City region

The term city region has been in use since about 1950 by urbanists, economists and urban planners to mean not just the administrative area of a recognisable city or conurbation but also its hinterland that will often be far bigger. Conventionally, if one lives in an apparently rural area, suburb or county town where a majority of wage-earners travel into a particular city for a full or part-time job then one is (in effect) residing in the city region.

In studying human geography, urban and regional planning or the regional dynamics of business it is often worthwhile having closer regard to dominant travel patterns during the working day (to the extent that these can be estimated and recorded), than to the rather arbitrary boundaries assigned to administrative bodies such as councils, prefectures, or to localities defined merely to optimise postal services. Inevitably City Regions change their shapes over time and quite reasonably politicians seek to redraw administrative boundary maps from time-to-time to keep in-tune with perceived geographic reality. The extent of a city region is usually proportional to the intensity of activity in and around its central business district, but the spacing of competing centres of population can also be highly influential. It will be apprciated that a city region need not have a symmetrical shape, and that is especially true in coastal or lakeside situations (consider for instance Oslo, Southampton or Chicago).

In the United Kingdom, the city regional agenda began to be seen as an alternative to the Regional Assemblies in England that were favoured as a partial answer to the West Lothian question but rejected in a referendum by voters in North East England in November 2004. The concept of city regions and their development features heavily in The Northern Way, a collaborative development plan between the three northernmost English Regional Development Agencies. An embryonic city regional framework exists in the form of the Passenger Transport Executive and the Core Cities Group. The October 2006 Local Government White Paper did not contain firm proposals for city-region-wide authorities however.

The New Local Government Network proposed the creation of city regions as part of on-going reform efforts, while a report released by the IPPR's Centre for Cities proposed the creation of four large city-regions based on Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Greater Manchester. Edinburgh and it's hinterland strong economy (Forth Valley, Fife, West Lothian, Midlothian and East Lothian) means it has been named a one of Europe's fasting growing city-regions.

Also in 2006, the OECD published a number of studies on city regions, including an assessment profile of the Newcastle-Gateshead city region and a review of numerous city regions across the world [1].

In July 2007, HM Treasury published its Review of sub-national economic development and regeneration, which stated that the government would allow those city regions that wished to work together to form a statutory framework for city regional activity, including powers over transport, skills, planning and economic development [2]. Under the government's Transport Innovation Fund, city regions can band together to pilot forms of road pricing, such as the Manchester Congestion Charge considered by councils in Greater Manchester (but later rejected by referendum). In the April 2009 Budget, the government announced that Greater Manchester and Leeds would be the first two city regions with formal powers [3].

References

• Allen J. Scott (ed.) (2001) Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

External links

• CityMayors feature on English city regions 1
• CityMayors feature on English city regions 2
• NLGN report Seeing the Light? Next Step for City Regions (PDF)
• Centre for Cities 'City Leadership' report
• Defining City Regions - Warwick Podcast