Metropolitan Governance Research Articles

Construção técnico-política de governança metropolitana

O artigo tem como objetivo discutir uma teoria pertinente à análise dos problemas de planejamento e gestão metropolitana, partindo da ideia de “planejamento adaptativo” (Clementino e Almeida, 2011) e do conceito de “mal público metropolitano” desenvolvido por Lacerda (2011) na formulação de um modelo de ação coletiva metropolitana. Propõe a inclusão de um novo elemento no “balanço global positivo de gestão” de Matus (1996) para analisar a cooperação intergovernamental para solução de problemas comuns, particularmente no Brasil, e como solucionar o "mal público metropolitano". A expectativa é a de contribuir para o debate da governança urbana e metropolitana na América Latina a partir de uma nova concepção que tem como base de sustentação teórico-metodológica o conceito de ação coletiva elaborado a partir da sistematização e recorte de uma literatura atualizada.

Metropolitan Governance in the Federalist Americas: Strategies for Equitable and Integrated Development - edited by Spink, Peter K., Ward, Peter M. and Wilson, Robert H.

Metropolitan Governance in the Federalist Americas: Strategies for Equitable and Integrated Development - edited by Spink, Peter K., Ward, Peter M. and Wilson, Robert H.

A Policy Network Approach to Cross-Border Metropolitan Governance: The Cases of Vienna and Bratislava

This paper presents a structural analysis of the governance arrangements established between Vienna and Bratislava close to the Austrian–Slovak border. We unravel the metropolitan governance relationships built in the context of territorial debordering and critically assess the policy relevance of cross-border cooperation (CBC). We particularly focus on cross-border economic positioning as a policy domain of strategic importance in a neoliberal era marked by urban and regional entrepreneurialism. In order not to embed the analysis in a predefined territorial configuration or geographic scale, this paper argues for an approach based on policy networks. The key point is that those private and public actors involved in building cross-border regions are developing a diffuse form of governance that relies on a set of flexible and tangled connections that do not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of the states concerned. Based on original fieldwork and data on the exchange of information between the stakeholders involved in cross-border economic positioning, we use a social network analysis to describe the relational patterns of the policy network and complement the analysis with a qualitative assessment of actors’ interests and strategies. The roles and positions of the actors reflect the sharp imbalances in interest and resources, highlighting the persistence of border-related barrier effects that hamper CBC initiatives between Vienna and Bratislava.

The suburban question: grassroots politics and place making in Spanish suburbs

Manuel Castells spoke of the urban as a unit of collective consumption, yet much of the politics of collective consumption he documented was evident in the suburbs. The tendency for suburbs of most complexions to lack services and amenities has been and continues to be a focus of politics in Europe. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, a grassroots politics surrounding the making good of these deficits in basic services and amenities has broadened and formalised somewhat to become part of a competitive local representative politics concerned with shaping a sense of place. Here we consider this legacy of grassroots politics as it has played out more recently in a politics of place making in Getafe and Badalona in metropolitan Madrid and Barcelona, respectively. In conclusion, we suggest that this enduring suburban question—of making the suburban urban—places them at the centre of contemporary metropolitan governance and politics. However, it also raises further issues for study—notably, the scalar politics in which suburban place making is empowered or constrained, the role of political parties and individual politicians on the place-making process, and the point at which grassroots politics of collective consumption becomes urban entrepreneurialism.

Metropolitan Governance Capacity and Climate Change Planning : Assessing Metropolitan Responses

With political inaction at the federal level in the U.S., there is increased attention on the importance of planning for climate change at the metropolitan level, where implementation of climate change policies would occur. This study reports on a survey of 25 regional planning organizations that was conducted to examine the extent to which regional planning organizations have adopted climate change plans and to identify the factors that impact their ability to take metropolitan level action in regards to climate change initiatives. The findings revealed a majority of regional planning organizations are involved in climate change planning in some way, largely due to existing efforts in complementary policy domains. Based on the findings, a multi-level framework is developed for assessing the institutional capacity of metropolitan governance capacity in climate change policy and planning. Employing this framework would allow regional planning organizations to assess their capacity to address climate change...

