‘Who governs’ Berlin’s metropolitan region? The strategic-relational construction of metropolitan scale in Berlin–Brandenburg’s economic development policies

Abstract

‘Who governs’ Berlin’s metropolitan region—and how? The article addresses this question by inquiring into the way metropolitan space is being constituted in current economic development policies for Berlin–Brandenburg. It follows the hypothesis that no single-unitary understanding of metropolitan space exists in Berlin as expression of an explicit metropolitan project, but rather a heteronomy of policy practices which express diverse and possibly competing ‘implicit’ metropolitan issues and agendas. Accordingly, rescaling in the Berlin metropolitan region is not occurring in a comprehensive political–institutional form, as an ‘explicit project’. The more significant, however, is that rescaling is occurring—as an ‘implicit project’—through policy and governance practices which constitute a variety of understandings of metropolitan space. Metropolitan space appears therefore as an emerging construct defined by strategic-relational interplays between public and private actors and by the selective involvement of their interests and resources in the domain of specific spatial-economic development policies. Analyzing the construction of metropolitan space within specific policy arenas therefore offers a significant perspective on ‘who governs’ metropolitan development and on how this is possibly tied to the emergence of hegemonic understandings of scalar references for metropolitan policies.