Suchergebnisse

International audience ; Territoriality has variously been seen in the contexts of space and law (Lefebvre, 1991; Taylor, 1993), behaviourism (Urry, 1985) and power (Sack, 1986; Taylor, 1993) and the like. These conceptions have often dominated the national scale, not least because sovereignty over territory has always been at the forefront of nationalist and separatist movements. As Taylor (1993) has shown, the establishment and disestablishment of states represent victories for some social groups and defeats for others. Beyond this, we need to understand territoriality at scales of analyses including sub-national and personal levels. As Urry (1985) has commented, one's conception of oneself and one's place in society is subtly merged with one's conception of the spacially limited territory of social interaction. In practice, territorial organisation can be used as an instrument for socialising people into space, as with apartheid social engineering in South Africa and districting in the United States, or in the general organisation of the state. All these become highly questionable when political changes occur as experiences in countries undergoing dramatic socio-political changes, show.

This article examines the decentralisation process that took place in Greece from 1981 until 2010. Although Greece remains a highly centralised state, considerable decentralization reforms were undertaken during this period. Those reforms affected all subnational levels of government. Nevertheless, despite the considerable changes, the fundamentals of the polity have remained relatively untouched. The paper examines the causal factors of decentralisation reforms throughout this period alongside the obstructing factors that resisted them, thus contributing towards the relative inertia of the polity structures. The main argument put forward is that it was mainly domestic factors that shaped the decentralization process in the country. Party politics, the démocratisation discourse and, later on, managerial concerns influenced the reform process greatly. Additionally, structural characteristics of the Greek socio-political system, such as veto points at the local and national levels, obtruded change, while the role of certain individual actors who acted as policy entrepreneurs and pushed the reforms up the political agenda should not be underestimated. Europeanisation and other international factors were of secondary importance in the whole process. Nevertheless, one should not overlook them altogether, since their interrelation with the aforementioned domestic factors produced considerable consequences.

Abstract.  This paper argues that the formation and transformation of local entrepreneurial governances can be understood as a process of local responses to challenges presented by global economic restructuring. Two kinds of local responses are theoretically identified. At the structure level, local entrepreneurial governances happen when places are embedded in the situation of competition between cities and regions. At the agent level, the emergence of local entrepreneurial governances requires local actors who pursue their own political and economic interests. The theoretical framework, what I term 'territorial restructuring process', is empirically explained by the context of the West and China.

Territorial systems in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are surveyed together with factors that have determined their present shape. The most important among these are: a relatively late start in the building of the modern state, the legacy of communist regimes, and the exigencies of postcommunist transition. In the second part of the paper territorial cleavages occurring in the region are examined, in particular: the centre–periphery contrasts; the urban–rural cleavage; the West – East gradient of modernisation and economic development; and sociocultural cleavages as reflected in local self-organisation. In the third part of the paper the strategies of territorial reorganisation are discussed, as they are debated and implemented in the countries under study.

Recent decades have seen a flurry of administrative division adjustments (ADAs) in major Chinese cities, including ADAs that reconfigure multiple local government units at once. Despite the growing visibility of such reforms, it remains unclear how they come about and how profoundly they change cities' governance and development prospects. To address these questions, this paper examines cases of ADA in Nanjing and Ningbo that had varying practical and political significance. Nanjing's 2013 ADA, though broad in scope, primarily served the purpose of administrative streamlining. By contrast, Ningbo's 2016 ADA marked a political and economic turning point, furthering the city's agenda of territorial consolidation. This detailed case comparison traces how varying ADA outcomes emerged from different intergovernmental relationships between cities, urban subunits, and provincial authorities, highlighting the territorial interest conflicts that play out within Chinese cities and the broader political challenges surrounding efforts to improve metropolitan governance.