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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses a project of networking of cities in Switzerland, the RUN, and argues that the network operates as a retiology, in other words as a progressive ideology that overcodes relations between cities.

Paper long abstract:

The network has become a dominant figure in spatial planning (Albrechts and Mandelbaum 2005) and in governance literature (Torfing and Sørensen 2014). Accordingly, regional policies based on networking between cities have flourished in Europe for two decades (Leitner and Sheppard 2002). In Switzerland the "network discourse" has a performative strength and is shared by politicians, planners and scholars (Conseil fédéral et al. 2012; Schmid 2014). Some regions are thus defined as being (or having to be) composed of networks of small and medium cities. My empirical case study is one of these so-called networks of cities, the RUN (Réseau urbain neuchâtelois), that gathers three cities in northwest Switzerland. Despite a strong interurban strategy, the cities experienced a "runaway" four years ago when the backbone of the RUN, an ambitious transport infrastructure project, was refused by the population. However the RUN is not dead, as the links and collaborations between the cities exceed the infrastructure network.

Drawing on a discourse analysis of the campaigning material of the RUN, I argue that this point raises an essential question about networking in spatial planning. The network is not only an "imaginative weakness" (Healey 2006) that fails to capture the complex relations between cities; it also operates as a progressive ideology, a "retiology" (Musso 2003), and "overcodes" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) these relations.