Political Geography of Cities and Regions

Kees Terlouw is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

• 1. Introduction: Looking beyond national populism, 2. The relational and territorial perspectives, 3. Early modernity and urban autonomy, 4. Industrial modernity: integrating cities in the national territory, 5. Late modernity: from territorial regulation to competition, 6. Metropolitan regions: competitiveness justifying the new institutional framework, 7. Challenging the metropolitan region: local resistance identities, 8. The resurgence of the territorial perspective: universal villagism and localised territorialisations, 9. Conclusion: the cycle of dominance of the territorial and relational perspective

“One of Terlouw’s exciting themes is the question of resistance identities that often emerges when spatial entities are transformed. […] Overall, this analysis of the long-term evolution of the case study regions is multilayered and rich in details. […] All in all, Terlouw’s book provides the reader with an appealing and detailed geohistorical analysis of the developments of his two research areas and also introduces a wide array of concepts and frameworks that are potentially useful for such an analysis elsewhere. I liked particularly chapters 7 and 8, which provide a thick analysis of local resistance identities in research areas and a more general or synthetic discussion of the resurgence of the territorial perspective.” — Anssi Paasi (21 Aug 2023): Political geography of cities and regions: Changing legitimacy and identity, Regional Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2241270