Metropolitan cooperation in Europe: Theoretical issues and perspectives for urban networking 1

In recent years urban entrepreneurialism has become a metropolitan strategy to cope with the challenges of an increasingly flexible global economy. Building on a debate about the problematic nature of this strategy we argue that cooperation of cities, or metropolitan cooperation, constitutes a new policy option for local actors which has the potential to overcome the negative effects of urban competition. In order to explore this potential we analyse the fundamental changes of the local state and existing cooperative efforts. This analysis shows that so far metropolitan cooperation is mainly experimental in character and a policy option that moves forward by trial and error and by learning from success and failure. We see this as partly due to a lack of an adequate theoretical framework dealing with the economics of urban systems. By way of synthesizing different academic discourses we suggest a conceptualization of metropolitan cooperation which takes into account the potential economic benefits and institutional requirements of cooperative behaviour of urban actors. Based on these considerations we establish criteria for suitable thematic fields of metropolitan cooperation and suggest forms of institutionalization.     

3. BEYOND REPRESENTATION: PICTORIAL TEMPORALITY AND THE RELATIONAL TIME OF THE EVENT

Pictures are often connected with the mediation of the event but, paradoxically, not with temporality as such. Although there are several existing approaches that focus on the interplay between the event and its literary representation, the relation between pictorial time and the temporal constitution of the event remains unexplored. The field of image theory has offered insights into the multiple dimensions of the picture's temporality. It has shown that the picture's temporality concerns not only the depicted event but also the picture's immanent modes of producing different temporalities within one pictorial plane. The picture thus not only makes visible but also generates multilayered times of the event. This article brings together insights from image theory and from theories of historical times to demonstrate the relationship between the times of the event and the inner logic of the picture. In order to identify the various qualities of the picture that structure the times of the event, this article uses the case study of Reinhart Koselleck's practical and theoretical work with pictures. This article reads Koselleck's approaches to pictures alongside new insights concerning the relationality of time to the event and the picture. By exploring the picture's agency with regards to the politics of time, this article lays bare the picture's potential to structure the times of the event.