Abstract
As in other European countries, over recent decades the question of metropolitan government has captured political and academic attention in Italy too. The debate has been recently fuelled by a nat ...
Highlights
Large cities have always played a prominent role in European identity, as witnessed by the pioneering work of urban sociologists like George Simmel and Max Weber
Despite their role in the modern history of Europe, it was only in the last four decades of the twentieth century that the government of large cities came to be considered as a prominent political question and the concept of metropolitan area was widely adopted by European countries
Following attempts to apply this sort of rational model to the functions of the metropolitan authorities, which were often unsuccessful in many countries (Lefèvre, 1998), discussions about metropolitan government gained new momentum from the 1990s, when processes such as globalisation and the rise of the European Union prompted the emergence of new forms of territorial organisation (Amin and Thrift, 1994; Brenner, 1999, 2004; Hooghe, 1996; Marks et al, 1996; Le Galès, 2002; Savitch and Kantor, 2002)
Summary
Large cities have always played a prominent role in European identity, as witnessed by the pioneering work of urban sociologists like George Simmel and Max Weber. A second broad group aims to discover and analyse the implications of the spatial, socio-economic and political transformation of European urban areas for policy and planning practices In this strand, most authors advocate the emergence of new, more relational, governance settings to address the metropolitan dimension of government (Albrechts et al, 2001; Healey, 1997; Herrschel and Newman, 2003, Salet et al, 2003). Many political and operational difficulties are being encountered in the process of empowering such metropolitan authorities, including a constitutional referendum held in December 2016 to confirm the provinces (a territorial level to be replaced by the metropolitan authorities in the largest urban areas) This event has resulted in a stalemate in terms of the implementation of the reform. The conclusion focuses on two main issues that, in my opinion, still need to be addressed by policy to provide effective metropolitan government: the problem of heterogeneity of urban-regional development in the country; and the lack of multi-level governance
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