Metropolitanizing a nordic state? City-regionalist imaginary and the restructuring of the state as a territorial political community in Finland

Abstract

In this chapter, we study the effects of city-regionalism on state spatiality and on state as a territorial political community in the Finnish context. We conceptualize city-regionalism as an economic-geographical imaginary that has recently emerged as the dominant spatial framework informing national spatial policies and territorial strategies in the context of the capitalist world economy. The effects of city-regional policies and strategies on national economies‚ on the states’ physical spaces‚ or on the institutional arrangements of territorial governance have been discussed widely in political and academic circles. However, the potential implications of the imaginary of city-regionalism on the state as a territorial political community have received less attention. In this chapter, we seek to fill this gap by scrutinizing city-regionalist policies and discourse in the Finnish context through Hannah Arendt’s concepts of politics and political community. We start with the view that a state, even if nationally scaled, is at least potentially a more inclusive and plural form of political community than any city or metropolis. Based on our empirical analysis of the city-regionalist discourse, we argue that city-regionalism is an exclusive and selective imaginary, which builds on a peculiar form of depoliticized politics fueled by particular forms of economic knowledge and rationales. Moreover, the imaginary privileges specific urban localities, issues, and actors as politically appropriate topics of public deliberation and as relevant subjects of national political concern. Accordingly, city-regionalist imaginary not only contributes to the transformation of the state’s physical territorial structure but also considerably delimits the public space of politics, the notion of citizen-subject—and eventually, the state as a territorial political community.