Introduction

In recent years the notions of city-region and neighbourhood have gained growing prominence in both policy and academic fields; in a sense both are increasingly seen as ‘natural units’ for analysis and policy focus in terms of addressing a range of problems facing urban areas. This emphasis on the city-region is by no means a trend unique to the UK. Across Europe, under the growing pressure of globalisation and the apparent decline of the nation state, the city-region (or metropolitan region) has increasingly been defined as the natural focus for economic development policies (see Le Galès, 2002, pp 156-9). Cities are now widely viewed as the ‘motors of economic growth’ (see CEC, 1997, 1998; Atkinson, 2001) and the search for ‘urban competitiveness’ has become the new ‘holy grail’ of city development. Over a somewhat longer period across Europe the neighbourhood has become a key arena for a range of more ‘socially oriented’ policies (see also Chapter Three). The neighbourhood is if anything an even more longstanding and widely used notion in both policy and academic work and has increasingly been assumed to have significance for (urban) policy (Kearns and Parkinson, 2001).

In terms of this chapter, what is important is that one of the crucial ways in which the city-region and the neighbourhood are to be linked, if at all, will be through the form(s) of multi-level governance developed within the city-region (on debates over governance see Kooiman, 1993; Rhodes, 1995, 1997; Stoker, 1998; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999; Pierre, 2000). More recently this has also included debates over how to link both economic development (or competitiveness) and social cohesion (or social integration) (see Boddy, 2002) and how, and to what extent, different forms of governance can promote such links (see Ache, 2000). At the same time, linked to debates over governance, there has also been a renewed emphasis on citizen and community participation within the neighbourhood (Miliband, 2005a). Thus, in part, the link between the city-region and the neighbourhood is implicitly made in terms of multi-level governance and how the different levels of governance within a city-region can operate efficiently and effectively to govern and promote economic development while ensuring that the organisations/institutions and formal and informal networks that constitute this system of multi-level governance are transparent, accountable and open to wider participation.