Realizing potential: Building regional organizing capacity in polycentric urban regions

Regional planning for and in polycentric urban regions may entail certain competitive potentialities over a stand-alone development of their individual cities or city-regions. These potentialities relate to the pooling of resources, complementarities and spatial diversity. It seems that planners are increasingly aware of these potentialities as in several European countries attempts are made to identify such polycentric regional systems of formerly independent and distinct cities that are located close to each other, often building on increasing functional relationships between them. This article argues, however, that in order actually to exploit the theoretical potential planning for polycentric urban regions has, one needs to do more than just identify a polycentric system on the map. Rather, an active building of regional organizing capacity is needed - that is, the ability to regionally co-ordinate developments through a more or less institutionalized framework of co-operation, debate, negotiation and decision-making in pursuit of interests at the regional scale - to shape a polycentric urban region's competitive advantages. This need for regional organizing capacity may sound obvious, but in practice successful examples of proclaimed polycentric urban regions developing networks for regional co-ordination and action are rather thin on the ground. Basing our argument on evidence from four polycentric urban regions in North West Europe, it was found that the building of regional organizing capacity is conditioned by a number of spatial-functional, political-institutional and cultural factors. Major constraints in the examined regions include institutional fragmentation, an internal orientation of key persons and the lack of identification with the region at large.