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Recent discussions on state rescaling have pointed towards the need for a greater focus on how and why state activity may change over time in order to generate insights into the provenance, trajectories and outcomes of rescaling in different global regions and national state spaces. Consequently, this paper explores the dialectical and recursive relationship between the concepts of “statecraft” and “scalecraft” to explore the evolving sites, objects and mechanisms for urban planning within two key urban centres in different parts of the world—Birmingham, UK, and Brisbane, Australia. It is illustrated how a range of actors—from the national to the local level—have sought to craft and reshape the strategies and structures for urban planning according to different imperatives. In turn, the implications for a tighter specifying of the process of state rescaling are considered, as well as the subsequent nature of urban planning arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considerable debate has taken place in England around the concept of the city-region. While there is contestation over the terminologies and interpretations of city-regionalism, this paper considers the extent to which it can offer a more integrative set of arrangements for community planning practices in England. Community planning is concerned with securing institutional efficiencies and sustainable development gains in the context of local service provision and integration. Attention is drawn to the extent to which the convergence of these two parallel processes may either exacerbate or ameliorate the institutional barriers to securing efficient and effective community planning. The paper argues that the effective translation of city-regionalism into practice is influenced by (i) variance in the territorial imaginaries/operational boundaries of local institutions and the impact on city-regional governance structures; (ii) the consistency of approach to city-regionalism that is evident within central government and the impact of national policy guidance on the establishment of functional city-regions and (iii) a lack of vertical integration between community planning and city-regional working. These impinge on the extent to which an effective 'spatial fix' can be secured locally and the ability of community planning to act as a 'decongestant' within an increasingly congested state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a plethora of urban regeneration interventions introduced by UK Governments over the last 20 years, variation remains in respect of levels of deprivation that exist within many urban areas. This paper focuses on the extent to which Local Area Agreements (LAAs) - as a new management tool for addressing local needs through collaborative working - are able to identify and respond to such variation in the UK. The research highlights that LAAs' 'management by targets' approach, where localities are required to select, negotiate and implement a relatively small number of centrally driven indicators and outcomes in order to improve performance, may not be fully conducive to addressing variations in levels of deprivation. In turn, the paper compares/contrasts similar approaches elsewhere in the world and, in so doing, draws out a number of wider 'lessons' for enhancing innovation and knowledge exchange in urban regeneration management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]