Elite city-deals for economic growth? Problematizing the complexities of devolution, city-region building, and the (re)positioning of civil society

The concept of localism and spatial delineation of the ‘city region’ have seen a renaissance as the de facto spatial political units of governance for economic development. One articulation of this has seen the creation of Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) to potentially enhance Wales’s poor economic performance and secure democratic forms of social cohesion. City regions have been vaunted as the ‘spatial imaginary’ for engendering economic development, but there are considerable state spatial restructuring tensions. The paper discusses these by following the development of city-regionalism in Wales and specifically the unfolding of the ‘elite-led’ CCR City-Deal.