Decoding the Newest “Metropolitan Regionalism” in the USA: A Critical Overview
Section snippets
Introduction: metropolitan regionalism and the new politics of scale
Debates on metropolitan governance and regional cooperation have been proliferating in major US city-regions since the early 1990s. Throughout the last decade, a number of widely discussed academic and popular books, articles and reports by major think-tanks have directed renewed attention to the regional or metropolitan parameters of major urban problems – from fiscal disparities, class and racial segregation, concentrated poverty, the spatial mismatch between jobs and skills, and inadequate
Metropolitan regionalism and the historical geography of US urbanization
For my purposes here, metropolitan regionalism refers to all strategies to establish institutions, policies or governance mechanisms at a geographical scale which approximates that of existing socioeconomic interdependencies within an urban agglomeration. Thus defined, metropolitan regionalism encompasses a broad range of institutional forms, regulatory strategies and governance projects – including, for instance, attempts to modify existent jurisdictional boundaries through annexation, merger
The new conjuncture: the resurgence of metropolitan regionalism in the 1990s
Why has the issue of metropolitan political reform been rediscovered during the 1990s? As Todd Swanstrom (1996, p 6) has noted, the case for metropolitan regionalism has recently shifted “from a social welfare justification aimed at the redistribution of resources to an economic justification aimed at regional growth and prosperity.” According to Wallis (1994a, pp 40–41), “Whereas regionalism in the past was concerned with maintaining the central city's hegemony in the region's economy, today
Concluding reflections on urban governance and the new politics of scale
Perhaps the key analytical question for urban and regional development theory these days is not “Who rules cities?” but rather “At what spatial scale is territorial governance crystallising?” (Jonas and Ward, 2001, p 21)
The scale of struggle and the struggle over scale are two sides of the same coin. (Smith, 1993, p 101).
In an important recent study of governance restructuring in Los Angeles and Toronto, Keil (2000) has underscored a key ambiguity which underpins contemporary struggles to
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Julie-Anne Boudreau, David Jacobson, Roger Keil, Mark Purcell, Todd Swanstrom and an anonymous reviewer for Cities for extremely incisive criticisms and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Needless to say, I assume full responsibility for any remaining errors of fact or interpretation.
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