Research Policy and Review 1. Taking the Rest of the World Seriously? The State of British Urban and Regional Research in a Time of Economic Crisis

The links between the British economy and the world economy are becoming more important every year. As a result, change in Britain and the rest of the world is now directly related as never before. But British research on urban and regional change has been slow to take account of this fact and, in general, remains committed to a view of the world in which the British economy stops at the shoreline of Britain and the world economy appears as a set of ‘external factors' or ‘macrotrends in the economy’, or ‘international processes’ that are conjured up by the outside world and then fed into the British economy as something called ‘restructuring’. This parochial point of view, so inappropriate in the modern world, is illustrated by the Economic and Social Research Council Environment and Planning Committee document, “Research policy and priorities†.