tropes and ideas of what the city is or mightbe were being invoked in urban governancediscourses in Newcastle upon Tyne. Thisvariety in itself is a positive sign of multipleattempts to construct visions of urban futuresand reflects the fact that there was no singletotalising discourse in operation that operatedto the exclusion of others. However, littleexplicit consideration, or conception, ofwhat a city might mean these days wasevident in our case study. Beyond using thecity as a simple place-marketing device,little conception of the value of seeing a cityin some kind of totality was present, despitesome efforts at strategy-making. There is,therefore, little evidence of ‘joined-up’policy-making as far as articulating the ‘city’context was concerned. Few ideas wereshared across the city that could help todevelop such ‘joining-up’ of conceptions ofthe city. Getting below this broad level, wecan now return to the questions posed earlierin the paper to examine in more detail howthe city is being mentally constructed and


what might be the opportunities and problemsarising from such constructions.

First, as the above discussion shows, theterm ‘city’ was often used in these policy dis-courses as a taken-for-granted ‘object’ orreferent. Little attention was given to itsmeaning. The term was typically used toimply a ‘container’ that held certain servicefunctions and assets. The meanings in such ause were assumed to be universally under-stood, with little adaptation to local circum-stances. There were few attempts to use suchmeanings to do institutional work—tomobilise actors or to build institutionalcapacities to effect some degree of change.This reflects an aspatial tendency frequentlyobserved in the British polity, which in turnremains highly centralised and sectoralisedwith all sorts of consequences for localefforts to develop policy that reflects localspecificities (Vigar et al., 2000). So, ‘Newcas-tle’ was being positioned within relevant con-ceptions in different government fundingregimes, demonstrating a continued centrali-sation within English governance. Alterna-tively, local actors tried to position the Citywith regard to the spatial maps of transna-tional economic actors.

Secondly, there were few attempts to thinkthrough explicitly what a concept of ‘city’might be for and what its role was, givenrecent socioeconomic change (see alsoByrne, 2000). Although underdevelopedwithin these diverse conceptions, someimplicit recognition of the debates highlightedearlier concerning globalisation, spatial splin-tering and pressures arising from multicultur-alism were present.

Thirdly, we note the concerns of Shields(1995) and Brenner (1998a) in the selectionof urban sites and processes to represent, andbe, the ‘city’. Some spaces were clearly privi-leged, often very reasonably, for policy atten-tion. Two area types appear to garner mostattention in the documentation analysed.First, premium waterfront and central-areaspaces were being prioritised. This focuswas justified partly in terms of using suchspaces at the forefront of competition forinvestment and tourists, thus positioning the

city in a European space of similar cities. Itwas also justified in cultural terms, with New-castle City Centre portrayed as being “anessential part of Tyneside’s identity” (JTCG,2000, Newcastle annex, p. 2).

In such debates, the City was portrayed as acontainer of assets aimed at audiences exter-nal to the conurbation. Certain ‘frontier’spaces were then promoted in ways that disar-ticulated them from other, surrounding areas.While there were efforts to make certain keyflagship developments accessible to all in theCity, these efforts were often strugglingagainst a tide which implicitly privilegedcertain socioeconomic groups for attention—whether in a battle for tourists, conventionbusiness or inward investment. In oneinstance, this can be seen beyond the citycentre and the waterfront with the creation ofNewcastle Great Park, a premium spacedesigned to appeal to affluent, highly mobile,skilled, white-collar workers and to attractand retain such workers within the tax-baseof the City Council. Similarly, the continuedfocus on long-standing neighbourhoods ofconcern was useful but somewhat unreflectivein its use of the ‘traffic light’ terminology andthe early vision statements that inappropri-ately imposed a vision for such areas derivedfrom that being implemented in the premiumspaces.

