Exploring the role of municipal governments as territorial actors

Keywords: territory, municipal government, state territorial hegemony, regional integration, Mediterranean, Barcelona
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Wednesday
Session Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 11:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 12:25 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the role of municipal governments as territorial actors. During the last decades, the transformation of local governments as part of the evolution of Western states has led them to engage in a broader range of activities than in the past. While the paradigm of urban entrepreneurialism continues to play a crucial role to understand this shift (Harvey, 1989), it is also true that today the agendas of municipal entrepreneurialism include a larger set of objectives and strategies (Lauermann, 2018; Thompson et al., 2020). Among other things, many cities now engage in intermunicipal diplomatic activities and develop regional alliances (Oosterlynck et al., 2019). In doing so, local governments should be less understood as being enclosed within a territory, than being an active agent in the production of territories. In this paper I seek to reflect on how this municipal-led territorialisation relates to state territorial hegemonies: to what extent do they challenge existing state spatial configurations by articulating new territorial formations? Or do they, in contrast, reproduce existing state spatial projects? These reflections aim to advance existing debates on the relation between municipalism (Thompson, 2020) and the evolution of state territoriality, by reflecting on the plural and contested character of local governments as territorial actors. The discussion will be based on the ongoing doctoral research examining the regional-building strategies developed by the government of Barcelona in the western Mediterranean from the 1980s to the present.