Michael Hoyler

Located within the world’s largest urban region, the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin (GMH) is a new experimental and innovative governance space connected to China’s ‘one country, two systems’ policy. Located within the geographical boundaries of Zhuhai, the GMH is governed under a shared administrative jurisdiction between Macao, Zhuhai and Guangdong Province. Originally developed from researching African urban contexts, we mobilise and extend a ‘transcalarity’ framework to overcome perceived weaknesses inherent in the ‘state rescaling’ approach often deployed to explain subnational governance arrangements in China. The paper reveals how polycentric urban regions such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area are actively governed through transcalar state strategies. It shows how transcalarity, as a concept, can reveal important new empirical and theoretical insights into urban China. Conceptually, it reframes Hengqin as a ‘buffer zone’ that stabilises yet simultaneously destabilises the ‘one country, two systems’ configuration, producing experimental governance dynamics. Empirically, the paper draws on 39 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, to provide a granular and multi-perspectival analysis of experimental governance practices in the GMH. We demonstrate that central government actors orchestrate polycentric urban development through selective delegation, embedded jurisdictional controls and strategic recalibration of intergovernmental relations. This produces distinctly asymmetrical outcomes: Macao gains institutional leverage, while Zhuhai’s formal administrative authority is constrained. Overall, our paper demonstrates how polycentricity is strategically constructed, rather than emergent, in contemporary state spatial projects.

A central concern of media scholars has been the discursive and economic power of a small number of transnational media corporations (TNMCs). In this paper, we advance research on TNMC power through a novel empirical analysis of their global-spatial organization, reflected in their corporate global office networks. Our findings reveal both global and regional corporate strategies and, further, demonstrate how US new media firms are expanding into Chinese global media cities to penetrate this emerging media market. Our analyses provide a crucial macro-level overview of the structural power of TNMCs to consolidate control over the global network of media.

Widely recognized as an empirical reality, an important analytical framework and a normative goal for territorial development policies, polycentric urban regions (PURs) are the subject of concerted international interest among those charged with planning and governing cities and regions. And yet, why does so much research on cities and regions not really engage with the PUR concept? With the aim of renewing debates surrounding the governance of PURs and the polycentric model of spatial development, we reveal a significant body of hidden research before proceeding to identify dimensions of a future PURS+ research agenda which has critical governance questions at its centre.

This special issue offers a cross-section of state-of-the-art research into ‘polycentric urban regions’: regions characterized by the presence of multiple, more-or-less proximate, centres where there is balanced development among these centres. With the literature increasingly transcending the focus on paradigmatic examples, the papers in this special issue concentrate on three fundamental and complementary questions: How can polycentric urban regions be conceptualized? How can we identify them formally? What is the impact of this regional form on people and places? We discuss how the contributions collectively push the boundaries of the regional studies literature and identify promising avenues for further research.

This article contributes new empirical findings and conceptual arguments to topical debates about internationalisation ‘at home’ through a comparative study on how undergraduate students experience and perceive university learning and teaching by international and home academics. Drawing on survey data from a research-intensive English university, the study shows that most UK home students prefer being taught by home academics, whereas international academics are appreciated for developing intercultural understanding and global outlook. As home students with previous international experiences and BAME backgrounds value international academics more than their less diverse home student peers, we argue that cultural homophily shapes students’ experiences, evaluations, and benefits of encounters with international and home academics.

Ongoing splintering and siloification in urban studies require alternative approaches to bring the major theoretical and epistemological perspectives into constructive dialogue. Reflecting growing calls for engaged pluralism, we analyse the extent to which different perspectives can come together as complementary alternatives in understanding cities and present a framework for overcoming the key theoretical and methodological challenges caused by fragmentation. Using Istanbul as our illustrative case, we do this in three steps. Theoretically, we stress-test the potentials and limits of four dominant perspectives in urban theory making – global cities, state rescaling, developmental and postcolonial – revealing how each can only ever generate a partial, one-dimensional, explanation. Methodologically, we proceed to make the case for doing comparative urbanism differently by developing a conjunctural approach. Finally, and conceptually, we identify ‘conjunctural cities’ as a distinctive type of city and as a new approach to analysing cities. Our contention is that approaching all cities conjuncturally provides a significant step towards putting engaged pluralism into action, as well as indicating new terrain on which the future of urban theory/urban studies can be constructively debated.

Walter Christaller’s central place theory famously conceptualizes local external urban relations (town-ness) while neglecting non-local connections characterized as central flow theory (city-ness). In this paper, we advance the study of central flow theory by revealing its existence within the foundation text of central place theory. We systematically separate town-ness and city-ness in Christaller’s original data on 1920s’ southern Germany to estimate the balance between the two processes for different urban places. We find that city-ness dominates town-ness in leading cities and show the severe limitations of focusing on just one urban external relation in urban and regional studies of settlement systems.

This article advances research on external urban relations by drawing attention to the role of temporary project-based economic organisation in the formation of inter-firm links between cities. Through a novel empirical examination of (trans)national co-production in the motion picture industry, we reveal how such projects transcend the boundaries of individual production clusters and link urban centres within specific network configurations. Stripping away the ‘top layer’ of Hollywood’s commercially successful feature films, we undertake a social network analysis of film productions in four markets across three continents – China, Germany, France and Brazil – to provide a unique comparative analysis of networked urban geographies. Our findings show that film production networks are grounded in existing structural relations between cities. The spatial forms of these networks range from monocentric in the case of the French film market, to dyadic in the case of China and Brazil, to polycentric in the case of the German film market. Conceptually, we argue that adopting an inter-firm project-based approach can account for the ways in which complex patterns of inter-firm production relations accumulate to form (trans)national city networks. Viewing city networks in this way provides an important alternative perspective to dominant conceptualisations of global urban networks as formed through corporate intra-firm relations.