Europeanization as urban entrepreneurialism: South Moravian Region and the political economy of European Structural Funds
Abstract
This contribution uncovers the crucial role of the EU Cohesion Policy and its Structural Funds (ESF) in the promotion of urban entrepreneurialism in the Central and East European core city-regions. Grounded in a theoretical intersection between the critical political economy of European integration and critical urban studies, it proposes three main assumptions.
First, as state-rescaling engines in EU's peripheries, the ESF promote the consolidation of urban growth coalitions on the subnational scales of governance in Central and Eastern Europe. Second, this involves a restructuring process which encourages the growth coalitions to articulate economic imaginaries (B.
Jessop and N.-L. Sum) of regional competitiveness, knowledge-based innovativeness, and socio-spatial distinctiveness which would comply with the neoliberal content of transnational capitalist regulation promoted by the European Commission.
Third, these imaginaries are then socially regularized through the ESF-financed flagship projects: investment in human and physical capital such as the production of knowledge workers and the establishment of research centers that facilitate university-business cooperation in order to stimulate research and development in various branches of bio- and information-technologies. This contribution tests such theoretical assumptions on the empirical terrain of Brno, South Moravian Region.
It analyzes the social basis of Brno's growth coalition (e.g. Regional Development Agency South Moravia) and the semantic content of regional development strategies (Regional Operational Programme, Regional Innovation Strategies) that is connected to the EU's grand strategies such as Lisbon Agenda/Horizon 2020 and being materialized through the ESF-financed flagship projects (e.g.
Central European Institute of Technology).