State Devolution, Urban Regimes, and the Production of Geographic Scale: The Case of New Brunswick, New Jersey

Regime theory attempts to understand the complexity of governance in an era of public-private cooperation. Yet because it is an explicit attempt to avoid the economism of past state theory, it struggles to understand how regimes become agents of capitalism. This study examines the process of regime formation in New Brunswick, New Jersey, by focusing on how its activities have become increasingly motivated by the expansion-exclusion dialectic of capitalism during the last 25 years. The regime's immersion into the contradictions of capitalism has transformed it into an active producer of geographic scale, and in so doing necessitated certain forms of social exclusion. Understanding urban regimes as such has become increasingly important in the context of federal-state devolution. Key words: scale, regime theory, devolution, economic restructuring, state restructuring.