The emergence over the last 30^40 years of what is variously termed edge city, edgeless, and postsuburban development in North America and elsewhere raises a set of challenges for urban theory and existing ways of understanding the politics of urban growth and management. These challenges and their global import have been outlined in their broadest terms by members of à Los Angeles School'. In this paper we try to develop the detail of some of these challenges in ways that might allow for comparative analysis. We begin by considering three analytical dimensions along which distinctively postsuburban settlements might be identified. These dimensions are not without their limitations but we regard them as a heuristic device around which to centre ongoing comparative research. We then go on to highlight three political contradictions attending postsuburban growth which appear to flow from some of these defining dimensions. To the extent that such postsuburban growth and politics are distinctive, they pose important challenges to established theories of urban politics. We briefly consider these challenges in the conclusion of the paper.

Turn again? Rethinking institutions and the governance of local and regional economies Over the past decade work on local and regional economies has been marked by an increased concern with institutions and the relationship between institutional dynamics and economic development. This is reflected in a diverse set of literatures that address themes such as the institutional foundations of urban and regional economic growth, the development of new forms of political^economic governance and the relationship between institutional character and configuration and diverse processes of economic and political change (Amin and Thrift, 1994;MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999a). Such issues are being addressed from a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, these developments are seemingly bound up with a wider shift within geography, and the social sciences more broadly, to place institutions more centrally within the encompass of contemporary academic concerns (see Jessop, this issue;Philo and Parr, 2000).Despite the diversity of substantive concerns, the literature exhibits a degree of consensus and coherence derived, in part, from a shared set of intellectual and conceptual roots on the one hand and a common set of methodological and ontological developments on the other. In these introductory comments we signpost the lineage of the`institutional turn' in urban and regional studies, while recognizing that we should see this as a``complex, polyvalent phenomenon'' rather than a coherent and complete intellectual venture (Jessop this issue, page 1213). We go on to outline five important developments in the recent literature. A degree of consensus combined with the currency of the literature give rise to a number of strengths that are reflected in the papers that follow. Notable here are the developing concern with processes of institutionalization, the attempt to mediate between everyday social practices and the reproduction of broader social structures or networks, and the recognition of the explanatory limits of associated theoretical frameworks. However, certain critical weaknesses remain and consensus in some areas contrasts with vigorous debate elsewhere. Indeed, both the theoretical foundations and the policy implications of work in this field are hotly contested, as recent papers by Amin (1999) and Lovering (1999) indicate. In consequence we argue that the institutional turn may be rather less well founded than commonly perceived. In this light the papers collected here might be read as part of an ongoing process that seeks to clarify and strengthen recent work while at the same time recognizing and understanding its limits.The intellectual roots of the current institutional turn in urban and regional studies are carefully set out in the papers by MacLeod and Jessop. There is little need to rehearse their arguments in detail but both indicate the diversity of disciplinary and intellectual traditions that have supported and furthered an institutionally focused agenda. These diverse traditi...

Since 1980 the dominance of elected municipal government in Britain has given way to a broader local governance. While the precise configuration of this change has been debated in detail, approaches to the processes of restructuring and the operation and relative efficacy of new arrangements remain empirically limited and theoretically underdeveloped. We explore the usefulness of a range of contemporary theoretical accounts including regulationist approaches in responding to these lacunae. In developing our analysis we argue first that explaining the restructuring of local governance requires (amongst a range of developments) further theoretical and empirical work on local business interest representation; and, secondly, that attempts to move beyond partial evaluations of the new local governance must be predicated upon appropriate and rigorous theoretical foundations.

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Much of the recent literature about local governance of Britain's cities has examined the power of a newly evolving 'business elite'. However, in trying to understand changing governance forms, these analyses have generally lacked sensitivity to the role of actors (businesspeople) and their representative organizations. Analytical categories drawn from social movement theory (SMT) are introduced to develop a more actor-centred approach to the role of business interests in urban management. While not attempting to claim that business represents a social movement within Britain's cities, it does illuminate how effectively or otherwise businesspeople develop an identity based around their representative organizations and specific business agendas, define non-business actors as opponents, and deploy and implement the agendas they create. We then use these SMT categories to examine the creation of business agendas in three English towns - Barnsley, Mansfield and Accrington. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.