Metropolitan Reform Research Articles

Governing Greater Sydney: The democratic promise and contention of local governments’ metropolitan integration

AbstractMetropolitan planning in Australia is argued to suffer from a ‘governance deficit’, alongside various calls for planning reform. The Greater Sydney Commission (renamed the Greater Cities Commission in 2022) was established in 2015 as a state‐appointed planning commission to preside over new strategic and statutory planning powers; local governments’ metropolitan integration is one tenet of the reform's ambition for a more cohesive system. While the grounds for reform are often argued on effective terms, there is a clear need to explore the ways it may suffer from a ‘democratic deficit’ or be democratically defensible. This study explores the shifting planning powers, accountabilities, and forms of interest representation at the local level of the political system, in Australia's most concerted contemporary metropolitan reform attempt.Points for practitioners The reformed planning process promoted new forms of substantive exchange and coordination from the local government sector informing local, district, and metropolitan planning processes. Interest representation outside of local governments’ required plans is largely voluntary; Western City District councils demonstrated considerably more inter‐council collaboration as well as collaboration with the Commission than the Central City District. New forms of inter‐local exchange and coordination may help address ‘fragmented’ localism. The reform has improved prior democratic qualities of local strategic planning and improved policy accountabilities between councillors, the community, and planners in a loose compliance framework. The state's governance of housing growth targets and land use was said to contradict what had been negotiated between councils and the Commission, alongside local governments’ increasingly narrow land‐use and development approval powers and policy churn of its governance. Practitioners can use the meta‐governance framework to consider the democratic ‘performance’ or defensibility of the Greater Sydney Commission's governance system and improve this or similar metropolitan governance reform settings.

‘Will-o’-the-wisp’: The Extended Campaign for Town Planning Legislation in New South Wales

Implementing widely shared visions of better cities in the twentieth century required legislative backing. This was a protracted process in every Australian state and certainly in New South Wales where it was linked distinctively to metropolitan governance reforms. Unpacking a tortured political narrative of anticipation and rejection, this article charts the interplay of the professional, parliamentary, and popular quests for effective town planning legislation through the first half of the twentieth century. Its eventual achievement by the McKell government in 1945 was, for once, not chimerical, with a new Act of Parliament that fundamentally altered the statutory environment for urban development.

Making Mangaung Metro: The politics of metropolitan reform in a South African secondary city

Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing metropolitanisation. The case of Mangaung, an early instance of secondary city metropolitanisation, is an opportunity to examine the motivations underlying these reforms, the politics involved and their impacts on urban governance. Mangaung’s political and administrative leadership pursued metropolitanisation to jump scale, attain greater political autonomy vis-à-vis other tiers of government, and obtain fiscal and technical resources available only to metropolitan municipalities in South Africa’s urban municipal hierarchy. Metropolitanisation was no panacea for Mangaung’s governance challenges, however, since it did not resolve the underlying weaknesses in municipal capacity or the regional economy, nor did it address the spatial legacies of apartheid that produced a sprawling metropolitan service area. As other South African secondary cities contemplate metropolitanisation, we recommend revising municipal structures and mandates and strengthening administrative capacities and economies in secondary cities.

A Tailor-Made Metropolitan Union. Is This a Good Solution of the Metropolitan Governance Problem in Poland?

