Research content
Global and world city theories and approaches to metropolitanization challenge the traditional role and centrality of capital cities. Secondary capital cities tend to be overlooked in the field of urban affairs. Consequentially, there is a lack of research and resulting theory describing their political economy. We contend that there is a need for a theory that cohesively embraces the important role capital cities play in shaping the political, economic, and cultural identity of a nation. We propose a tentative theory linking the economic dynamics with the ways in which these capital cities position themselves in global and national urban systems. In order to cope with the characteristic of urban policy-making in secondary capital cities, we suggest linking the framework of the actor-centered institutionalism with urban regime theory out of two conceptual reasons. First, the research framework should account for variation of external pressure (structure) and main actors (agency) which enables us to study how the relevant actors, grasped as urban regimes, mediate the external effects. Secondly, it is inevitable to incorporate public and private actors in the research framework since the interaction of these entities are heavily intertwined and has the potentially to create a distinctive Regional Innovation System (RIS) located in capital city regions. We propose that in order to understand the national positioning strategies of secondary capital city regions, we should analyze external pressure (structure) exerted by the economic situation and the political-institutional setting upon the urban regime which has the capacity to mediate this structural forces (agency). More specifically, we suggest that capacity to compete with other metropolitan areas in the national urban system, the configuration of the federal tax system and the degree of federalism in combination with the country size are the most important structural factors that help to explain the national positioning strategies. We are then interested in how regimes are mediating these structural factors in producing its positioning policies. The mediation capacity of urban regimes should be particularly stressed because it brings the desired aspects of both the agency and the local into the analysis.
