City region limits:Questioning city-centric growth narratives in medium-sized cities

In this paper, we consider the implications of applying the city region concept to a medium-sized
city and whether such an application of a spatial and governmental policy is appropriate when the
central city in question is also not necessarily economically dominant or connected to its wider
city-region. This gives a deeper understanding to the process of subnational restructuring of the
UK state via the production of city regions which has now been in progress since the 2010
Coalition Government. The primary focus governmentally and in academic literature has been on
larger (English) city regions, but here we highlight how this has been applied in distinctive ways in
devolved nations of the UK. To this end, we focus upon the case of the Swansea Bay City Region,
based in South West Wales, looking through the lens of Welsh devolution and through the
concept of the city-region as a scalar narrative for the delivery of economic development.