Anchor organisations in Auckland: Rolling constructively with neoliberalism?

The city of Auckland has recently been reconstituted through the amalgamation of eight territorial authorities and their constituencies. The new city was designed to provide coordinated economic, infrastructural and resource management for a territorial social economy given form and meaning by economic and infrastructural connections and daily movements of people and things. In this paper, we examine how this rationale has been translated into a vision for making and performing Auckland as a unitary space and ask whether the initial excitement over the new city has been captured as potential for delivering a more progressive city. We explore the shift from sustainability to liveability as a guiding imaginary for a new Auckland and the formation of the Auckland Anchors network as a group that might play a leadership role in shaping it. We conclude that whilst the process of amalgamation undermined much of its potential to achieve a more coordinated metropolitan governance, it has revealed possibilities for the practice of a new constructive urban politics.

Transnational Metropolitan Development Strategies and Governance in a Post-Socialist Setting: The Case of Szczecin

Abstract The integration of cities and their regions into transnational networks has become a key municipal strategy, with the creation of a metropolitan governance structure being seen in this context as a fundamental element. The Szczecin Metropolitan Area constitutes an example of meagre results in intercommunal cooperation in post-socialist East-Central Europe. This has its repercussions on the task of creating cross-border metropolitan governance structures including adjacent German counties, a task which, in turn, may help to overcome development barriers. This becomes apparent particularly in the process of defining joint development objectives as well as an image for the cross-border metropolitan region

Metropolitan Governance: How Regional Organizations Influence Interlocal Land Use Coordination

ABSTRACT:By focusing on Regional Planning Councils and metropolitan municipalities in Florida, this study addresses a gap in the literature concerning the role of regional organizations in metropolitan governance research. This study investigates two competing visions of the influence of regional organizations on interlocal coordination in land use decision making. The results show that regional organizations’ substitutive effects on self-organizing interlocal cooperation are salient, while their complementary influence is not observed in regard to land use. Moreover, this research posits that municipalities with a higher level of need for coordination due to population stress and a council–manager form of government are more likely to coordinate land use decisions with other local governments.

Governing metropolitan areas: growth and change in a networked age

Interest and research on regionalism has soared in the last decade. Local governments in metropolitan areas and civic organizations are increasingly engaged in cooperative and collaborative public policy efforts to solve problems that stretch across urban centers and their surrounding suburbs. Yet there remains scant attention in textbooks to the issues that arise in trying to address metropolitan governance. Governing Metropolitan Areas describes and analyzes structure to understand the how and why of regionalism in our global age. The book covers governmental institutions and their evolution to governance, but with a continual focus on institutions. David Hamilton provides the necessary comprehensive, in-depth description and analysis of how metropolitan areas and governments within metropolitan areas developed, efforts to restructure and combine local governments, and governance within the polycentric urban region.This second edition is a major revision to update the scholarship and current thinking on regional governance. While the text still provides background on the historical development and growth of urban areas and governments' efforts to accommodate the growth of metropolitan areas, this edition also focuses on current efforts to provide governance through cooperative and collaborative solutions. There is also now extended treatment of how regional governance outside the United States has evolved and how other countries are approaching regional governance.

Cross-border metropolitan governance: the multi-faceted state power

Metropolitan regions have become one of the most appropriate scales to define efficient governance networks for economic and territorial development. The state still is the key actor of these partnerships. Yet the question remains whether cross-border metropolitan regions represent a new point of reference that puts state power in question or whether they only reorganize it. The centrality of state power will be examined by looking at two networks of actors (public transport and territorial marketing) working at the Eurometropolis Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai. The results reveal that a triple-faceted state power has emerged to define and organize cross-border metropolitan management.

