Governing the Capital—Comparing Institutional Reform in Berlin, London, and Paris

Abstract

The inherent tensions between centralizing and decentralizing trends in big city government have been a recurrent issue of the local government literature. Arguably, these tensions are as old as the phenomenon of large cities that are home to millions of people and serve as centers of gravity for national and increasingly international functions in politics, culture, and the economy. On the one hand, many public services and competencies could be centralized easily because of the manageable territorial size of these cities. On the other hand, the sheer size of their population (and, in particular, the population density) requires more decentralized modes of service delivery and politico-administrative responsibilities (Barlow 1993). Far-reaching changes taking place in big European cities seem to indicate that traditional forms of hierarchical and bureaucratic political control have reached their limits and are now in retreat. At the same time it has become quite obvious (especially in London between 1986 and 2000) that all modes of horizontal self-coordination have severe disadvantages—as long as they do not operate in the shadow of hierarchical decision-making procedures as “ultima ratio.” Against this background there are some indicators that politico-administrative arrangements in big cities converge toward two-tier-systems that take vertical and horizontal coordination problems in agglomerations into account and that might be able to reconcile potential conflicts between central and decentralized control mechanisms (see also Barlow 1993).