Abstract
In 2014, European Urban and Regional Studies awarded the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize was established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in Volume 21, Number 1, 2014). Following nominations from the journal’s editorial board members and careful consideration of these nominations among the journal’s editors, we are delighted to announce that the 2015 prize is awarded to John Harrison and Anna Growe for their paper ‘From places to flows? Planning for the new “regional world” in Germany’, European Urban and Regional Studies 21(1): 21-41.
Adrian Smith
Editor-in-Chief
We are absolutely delighted, honoured and, honestly, pleasantly surprised to be awarded the 2015 Jim Lewis Prize. The paper represents the first outcome from our collaboration and so this is a wonderful affirmation that our work is making its contribution to the collective endeavour of authors and editors, past and present, to advance European Urban and Regional Studies.
Our collaboration, and this paper, owes much to happenstance and fate. We first met when Anna spent the first half of 2010 as a visiting research student in Loughborough. Anna’s primary aim was to develop her doctoral research on knowledge hubs and functional and economic relations in the German urban system working in conjunction with Peter Taylor and colleagues in the GaWC research group. That said, during the first few weeks Anna delivered a research seminar which included a map – Figure 1 in our paper – which was neither essential, nor integral, to the presentation of her research. Included simply to explain where her research interests developed from (Growe, 2009), it could very easily have been left out, meaning this paper would never have been written (or certainly not by us).
Figure 1 is the genesis of this paper because it made an immediate connection to John’s work which was, at this time, examining a series of very similar spatial maps for the North West region of England (Harrison, 2010, 2013). Set against the backdrop of territorial–relational debates in regional studies, this work was examining how different conceptions of the city-region – as agglomerations, as a political scale, and as functionally networked hubs and spokes – were being used by actors in their attempts to make territorial and relational approaches complementary. What was striking about the 2006 Leitbilder image for Germany was that it was almost identical in appearance to the maps produced for North West England; the only major difference was all three conceptions of city–regions appeared together in a single spatial vision.
The major contribution of the paper, and this research, has been to understand better the process by which policy elites have sought to re-imagine the German space economy as a relational space of flows centred on more networked regional spaces. We reveal how the three conceptions of the city–region have been mobilised at different times over the past 20 years to facilitate transition from a territorial planning perspective (based on the 16 Länder) to a new relationally-networked planning framework (based on 11 European Metropolitan Regions) in Germany. This suggests that the ambiguity of regional concept is politically expedient for actors – in our case the Federal State – when facing the challenge of making territorial and relational approaches, and regional development strategies that are more exclusive and inclusive, appear complementary. Indeed, in the final part of the paper we are able to suggest that the emergence of new regional imaginaries (e.g. cross-border metropolitan regions) in academic and political discourse is a direct response to the challenge of making networked regional spaces complementary, as well as networked-territorial spaces – an idea we have subsequently developed (Harrison and Growe, 2014).
Publishing this paper in European Urban and Regional Studies was very important to us. Firstly, the title of our paper refers back to Michael Storper’s notion of a ‘regional world’ – an idea first published in this journal (Storper, 1995) and revisited at the time we were writing (Storper, 2011) – which meant the transition we reveal in the paper was a transition integral to how the journal has itself evolved over the last two decades. And, secondly, the journal publishes the type of theoretically informed, policy relevant and empirically-grounded research paper that we were aspiring to write in order to develop a better understanding of the processes shaping urban and regional development both in Germany particularly and in Europe more broadly.
Finally, this is a rare opportunity to thank publicly those who have helped us towards this achievement. We are both hugely indebted to our respective mentors, Martin Jones and Hans Blotevogel, without whose guidance and support we would not be doing the research we both enjoy so much. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Diane Perrons, overseeing editor of the paper, and the two anonymous reviewers who take much credit for instructing us on how to strengthen and refine the ideas in the paper.