Regional heteroglossia: the metropolitan region as a dialogical landscape

Many metropolitan conceptualizations apply ‘territorial grammar’ when articulating the region. This paper approaches the metropolitan region as an entity whose extent and internal structure are negotiated in both space and time. We argue that the ‘planning imagination’, which is predominantly spatial in nature, must be temporalized by considering ‘temporal grammar’. The main objective of this study is to explore how a temporal dimension can be integrated more effectively into how the metropolitan region is imagined and conceptualized. Therefore, we employ the dialogical concept of heteroglossia to present the metropolitan region as a continuous dialogue between municipalities of different power, as an open, ongoing and negotiated spatiotemporal unit. Our secondary aim is to employ this conceptualization in an empirical description of the spatiotemporal arrangement of a particular region (Brno, Czech Republic, summer 2015). For this purpose, we use data related to the opening hours of shops selling fast-moving consumer goods. Analysis revealed four specific voices present in the complex heteroglossia of the region: the voice of the core, the city of Brno; the voice of secondary urban centres; the voice of municipalities located in the hinterlands of secondary urban centres; and the voice of traditional agricultural municipalities.