Towards a Communicative City: Enhancing Urban Planning Coordination by the Support of Information and Communication Technology. Case Study Bandung Metropolitan Area, Indonesia

Communicative city leads to the understanding of enhancing urban development performance by encouraging better interactive communication among development actors. This idea not only tries to provide better planning management in terms of governance system, but also planning engagement among development actors in terms of people centered development. This paper learns the preparedness of local governmental officials as forefront in planning decision making process, especially to utilize mobile technology in order to perform better planning performance. By emphasizing to the context of coordination in spatial planning process, appropriate technology in terms of mobile phone and internet connection have significant role in metropolitan's spatial planning process.Survey has been done to the governmental planning employees throughout regencies and autonomous cities within metropolitan Bandung, and found out that appropriate technology like mobile phone and internet connection plays as spatial planning support system and still can not be implemented to resolve spatial planning conflict in the spatial planning process that combine local and metropolitan governance concerns.

The Emergence of Metropolitan Governance: A coevolutionary analysis of the life-and-death cycles of metropolitan governance in the Amsterdam metropolitan region

This article develops an explanation for the emergence of metropolitan governance in the Amsterdam metropolitan region. A coevolutionary framework is deployed to analyze how the governance system developed between 1982 and 2009. Data was gathered from 43 policy docu- ments, over 150 newspaper articles and 14 semi-structured interviews. The analysis focuses on the workings of selection pressures and the adaptive processes. It shows that metropolitan gov- ernance evolves in a punctuated fashion when fitness with the environment is lost and when the governance system’s ability to absorb selection pressures has eroded.

Local Government Management

This special issue of ARPA seeks to fill a void in the public administration literature by bringing to the forefront analyses of local government and metropolitan challenges from the perspective of public administrationists: Those who manage cities and counties, and those who both teach and study local government management. The public administration perspective on local government and metropolitan governance has traditionally been grounded in jurisdictions—cities, counties, school and special districts. Today, however, there is often a disjuncture between problems to be solved and jurisdictional boundaries. Accordingly, local governments have changed, and continue to change in response to boundary-crossing challenges as Wheeland, Paulus and Wood evaluate, and new patterns of metropolitan governance are emerging, as Leland and Thurmeier analyze. According to Agranoff, these patterns of change are both horizontal, between and among connected units of local government and vertical, among local governments, states, and the national government. Civic engagement in local public affairs is growing in creative new ways as citizens seek to participate, a topic probed by Nabatchi and Amsler. In the same way that all politics is local, all policy is also local and none is more important than the need to balance the risk of disaster with the need for preparedness, as Donahue, Eckel, and Wilson explore. Together these articles are a timely treatment of compelling challenges facing governments and governance nearest at hand: Our cities, counties, districts and metropolitan areas.

Democratic metropolitan governance: experiences in five German metropolitan regions

The paper seeks to describe whether reflections about the legitimacy metropolitan governance arrangements found consideration in metropolitan reforms in five German metropolitan regions. Metropolitan regions are an increasingly relevant scale for political decision-making but mechanism for legitimacy and accountability did not keep pace. Given the fact that in most metropolitan institutions only indirect mechanisms of legitimacy such as regional assemblies with representatives from municipal councils or public–private governing boards are at work, one may expect that output legitimacy or legitimacy by performance is the dominant source for legitimacy in metropolitan governance. In fact, citizens care much about the quality and the prize of services such as waste management or public transport but less about the transparency of decision-making procedures behind these services – at least on the scale of the region. The results show a mixed picture. In two out of five regions, directly elected regional assembly have been established and now constitute genuine tiers of metropolitan politics where input and output legitimacy are combined. In other regions, the turn to flexible forms of governance opened up decision-making arenas for societal actors, but it seems that this opening of the policy process is very selective and comes at the expense of citizen participation.

Governing the Large Metropolis

Metropolitan governance is shaped by the strong interdependencies within urban areas, combined with the fragmented geography and roles of the agencies that govern them. Fragmentation is not an accident; it responds to underlying differences in the preferences of constituencies, the scale of efficient provision of public goods and regulation, and the bundling of attributes of the city into jurisdictions. This is why governance moves forward in a haphazard way, through tinkering. The analytical framework for understanding metropolitan governance is as a large-scale unfolding principal–agent problem. There is no optimal ‘solution’ to this problem, whether from the standpoint of efficiency, satisfaction, or justice. This paper instead proposes creating a more explicit social choice process around the agencies and instruments of metropolitan governance.

