City profile – Leeds
Abstract Leeds is the third largest Metropolitan District in the United Kingdom and the administrative and employment centre of the Yorkshire and the Humber region in the north of England. From being dominated initially by textiles and clothing manufacture, it has seen the development of engineering and the rise of services, notably business and financial services, to produce what remains a relatively diverse local economy. It has been transformed from an industrial to a services dominated city but one retaining important elements of its manufacturing past. A city in a unitary state, the profile traces developments in the city’s political economy through the lens of central–local state relationships and the recent transition from urban government to evolving forms of urban governance: from the entrepreneurial municipal city of Victorian times to the current attempts by the local council to reinvigorate ‘civic enterprise’ in the aftermath of recession and the current Government’s austerity programme and localism agenda.