Metaphors of regional policy: cities as engines, multilevel governance in gardens

Metaphors of regional policy: cities as engines, multilevel governance in gardens. Regional Studies. Recent work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology suggests a much greater communicative role for metaphor: good metaphor links a paradigmatic way of knowing the world with our hard-wired programmes for surviving in it. From this perspective, the engines-of-growth metaphor underlying the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography (2009) naturalizes the new economic geography paradigm. In contrast, the alternative place-based approach espoused in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Promoting Growth in All Regions (2012) remains largely inaccessible to laypersons. The productiveness of a garden metaphor for linking the place-based paradigm to some primitive functions is assessed.