Perspectives on narrowing the action gap between landscape science and metropolitan governance: Practice in the US and China

While scientific knowledge of urban landscapes is incomplete, it is adequate to inform design, planning, and management of metropolitan regions. Yet, landscape knowledge is seldom employed as fully as it could be, creating an action gap that slows down or prevents effective use of landscape science to improve metropolitan conditions for urban sustainability and livability. We characterize the nature of the action gap through highlighting the differences between governance, science and practice in China and the US. We suggest that amidst such differences, a common thread exists in the application of practice as a catalyst for closing the gap. We then make suggestions for changes in related systems of rewards, innovation, and communication to activate practice as a catalyst in deployment of landscape science. Practice is also suggested to assume differentiated roles (bridging vs. facilitating) under the different governance systems of China and the US.

State-led metropolitan governance in China: Making integrated city regions

Scholars have widely discussed the issue of how to govern rapidly growing metropolitan regions under the economic, social and political pressures of globalization. Many have argued for a metropolitan governance approach that involves less government regulation and more flexible arrangements between public and civic sectors. However, in countries like China, where a traditionally centralized state controls most resources and seeks to impose its vision for metropolitan development, a strong state-led approach is widely adopted. This article analyzes such a state-led model in China and identifies the economic and political factors that contribute to such development. It is suggested that metropolitan governance in China has formed a strong top-down, “dirigiste type” model to achieve state objectives. Findings are drawn from field observation, archival research and socio-economic data analysis in the Guangzhou–Foshan metropolitan region of the Pearl River Delta region in China.

English

Innovation is being utilized as an important governance tool for improving government functions. The purpose of this research is to identify social innovation programs and initiatives in Seoul, South Korea, through a review of literature on social innovation and a case study of the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG). This research suggests that the SMG fosters social innovation through a variety of metropolitan examples and such innovation projects help to sustain metropolitan governance and develop partnership opportunities and collaboratives. This study contributes to the literature on social innovation in the public sector by looking at the motivations for innovation, the culture to facilitate innovation, collaboration as a tool for innovation, and finally how to sustain innovation. The study also emphasizes how collaboration with the civil society and the private sector helps to promote social innovation through creativity, leadership and sustainability. Other metropolitan governments can benefit from exploring the social innovations presented in this study because the examples demonstrate a way for government to become more effective and efficient by using innovation as a tool for governance.

Spatial Governance across Borders Revisited: Organizational Forms and Spatial Planning in Metropolitan Cross-border Regions

In Europe, cross-border cooperation in spatial planning has intensified in recent years. Organizations with varying institutional characteristics have emerged in urban areas that cross a national border. They deal with problems stemming from the cross-border situation. The institutional and spatial aspects of organizations on the sub-national level in nine European cross-border metropolitan regions are compared in this article. The analytical concept of metropolitan governance applied here takes into account the simultaneous existence of different cross-border organizations as well as their spatial and functional relationships. Subsequently, this article assesses the impact of governance on spatial planning in two cases, Basel and Lille, where institutional changes occurred on the sub-national level between 2000 and 2010. The way organizational and spatial attributes of new forms of cross-border metropolitan governance influence the coordination of spatial policies is discussed here. The comparison of organizational characteristics and capacity to coordinate reveals important differences. Furthermore, comparing spatial scales shows how new cross-border perimeters are drawn along existing national territories. Organizations' competences and interests are decisive for the coordination and implementation of spatial policies.

Politiche dei confini: quali temi per il governo metropolitano?

The issue of borders and the geographical areas located between the city of Milan and neighbouring towns and villages plays a crucial role in giving tangible shape to an effective process for the construction of a new institution for metropolitan governance. This essay addresses the question from the viewpoint, amongst other things, of the controversial institutional process in progress, with proposed legislation for the creation of metropolitan cities. The hypothesis is that, by assuming the plural nature of borders (considered as thresholds, buffers and devices), it is possible to better understand their variety and interpret their role more effectively in the process of change that is in progress in the Milan urban region. To conclude, the essay identifies a necessary condition for the definition of a credible perspective of metropolitan governance in the construction of a credible ‘policy for border areas’.