The scale and dynamics of socio-economic and spatial processes in Poland in the last three decades, including territorial diversification of the pace of economic development and demographic and social changes, as well as processes such as metropolisation and suburbanization, determine new challenges in the management and programming of the development of large cities and their areas functional. The new processes require state and local authorities to take actions in the strictly political, legal and organizational and planning dimensions. In Poland, for almost 20 years, there has been a discussion on the introduction of specific forms of management of metropolitan areas. Failure to adopt systemic solutions at the level of the entire country (lack of political will for metropolitan reform and the creation of metropolitan self-government county) leads to the emergence of numerous grassroots integration initiatives of local governments (metropolitan associations of cities and municipalities). Since 2015, the EU cohesion policy instrument Integrated Territorial Investments has been implemented in functional urban areas. Since 2017, the first multi-task metropolitan union (Metropolitan Union of Upper Silesia—Górnoślasko-Zagłebiowska Metropolis) established by the parliament (special act) and the government (executive regulation) has been operating in Poland. The first—sui generis—statutory metropolis encourages local authorities of other metropolitan areas to adopt their own legislative initiatives (Kraków, Łódz, Tricity: Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot). Is the choice of the path for creating individual statutory solutions for each of the Polish metropolises in the form of a metropolitan union appropriate? Does diferrentia specifica for various metropolitan areas seem to be the most justified at the moment, taking into account the political conditions and the bottom-up and top-down approach to metropolitan governance in Poland? The article presents the complex path to solving the issue of management in Polish metropolitan areas and assesses the legitimacy of a solution based on a model tailored to each metropolis, introduced by a separate metropolitan act.

Exploring the creation of the metropolitan city-region government: the cases of England, France and Italy

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, several European countries have undergone reforms that modified the distribution of allocated powers and/or the geographical area of intervention of local authorities. This paper focuses on the institution of metropolitan governments. National legislative and executive powers usually claim that they want to provide densely urbanized areas with a more integrative level of action. As a result, the public authorities in large cities would get a greater capacity to deal with issues such as economic growth, increased soil sealing, socio-spatial inequalities, etc. This paper explores the motivations and forms of such metropolitan reforms in three European countries within the last decade, with the creation of Combined Authorities in England, of métropoles in France and of citta metropolitane in Italy. We argue that the forms of metropolitan government that have emerged in the three countries are embedded in very different institutional systems (Section 2). Considering the strategies of key protagonists, we show that the new modes of governance differ across and sometimes within countries (Section 3). In particular, the spatiality and the autonomy of the new metropolitan governments vary in the three countries (Section 4).

Cultures of Sex, Laws of Difference: Age of Consent Law and the Forging of a Fraternal Contract on the Margins of the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction and sexual respectability, which were the grounds for imagining difference amongst imperial populations only recently assembled under colonial jurisdiction. Age of consent laws arose out of these contingencies rather than out of any concern with a liberal politics of social reform. Consequently, colonial age of consent laws governing white settlers bore only superficial resemblance to metropolitan legislative reforms such as age of consent laws. Instead, the Natal state's practices of law-making recognized three discrete and divergent moral economies of sex in the colonial laws governing white settler citizens, Native law which governed the lives of Africans and the consolidated body of laws governing Indian immigrants. In this young colony, not only did ‘age of consent’ laws have to be newly made, but they were conceived separately and contained by ‘colonial law’, ‘Native custom’ and ‘Indian custom’. The sexuality of young white woman was coded in colonial rape laws and used to draw lines of civilizational difference between settler citizens and their Others. For these others, relating sex to exceptional marriage customs excluded from legal codes of civilized common practice was how the state worked to assert difference.

Митрополит Иосиф (Семашко) и реформы народной школы в Северо-Западном крае

Митрополит Иосиф (Семашко) и реформы народной школы в Северо-Западном крае

“Directing the Upcoming Generation’s Mind in the Right Direction”: Enslaved Children in the French Emancipation Project in Martinique, 1835-1848

Enslaved children were at the centre of France’s reform of colonial slavery from the mid-1830s to1848. Youths, because of their malleability and supposed innocence, were deemed most deserving of moralizing efforts through religious and elementary education. When emancipation was conceivable by many on both sides of the Atlantic, enslaved children came to represent the future generation of French colonial citizens. Although slaveholders strongly opposed abolitionists’ efforts and despite the slow nature of metropolitan reforms, hundreds of enslaved children in Martinique benefitted from the rights they acquired in the last decade and a half of slavery, namely, partial access to religious and elementary education, family rights, and freedom.