Documentation from policy sectors such ashealth, meanwhile, demonstrated little con-ception of place and space. Certainly, anynotion of ‘cityness’ was missing, with manystrategies preferring to focus on collectionsof people or communities, or merely seeingdifferent spatial scales as containers for thedelivery of resources. The ‘place’ effects ofhealth policies were poorly articulated in anadministrative sense although there was someattention to links between neighbourhood,health and housing agendas, particularly inHealth Action Zones. In this latter instance,however, the innovative actions of localactors were reined in by a central state closelyallied to an audit culture that forced a refocus-ing on narrow indicator-based performancemeasures derived from a mainstream healthagenda. This spatial blindness and selectivity


in public policy undermined the emphasis onefficiency and co-ordination, expressed inthe ‘joined-up’ agenda. It also had potentialimplications for inclusiveness and equality.

Other policy sectors did take a more sys-tematic view of the city and indeed thewider urban region. In transport—due to thecomplexities of origins, destinations andnetwork flows—maps and policies illustratedthe interdependencies between sites andneighbourhoods at the urban-region scale.Only in the transport section of plans wasthe polynodal nature of the city and the conur-bation clearly acknowledged (see Figure 4).

Finally, the word city was clearly beingused positively in some instances in coalitionbuilding, agenda setting and in mobilising sta-keholders. The word did indeed operate as agovernance ‘lightning conductor’, as a valu-able mobilising metaphor, whose verydiffuse meaning, and virtually infinite flexi-bility of interpretation, makes it useful in the

enrolment of diverse stakeholder groups intopolitical coalitions. Such efforts were mostvisible in relation to the (failed) bid for Euro-pean City of Culture status in 2008 and ineconomic development documentation aimedat positioning and promoting the city in aEuropean competitive space. The emergenceof ‘NewcastleGateshead’ as an urban con-struct, mainly in response to the need todevelop a broad local base for the EuropeanCity of Culture 2008 bid, constitutes a rep-resentational innovation that has rapidlygained recognition and in some instanceshelped to overcome long-standing insti-tutional rivalry. That said, ‘city’ was beingused in such discourses much less than weexpected. Developing a debate on themeaning of the ‘city’ and places within itwas thus largely ignored as a politicalproject which could help to make multiplepolicy interventions more co-ordinated and‘joined-up’.

Figure 4. Traffic flows in the conurbation.


5. Conclusions

What, then, can we draw from our case studyin addressing whether conceptual diffusenessand limited attention to how cities are rep-resented in contemporary policy-makingmatter and how representations of city relateto the contemporary problematising of thenature of the city?

In general, we would argue that there is alack of explicit attention in urban and regionalplanning as to what the word ‘city’ mightactually mean these days. The many processesof change that problematise the word ‘city’and challenge its generally assumed meaningshave been largely ignored in such dis-courses. A consequence of this is that theconcepts of the ‘city’ that are invoked,reworked or constructed—either intentionallyor unintentionally—tend to rely on a diffuseand extremely flexible series of iconic and his-torically grounded notions of cityness. Whilesuch discourses rely on the interpretive flexi-bility that the word ‘city’ clearly displays,the uses of the word become so loose anddiffuse that any real meaning rapidly evapor-ates. Thus the word ‘city’, and concepts of‘cityness’, become merely a sort of automaticreferent in contemporary, entrepreneurial andneo-liberal policy discourses. Governanceagents tend to throw the word around as asignifier of importance. This is in itself inter-esting and reflective of something of a renais-sance for UK provincial cities compared withthe 1970s and 1980s when the city and theurban tended to be viewed more negatively.But our case studies suggest that no onewithin the complex institutional fabric ofEnglish urban governance seems quite surewhat a city means anymore. We believe thatthis inhibits the development of strategy forcities as complete territorial entities. Such asituation reflects a historical tendency withinEngland to retreat to small areas to deal withurban problems, rather than emphasising thequalities of cities and the opportunitiestherein to improve quality of life andeconomic conditions (DETR, 1999).

Here we confront a central paradox. On theone hand, the extraordinary interpretive

flexibility of the word ‘city’ means that itcan be invoked easily in attempts to buildand maintain all sorts of diverse urban govern-ance coalitions, rather as the terms ‘sustain-able development’ or ‘community’ have inother arenas. On the other hand, however,the discourses that result tend towards thevacuous: genuine debates about the nature ofthe ‘city’ are notable by their absence. It ispossible that organisational fragmentationand the smallness of the city addressed inour case study, in relation to its metropolitancontext, work to undermine thinking aboutcityness in meaningful or strategic ways.But, there is a failure in the Newcastle metro-politan region to capitalise on the potential fora rich and dynamic conception of the city tomobilise attention, galvanise meaning andco-ordinate action. Such a failure is importantbecause cities are imagined as well as physicalentities. They are in part dreamed of by citi-zens through active debate. The way thatnotions of cityness are used and debated inpolicy talk therefore matters a great deal.

