In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city‐regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city‐regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The ‘new’ city‐regionalism results in a reification of the city‐region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city‐regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re‐territorialization around the city‐region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city‐region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city‐region.