"Directing the Upcoming Generation's Mind in the Right Direction": Enslaved Children in the French Emancipation Project in Martinique, 1835-1848

Enslaved children were at the centre of France's reform of colonial slavery from the mid-1830s to 1848. Youths, because of their malleability and supposed innocence, were deemed most deserving of moralizing efforts through religious and elementary education. When emancipation was conceivable by many on both sides of the Atlantic, enslaved children came to represent the future generation of French colonial citizens. Although slaveholders strongly opposed abolitionists' efforts and despite the slow nature of metropolitan reforms, hundreds of enslaved children in Martinique benefitted from the rights they acquired in the last decade and a half of slavery, namely, partial access to religious and elementary education, family rights, and freedom.

The Future of Municipalities in Metropolitan Areas: Evolution of Views on Metropolitan Governance

In the 21st century, metropolitan areas will become the main supporting territories for the development of the Russian economy. Their development is associated with agglomeration problems, caused by the strengthening of “external effects”, which are manifested in a disproportional distribution of income across the metropolitan area, a gap in the quality of service delivery, and a decrease in economic and administrative management effectiveness. The catalyst for agglomeration problems is the high fragmentation of authority, the absence of a single decision-making center in the metropolitan area. Fragmentation can be eliminated in a number of ways. The answer to the question of how to solve the agglomeration problems and the future of municipalities in the metropolitan area is provided by three main theories of metropolitan governance: the theory of Metropolitan Reform, the theory of Public Choice, and the New Regionalism. This research analyzes and compares the data of theories, discusses the results of their practical application, and shows the strengths and weaknesses. On agglomeration statistics of OECD countries for 1951–2010, historical periods of their popularity are revealed. With probability of 99%, the hypothesis about the influence of civilizational features of the countries on the duration of the periods of theories’ popularity, and also on propensity to the centralized/decentralized model of metropolitan governance, is statistically proved.

Beyond Boundaries: Envisioning Metropolitan School Desegregation in Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia, 1963-1974

From the early 1960s onward, battles over school desegregation took on an increasingly metropolitan orientation, one all but destroyed by the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley. In Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia, segregationist urbanites, when faced with a legal challenge either created or made possible by black civil rights advocates, reversed course and trumpeted the advantages of metropolitan desegregation. These tactical metropolitanists recognized that a larger desegregation area reaching into the predominantly white suburbs would mean that white children would continue attending majority-white schools and they understood that stoking suburban opposition to desegregation could defeat integrationist legislation. Despite their segregationist motives, tactical metropolitanists offered a potentially productive solution capable of mitigating white flight, providing lasting integration, and aligning with the efforts of integrationist civil rights advocates in court. Uncovering tactical metropolitanism complicates our understandings of urban segregation and the sources of metropolitan reform. It suggests the need for a metropolitan history of civil rights that centers the importance of municipal boundaries in perpetuating inequality.

Urban political strategies in times of crisis: A multiscalar perspective on smart cities in Italy

European cities are experiencing a mushrooming of a new urban imagery amid multiple types of crisis. In fact, the ‘smart city’ has become a widely spread vision used by a variety of powerful key actors as well as a top-down urban political strategy that is applied in order to promote new arrangements, models and technologies for almost all policy areas. By using the Italian case as a point of reference, this paper analyses how smart city strategies are institutionalized and embedded in times of crisis on different spatial scales. Therefore, the paper adapts a strategic-relational approach that provides a conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimension of smart city strategies. It argues that smart city strategies reflect a set of multiscalar political strategies leading to new responsibilities and powers on a local scale, as well as the creation of new state territoriality. Smart cities in Italy are part of metropolitan reforms that strengthen the role of large cities while reproducing existing territorial inequalities. Furthermore, they are used to create new public–private partnerships and new investment opportunities on different spatial scales. In addition, a content analysis of smart city rankings and reports sheds light on the modes of representation of smart city strategies, analysing them as elements of policymaking in times of crisis.