This analysis inevitably raises the normativechallenge. How might the ‘city’ be concep-tualised and promoted in more sophisticatedways to do institutional work in relation topolicy agendas of both policy co-ordinationand of ‘inclusiveness’? First, a greater devel-opment of a spatial imagination is required.The type example of a well-developedspatial imagination in a policy culture is theNetherlands, where spatial ordering conceptsare strongly embedded in policy discourseswhich guide both land use regulation anddevelopment investment (Faludi and van derValk, 1994; Hajer and Zonneveld, 2000).These spatial concepts act as co-ordinativedevices which guide a variety of actors inthe urban scene while also contributing to thedevelopment of institutional capacity throughthe way policy actors imagine their city.

Secondly, there is a challenge as regards thetheorisation of cities at the meso level: toconnect creatively abstract theories of contem-porary cities with practice. Such a challengenecessitates the grounding of some of theabstract theorisations highlighted in the firstpart of this paper. Much more attention is


needed here to translate such theorisations intonormative concepts for strategic and practicalpolicy work. With a few exceptions, therehas been little attempt by the academy toassist here and contemporary theorisations ofthe ‘multiplex’ or ‘relational’ city have yet tobe applied creatively within urban policy com-munities with any conviction—despite theirobvious promise as supports for the creativereimagination of cityness in real policycontexts (Amin et al., 2000).

In this ‘grounding’ process, it would behelpful to explore ways to break free fromsingular representations of the city towards amore sophisticated approach capable ofkeeping a range of representations and con-cerns in play. The first step in practice is toacknowledge the changing nature of the con-temporary city and the anachronism ofmodern, integrated, bounded and ‘unitary’visions of urban form and process as a basisfor policy and planning. The second is tounderstand and listen to the increasinglyheterogeneous populations of urban environ-ments. We suggest that policy-makers needto uncover what these heterogeneities—oflifestyle, identity, value and practices—actu-ally are and what they mean for spatial strat-egy-making and contemporary notions of‘cityness’. In the first instance, this requiresefforts by policy actors to construct govern-ance processes that can listen to the diversecommunities making up contemporary cities.

Thirdly, such a process must be coupledwith experimental approaches to urban rep-resentation and visualisation. Traditionalmaps and perspectival drawings are ill-equipped to represent the diversity of the con-temporary city but their use is taken forgranted in much urban planning practice(Boeri, 1998/99). Yet it is the urban planningtradition which has seen itself as the guardianof city representation. There is thus somethingof a paradigm crisis for plan-making withinthe spatial planning discipline. In our case,the key planning document made little contri-bution to expanding any conception of thecity. The difficulty planners face in this taskof representation is that, in many planningsystems, a formal development plan serves

the purpose both of generating a conceptionof a city and the locales within it and of defin-ing the legal and spatial parameters withinwhich rights to develop sites and propertiesare established. In some parts of Europe,including England, the tight nexus betweenthese two purposes is being separated, releas-ing the task of expressing a representation ofthe city to develop in other, more fluid and het-erogeneous ways (ODPM, 2004).

To bring our discussion to a close, thispaper forcefully suggests the imperative ofrecognising that there are multiple ways ofunderstanding and representing contemporary‘cityness’. There is an important link herebetween releasing the capacity to imaginethe city in multiple ways in urban policy andplanning, and the search for more collabora-tive ways of expressing concepts of citynessin spatial strategies, through the explorationof local contingencies, their meanings andconsequences (Healey, 1997). There are signs,through processes of devolution in manynational contexts, that further authority forcity-regions is likely to be forthcoming.Thinking through what this freedom meansfor concepts of cities and the places withinthem, as locales and ambiences in processesof strategic spatial strategy-making, will beessential if the co-ordinative and interpretiveaims of such strategic efforts are to berealised.

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