Spaces of city-regionalism: Conceptualising pluralism in policymaking

City-regionalism is now established as a key spatial arena for shaping sub-national urban policy. In these spaces, economic growth interests are marshalled within a competitiveness narrative as the dominant approach for the development of governance and policy. Yet such dominance in principle does not preclude other policy approaches from emerging and re-fashioning city-regionalism. In this paper, making reference to evolving city-region arrangements in the UK, specifically Cardiff, we explore and conceptualise policy pluralism. Our core argument is that to determine the possibilities for plural approaches to emerge, researchers can productively assess the intersections of relational and territorial geographies filtered through a micro–meso–macro framework. The framework positions governing principles, institutions and practices as mediators of, or triggers for, relational and territorial policymaking processes whose interaction may open up windows through which pluralistic approaches might develop. With such a conceptual approach applied in the context of city-regionalism, the break points in competitiveness-focused policymaking may more readily come into view.