Introduction: the rationale Changes in social, economic, and spatial patterns of urban regions over recent decades have led to polymorphic urban landscapes and new perceptions of city-regional spaces. Cities are evolving physically and functionally through external interactions into dispersed and multinuclear urban configurations that are quite distinct from the traditional urban hierarchy. With processes of urban transformation still unfolding, new perceptions of coherence and identity at the city-regional level have not yet crystallised. Many urban regions are reevaluating quality-of-life issues (economic, social, cultural, and environmental qualities) in the unsettled and fragmentary context of the emergent landscapes. These initiatives are part of a wider`cultural turn' in planning, understood as planning that makes reference to the cultural sense of a place (Montgomery, 1990). We define culture as shared codes of meaning or common sense. Cultural symbols are the objects, projects, metaphors, and so on that refer to a certain way of life (Geertz, 1975;Keesing, 1974; Swidler, 1986).An increasing range of stakeholders, from planners and urban designers to private sector developers and civic groups, are marking processes of change in symbolic ways in order to profile the ongoing transformation of cities. A variety of symbolic expressions is generated to accentuate the transition processes, such as the shaping of highly visible landmarks and design objects, the use of linguistic tropes (in particular metaphors) in strategic frames of planning, the expression of cultural markers in marketing strategies, the highlighting of new public spaces, the occurence of major urban manifestations and public events, and so on. The initiatives intend to enhance the social meaning (ie to amplify or magnify its meaning and create something more than is now apparent) of the transforming spaces in day-to-day perception by employing symbolic markers of change. Metaphors of planning and design (such as the Pearl River Delta symbolising the coherence of the metropolitan region of Hong Kong, Shenzen, and Guangzhou or the Flemish Diamond symbolising the polycentric city network in Flanders) and cultural landmarks (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,

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The emergence of new urban configurations -marked by enlarged scale, polycentrism and strong cities -often conflicts with the settled institutions of the 'old' city, with its hierarchical, centripetal development model. This model is challenged through the autonomous locational decisions of commercial and private actors, and sometimes through planning initiatives that aim to establish new planning spaces adapting to this new spatial reality, but despite this ongoing challenge, traditional conceptions of cities seem to prevail. This article offers a sociological-institutional approach to analysing how the institutions of the 'old' city are challenged, looking at the role of symbolic markers in planning strategies as an explanation for the institutional activation of new perceptions of the changing city. The urbanised zone of the Manchester and Liverpool city regions in the UK -where a massive investment strategy by a private-sector company has presented a new vision that challenges the entrenched positions of the two core cities -provides an excellent case study for investigating how symbolic markers spark a conflict over the meaning of two city regions that are closely linked but have thus far worked in isolation. The degree to which the meaning of existing institutions is reflected in the strategy is crucial for the success potential of establishing new governance spaces.

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