Rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability

ABSTRACT

Innovation comprises both novelty and practicability. These two dimensions of innovation correlate partly negatively in our analysis of survey data about planning processes in declining rural districts. As argued in the literature, declining regions need innovative concepts beyond traditional counteracting strategies to ‘shrink smart’. Competitions are suggested as feasible-to-initiate innovative local concepts by the state. The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture invited 39 particularly affected rural districts to participate in such a competition among the best concepts. We address the questions of how the districts dealt with the requirements for novelty and practicability in their concepts and how the rules of competitive bidding procedures influence those concepts. Answering these questions, we conducted a survey and statistically tested hypotheses deduced from governance and innovation theory. Moreover, we analysed the bidding documents. The results show that most districts came up with hardly novel and only partly practicable concepts because the organization of the competition, and local bargaining processes impede innovation. Furthermore, the ministry’s requirements for the competition overburdened local actors with a lack of resources in declining regions. As a policy implication, we propose to integrate external experts in local networks and to accompany declining regions over a longer time instead of short-term competitions and projects.     

‘We are the boys from the Black Country’! (Re)Imagining local,regional and spectator identities through fandom at Walsall Football Club

The Black Country, a region that is only loosely defined geographically, is an area located in the West Midlands of England, which its inhabitants claim holds a distinct geographical and cultural personality. However, despite the territory's perceived uniqueness, popular imaginations of England have often overlooked the Black Country's historical and socio-cultural individuality. Therefore, given those working in a number of disciplines have recognised local football spectator communities to be significant cultural arenas, through which localism is performed and remade, this article explores the role of fandom in imagining, preserving and/or contesting notions of ‘Black Countryness’. Utilising semi-structured interviews, netnography and participant observation, as key methodological techniques, this study explores how local-spectator communities at Walsall Football Club (one of three professional football teams based in the Black Country) continually (re)negotiate a collective sense of local and regional identity. By adopting a critical approach, guided by Hall's notion of ‘cultural identity’, this research, in line with other similar studies, highlights the significant role football fandom plays in imbuing particular locales with meaning. However, more importantly, by understanding football fandom is emergent from complex, productive and interconnected cultural processes, this article is also critical of local football spectator communities and their exclusionary, as well as inclusionary, practices and customs.     

Stimulating spatial quality? Unpacking the approach of the province of Friesland,the Netherlands

The article introduces the concepts of robustness and flexibility into the discussion on spatial quality to unpack the approach adopted by the Dutch province of Friesland in pursuit of their ambition to stimulate spatial quality. The analysis of how robustness and flexibility are manifested in Friesland, respectively the capacity to counteract negative impacts on spatial quality and the capacity to progress to more enhanced forms of spatial quality, reveals a multi-component, dynamic and selective approach. Multi-component refers to the combination of regulations, the building of purposeful organizations and teams and deliberate actions to influence spatial development projects and plans. It is dynamic because the approach is adapted to the dynamics of the multilevel governance system wherein the province and its actions are embedded. It is selective because spatial quality is reduced to a limited set of factors, decision-making is done by a selected set of actors and some measures tend to address a limited set of themes. The findings suggest that stimulating spatial quality strongly depends on how spatial quality is conceptualized and formalized in the arena of politics and planning, negotiated in multilevel decision-making processes alongside decisions on whether to make resources available for this purpose.     

Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to “valorize”, “secure” and socially “mix” estates. The paper highlights the political and neo‐colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land‐rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo‐colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the “urban revolution” of 1968 (Garnier) and to the “anti‐colonial revolution” of independence and anti‐racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti‐colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo‐colonial aspects of the French state.     

Regional restructuring of industrial sport: The case of elite hockey player production in British Columbia

Although ice hockey has been characterized as a “people's sport,” since the 1980s neoliberalism has stimulated elite hockey to take on industrial characteristics, driven by: the commodification of sport; a growing scale of hockey performance; the branding of teams and cities; a strategic coupling with media; and the privatization of training and facilities. In British Columbia, elite hockey players are being produced in new regional settings. Formerly, many elite players came from smaller resource-hinterland towns offering strong local support. With neoliberal commodification of the sport, the Lower Mainland has emerged as the main centre of elite player production in British Columbia. This has occurred very rapidly as costly private training programs located mostly in larger metropolitan areas have become the main source of young players aspiring to elite status. High-performance training companies and private hockey academies offer costly routes to elite player status, with new class relations that exclude low-income families. A range of internal and external scale economies lead to these new facilities being concentrated in larger conurbations, particularly in Greater Vancouver.     

Berlin: The Metropolis as a Production Space

Metropolitan regions can be regarded as economic areas comprising various sub-economies with different forms of economic and spatial organization. The purpose of this article is to undertake a critical appraisal of the vision of Berlin as a 'service metropolis' through empirical observation of sectoral trends and locational patterns in the city, and to establish that Berlin's urban area is a major production space with a complex fabric of specialized production districts. This spatial organization will be examined in terms of the level of agglomeration of various sub-economies with special reference to the formation of local enterprise clusters in the Berlin economic area. Berlin's specialization profile and the employment trend in the city compared with other metropolitan cities in Germany make it clear that the metropolis of Berlin is under threat as a production space, and this threat partly stems from the way in which the real estate business has developed in the Berlin area.     

Strengthening the Polycentric Urban System in Europe: Conclusions from the ESDP

The first European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) document agreed in May 1999 calls for closer cooperation at the EU level in response to the challenges posed by globalization and the increasingly transnational impact of spatial development in Europe. The ESDP maps out a common approach to spatial development in the EU member states and supports an integrated perspective for European spatial development which goes beyond specialist viewpoints. This article focuses on the relationship between key statements on the European urban system contained in the ESDP and the 'real' structures and changes within this urban system. It also examines possible conclusions from the ESDP for urban policy in Europe in the light of the activities already launched to translate the ESDP into practice in the urban dimension of European spatial development.     

Civility,Male Friendship,and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth‐Century Germany

Largely neglected by historians who assume that its heyday passed in Europe with the demise of the Old Regime, Freemasonry in fact became a mass phenomenon among German (and French as well as American) middle‐class men in the nineteenth century. Masonic secrecy made possible a form of sociability which allowed men to experience intimate relations with each other. Within the lodge, men could experience the emotional drama of the rituals while, both in public and in the family, men increasingly sought to comply with the ideal of a man ruled by reason. Masonic rituals entailed the implicit message that the most important presupposition for civility, moral improvement and a ‘brotherhood of all men’ was male friendship.