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Despite a select group of urban centres generating a disproportionate amount of global economic output, significant attention is being devoted to the impact of urban-economic processes on interstitial spaces lying between metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, there remains a noticeable silence in city-region debate concerning how rural spaces are conceptualised, governed and represented. In this paper we draw on recent city-region developments in England and Wales to suggest a paralysis of city-region policymaking has ensued from policy elites constantly swaying between a spatially-selective, city-first, agglomeration perspective on city-regionalism and a spatially-inclusive, region-first, scalar approach which fragments and divides territorial space along historical lines. In the final part we provide a typology of functionally dominant city-region constructs which we suggest offers a way out from the paralysis that currently grips city-region policymaking.

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This article explores the responses of senior local government actors to the 2004 Wales Spatial Plan and its 2008 update. An example of the so‐called ‘new spatial planning’ which has emerged in the movement towards regional devolution in the UK, this planning discourse foregrounds elements of relational thinking that seek to alternatively augment, destabilize and overturn orthodox administrative categories and divisions of space. Whereas spatial planners have traditionally thought and practised with and through clearly bounded scales (national, regional, local), in this century the new spatial planning is imposing relationally inscribed concepts such as ‘soft space’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries’ into the lexicon of spatial planners. Keystones in a vocabulary used to conceptualize the emergence of new spaces of more networked governance, the importance attached to both concepts in current thinking is that they seek to translate theory into policy, and policy into action. A key question arising from this, however, is how the lexicon of the new spatial planning translates, intersects, and compares with the spatial imaginations of the local government and non‐government officials who have to implement and deliver the strategy. By drawing on the case study of post‐devolution Wales, this article draws on interview data to critically explore the impact of the Wales Spatial Plan as a strategy indicative of the new spatial planning in action, and the implications it has had for service delivery. Résumé L’étude s’intéresse aux réactions de hauts responsables des autorités locales face au programme ‘Wales Spatial Plan’ de 2004 et à son actualisation de 2008. Représentatif de ce qu’on a appelé la ‘nouvelle planification spatiale’, née dans le sillage de la dévolution régionale au Royaume‐Uni, le discours utilisé met en avant des éléments de la pensée relationnelle qui, eux, cherchent à grossir, déstabiliser et rompre les catégories administratives classiques et les divisions de l’espace. D’habitude, les aménageurs réfléchissaient et opéraient dans le cadre d’échelons territoriaux clairement établis (national, régional, local), mais depuis le début de ce siècle, la nouvelle planification spatiale impose, dans leur lexique, des concepts définis en fonction des interconnexions, tels que soft space (espace transversal) et fuzzy boundaries (délimitations floues). Éléments fondamentaux d’un vocabulaire servant à conceptualiser l’apparition de nouveaux espaces de gouvernance en réseau, ces deux concepts doivent leur place dans la réflexion actuelle au fait qu’ils tentent de traduire la théorie en politiques, et les politiques en actions. D’où une question essentielle : comment le lexique de la nouvelle planification spatiale parvient‐il à donner une traduction, à se superposer et àêtre comparable aux imaginations spatiales des responsables locaux, gouvernementaux et non gouvernementaux, qui doivent mettre en œuvre et concrétiser la stratégie? En partant de l’après‐dévolution galloise de l’étude de cas, ce travail s’appuie sur des...