Att göra region genom stadspolitik - America's Cup och gränslöshetens gränser

• This article is based on a study of the sailing event America’s Cup in Malmö in the late summer of 2005. It serves the purpose of exemplifying a project of urban governance. Urban governance means that municipalities are engaged in implementing different strategies in order to strengthen their own position in the competition between cities and regions. The article’s main theme is the relation between urban governance and regional constructions. How does it work in practice “to create a region through urban governance”? The creation of regions presupposes the elimination of traditional boundaries between political units. Politics must transcend traditional boundaries, which is a central theme in the narrative about cities and regions that the author of the present article reconstructs. This particular narrative of cities and regions makes up the ideological background to a concrete project of urban governance such as America’s Cup, as well as to the Öresund region at large. The narrative is, however, contrasted with the fact that in practice a process of articulating a number of new territorial borders is already going on, for example between Malmö and Copenhagen and between different Scanian regions. The territorial tensions have not ceased to exist, in spite of the rhetoric of boundlessness. The author concludes that formulations of borders may work as both facilitating and limiting. Through new constellations – transcending ingrained political boundaries – a power to act is created. At the same time the very notion that politics must act boundlessly, and in a certain way, obtains a form of power over the freedom of political imagination. On the one hand, various territorial perspectives on politics sometimes go before the vision of an Öresund region, and, on the other hand, the alternative political freedom of action becomes limited by what often is described as a more and more boundless world.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Keyword

gränser

globalisering

evenemang

platsmarknadsföring

urbana förnyelsestrategier

Malmö

Öresundsregionen

entreprenörstaden

städer

Stadspolitik

regioner

Publication and Content Type

kap (subject category)

vet (subject category)