Key points
- Brenner: globalisation did not weaken states but reorganised them, concentrating resources in the cities and regions able to compete.
- The rescaling of the state moves functions upward to the EU and downward to regions and cities, while the national state keeps the architecture.
- The new state spaces bet on winning regions and produce a territorial inequality the book anticipated.
New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (2004) is the book in which the urban sociologist Neil Brenner explains how globalisation has not weakened states but reorganised them in space. His thesis is that since the 1970s the states of Western Europe have stopped managing the national territory as a homogeneous whole to be balanced and have moved to concentrate resources and powers in the cities and regions able to compete in the global economy. The result is new state spaces: metropolitan regions, development agencies, special zones and urban alliances that take on functions once reserved for central government.
From spatial Keynesianism to the competitive city
Brenner starts from postwar spatial Keynesianism. Between 1945 and 1975 European states used regional policy, public investment and social housing to reduce the differences between rich and poor territories, and cities were above all administrative units of that national project. The crisis of the 1970s, deindustrialisation and international competition broke that model. Governments began to ask not how to distribute growth but where to concentrate it to attract investment, and big cities and their regions became the privileged scale of economic policy.
What the rescaling of the state means
Brenner calls that shift the rescaling of the state. It is not that the national state disappears: it redistributes its functions upward, to the European Union and international institutions, and downward, to regions and cities, while keeping control of the overall architecture. Urban locational policies, technology parks, large regeneration projects, city marketing, replace territorial redistribution. Brenner documents the process in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and the United Kingdom, from the Dutch Randstad to the British regional development agencies created in 1998.
New inequalities between winning and losing regions
The consequence is a new territorial inequality. Metropolitan regions connected to the global economy, London, Paris, Munich, Milan, accumulate investment, skilled employment and decision-making power, while declining industrial regions and rural areas are left behind. Brenner argues that this polarisation is not a side effect but the implicit objective of the new state spaces, which bet on the winners. The book anticipates the territorial discontent that would later be expressed in the vote of the abandoned regions in several European countries.
Method and legacy: toward planetary urbanization
New State Spaces also offers a method: understanding the state not as a fixed apparatus but as a continuous process of spatial reorganisation, with projects and strategies that change with the conjuncture. That view connects with Bob Jessop's theory of the state and with David Harvey's geography of capital, and prepares the line of research Brenner would later develop with Christian Schmid on planetary urbanization, where urban processes extend beyond cities to reorganise whole territories.
For urban governance the book leaves a warning and a task. The warning: the autonomy cities gain comes with the obligation to compete, and that competition limits what a local government can do for its most vulnerable residents. The task: to recover policies of territorial balance that do not leave the losing regions behind, and to build metropolitan institutions able to govern the real city, which no longer coincides with municipal boundaries. Brenner shows that the scale at which decisions are taken is not a technical detail but the heart of urban politics.
Frequently asked questions
What does Neil Brenner mean by the rescaling of the state?
The process by which, since the 1970s, Western European states have redistributed their functions upward to the European Union and downward to metropolitan regions, agencies and cities, abandoning the territorial balancing of postwar spatial Keynesianism to concentrate resources where they can compete in the global economy.
What does New State Spaces say about urban governance today?
That the autonomy cities gain comes with the obligation to compete, which limits what they can do for their most vulnerable residents, and that the task is to recover territorial balance policies and build metropolitan institutions able to govern the real city beyond municipal boundaries.
