LAUSR

ABSTRACT Despite their growing dependence upon foreign direct investment, the growth trajectories of the postsocialist city-regions of Central Europe have remained tightly embedded in their national development contexts. Guided by nested city theory and drawing upon empirical data and the author’s field research, this article argues that Slovakia’s postsocialist state development approach has served to reinforce historical uneven development among the Bratislava, Nitra, Trencin, Trnava, and Zilina city-regions (hereafter the Bratislava–Zilina auto corridor) and these areas’ dependency upon foreign capital. It also contends that this embedded policy framework has helped transform these 5 city-regions into nested dependent city-regions. That is, the current level of economic unevenness among them and their overreliance upon foreign transnational corporations has been shaped by central government policy initiatives, which themselves have been tightly embedded within Slovakia’s past and contemporary national and supranational–regional development contexts.