City-Region as the Extension of Urban Fabric

City-region qua a system of concepts has a theoretical, empirical and epistemological significance. On the strength of such a capacity, this system is applied to better understand the structures of production of space in different scales (global, international, national, regional and urban).

Using Henri Lefebvre’s conception of Urban Fabric, this paper tries to bring about a different reading of the concept of city-region. Not only the concept of city-region per se but also the whole system of this concept (region, neo-regionalism and city-region) is read in light of Lefebvre’s Urban Fabric. On the one side of this reading are subjects and their lived experiences, and on the other are institutions, governmental and administrative bodies. This reading emphasizes the importance of the subject in producing the scale, the gravity of the concept of scale itself and the importance of governance under the condition of neoliberal production of space. In the age of globalization and capitalist production of the city under neoliberal production of space, how does the city have its life and institutional content? The concept of Urban Fabric combines these two elements, and at the same time transcends them. This concept is the mediation between the two extreme limits of city region, i.e. the rural (hinterland) and its urban core. This concept also functions as a kind of perspective or standpoint, which qua the mirror of the relation between urban society and land manifests the mode of production of urban land within the urban institutional structure through its dissolution, which leads to the expression of Urban Fabric.

During the recent neoliberal production of space, there happens to emerge forms of city-region through the implosion-explosion of the urban core. Consequently, up to the urban hinterland, the thrown pieces of Urban Fabric are extended here and there. This reading of city-region tries to explain fractures and disintegration of the city and its extension to its surrounding during late capitalism, investigating it from institutional, structural and subjective dimensions. Urban Fabric demonstrates the social condition of the production of urban tissues under globalized circumstances. As a kind of embodiment of subjectivity in post-industrial age, Urban Fabric draws the condition of urban expansion, which as such, displays the state’s position as an entrepreneur and an enterprise. This would lead to the emergence of the condition of production of housing and commodification of space in order to prepare regions to compete with other international city regions. The conceptual hierarchy in this analysis begins with the everyday, spatial practices, which finally reaches its form. In other words, forms, the lived and the rational, are traceable in Lefebvrian Urban Fabric.

Today, Urban Fabric can be proposed for subjects such as uneven development, territorial differentiation and center-periphery polarity. In the age of globalization, whatever that was considered urban or in a way deemed as its features, such as definitive industrial and financial rationality, extends outside the city as if the region becomes a the Urban Fabric of the city. In each stage of urban implosion-explosion, the scale of effect and the extension of Urban Fabric becomes different, since the speed and quality of urbanization is different. If today, there are variety of the concept of city-region, it is because of the different effect it exerts upon social space.