City-regionalism as a constellation and re-positioning of discourses, practices and actors: insights from post-territorialist Italy.

From the rise and subsequent fall of local economic development policies and visions, between the 1990s and the early 2000s, to the recent wave of urban strategic plans, the discoursive construction of urban and regional policies in southern Italy and beyond has been driven, on the one hand, by the evolution of geographical imaginaries about the role and meaning of regional spaces in the national and the world-economy (from new-localism to new-regionalism and then to the currently emerging city-regionalism) and, on the other hand, by the need to accommodate changing interests, claims and regional identities in times of disillusionment toward the virtues of 'territorialism' and the local scale. The paper offers a critical review of this evolution, focusing on how socio-spatial relations (Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008) have been dealt with in scholarly and public debates about urban and regional development in southern Italy. In doing so we draw on different and at the same time related theoretical strands in critical urban and regional studies, including cultural political economy (Jessop 2004, Uitermark 2005), governamentality studies (Rose-Miller 1992, Huxley 2007), discourse theory (Laclau-Mouffe 1985, Muller 2008) and post-structuralist network analysis (Law 1994, Latour 2005). The aim is to challenge conventional pluralist ontologies of 'actors', 'networks' and 'regions' and to offer a methodological examination of alternative interpretive frameworks centred on the critical analysis of discourse and the ethnography of the local State.