Elsevier

Cities

Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 3-21
Cities

Decoding the Newest “Metropolitan Regionalism” in the USA: A Critical Overview

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0264-2751(01)00042-7Get rights and content

Abstract

This article provides a critical overview of contemporary debates on metropolitan governance and region-wide cooperation in US city-regions. Many commentators have interpreted the recent proliferation of metropolitan reform experiments in US city-regions as evidence that a new “regional coalition” is being consolidated or as the expression of a singular, unified and internally coherent political agenda. In contrast to such assumptions, it is argued that contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects in the USA are extremely heterogeneous, both institutionally and politically, and are permeated by significant internal conflicts and contradictions. Contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects are interpreted here as place-specific political responses to the new forms of sociospatial polarization and uneven geographical development that have been crystallizing in US city-regions under conditions of postfordist urban restructuring and neoliberal (national and local) state retrenchment. From this perspective, the current explosion of debates on metropolitan cooperation represents not a movement towards a putative “new regionalism” but rather a “new politics of scale” in which local, state-level and federal institutions and actors, as well as local social movements, are struggling to adjust to diverse restructuring processes that are unsettling inherited patterns of territorial and scalar organization within major US city-regions. A concluding section suggests that such metropolitan rescaling projects are redefining the geographies of urban governance throughout the advanced capitalist world.

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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