This book offers a cross-national analysis of contemporary issues and challenges for the governing of urban regions. The case studies on Germany, Spain, France, Greece, The Netherlands, Finland, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, the US and Canada, place particular emphasis on the tensions building on metropolitan governing capacity and democratic legitimacy. The authors develop and use an analytical framework focused on the dynamics of place and make an original contribution to the debates on the nature of metropolitan governance.

Bob Jessop presents an up-to-date account of his distinctive approach to the dialectics of structure and strategy in the exercise of state power. While his earlier work critically surveys other state theories, this book focuses on the development of his own strategic-relational approach. It introduces its main sources, outlines its development, applies this approach to four case studies, and sketches a strategic-relational research agenda. Thus the book presents a comprehensive theoretical statement of the approach and guidelines for its application. Key features of the book include: an account of the authors theoretical development; a review of recent developments in state theory and the cultural turn in political economy; critical strategic-relational re-readings of major state theorists Marx on political representation, Gramsci on the spatiality of state power, Poulantzas on the state as a social relation, and the later Foucault on statecraft; applications of the strategic-relational approach to important issues concerning the contemporary state: its gendered selectivity, the future of the national state, the states temporal sovereignty, and the relevance of multi-scalar meta-governance in Europe for the more general future of the state. The book concludes with recommendations for future strategic-relational research in political economy and state theory.

This book is an account of two dimension of state and nation building in France and Spain since the seventeenth century--the invention of a national boundary line and the making of Frenchmen and Spaniards. It is also a history of Catalan rural society in the Cerdanya, a valley in the eastern Pyrenees divided between Spain and France in 1659. This study shuttles between two levels, between the center and the periphery. It connects the "macroscopic" political and diplomatic history of France and Spain, from the Old Regime monarchies to the national territorial states of the later nineteenth century; and the "molecular" history--the historical ethnography--of Catalan village communities, rural nobles, and peasants in the borderland. On the frontier, these two histories come together, and they can be told as one. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990. This book is an account of two dimension of state and nation building in France and Spain since the seventeenth century--the invention of a national boundary line and the making of Frenchmen and Spaniards. It is also a history of Catalan rural society in