Metropolitan challenges and reform pressures across Europe – the perspectives of city mayors

ABSTRACTMetropolitan governance arrangements and their policy purposes have been a matter of debate among researchers and practitioners around the globe. While we may trace three broad schools of metropolitan governance – reform school, public choice theory and new regionalism – with each still having its proponents, we are interested to learn whether there are assumptions on metropolitan governance that have today become general knowledge among urban political elites. By investigating the attitudes and perceptions of city mayors across Europe, we show that functional multipurpose governance bodies are indeed more generally associated with equitable service distribution, whereas the preconditions for cost-efficiency and sustainable development are more equivocally placed at different modes of governance. Moreover, we show that a perceived general lack of problem-solving capacities does not automatically translate into pressures for metropolitan reform, but it is only in combination with a general disaffection with the governance structures currently in place.

State rescaling and new metropolitan space in the age of austerity. Evidence from Italy

This article presents the changes that are emerging in the Italian national policies mainly through the discussion of the contents both of the recent metropolitan reform initiative, and the national programming documents for metropolitan cities related to European Programming period 2014–2020. In Italy, which faced severe political difficulty and economic stagnation after 2008 global crisis, the production of the new metropolitan scale became one of the tools for the implementation of austerity measures. The paper examines whether the understanding of the new metropolitan scale in the Italian geography of austerity can be strengthened through a careful engagement with the body of literature on state rescaling and on austerity policies. The paper illustrates how that the apparently neutral emphasis on metropolitan city scale, first can be understood as a crucial tool of an austerity measures; second, it implies a rescaling of public power and, third, it neglects the multifaceted notion of the urban and the trans-scalar territorial governance relationships.

The influence of population on the economic efficiency of the metropolitan governance

Research purpose. In order to implement the optimal metropolitan governance model, it is important to understand the conditions under which this or that model is economically effective. There is a need to develop a quantitatively justified methodology for choosing the optimal metropolitan governance model for different types of metropolitan areas. It has been emphasized in some federal documents of Russia, for example, in the “Recommendations for the selection of pilot projects for approbation and improvement of mechanisms for managing the development of metropolitan areas in the Russian Federation”. Materials and methods. Domestic researchers (N. Zubarevich, K. Gonchar, etc.) and foreign researchers (Glaeser Edward L., Nakamura, Ciccone A., Hall R., etc.) carried out the study of quantitative relationships between the economic growth of cities and the characteristics of cities.However, for metropolitan areas, the analysis of the relationship has not yet been implemented between the outpacing economic growth of the metropolitan area relative to the average country values (labor productivity and GDP per capita), the institutional factor (the type of metropolitan governance model), andthe non-institutional factor (population size). To identify the dependencies we are interested in, we used the OECD statistical database and OECD researches to identify the metropolitan governance model in the sample of metropolitan areas in the world. The sample in this research was 87 metropolitan areas in Europe and was divided into groups, depending on the population and the introduced metropolitan governance model. For each group, a correlation-regression analysis was performed and a weighted average was calculated from the indexes of the economic growth. As the leading index of the economic growth, labor productivity was used, as the final - GDP per capita. Then a comparison was made between the real value of economic growth in each surveyed metropolitan area and the expected value when implementing different metropolitan governance model. If the comparison showed the non-optimality of the implemented model for some index of the economic growth, then the values of the economic growth in the metropolitan area and the national average were compared. As a result, a recommendationwas given for the metropolitan area on the degree of need for the management reform and an optimal metropolitan governance model was selected. Results. Based on the revealed regularities, we have created a methodical approach to choose the optimal model of metropolitan governance according to the population size. It can be used as a tool to justify metropolitan governance reform. The advantage of the approach is the use of real quantitative data that reduces the degree of subjectivity in decision-making Conclusion. The methodical approach is tested on the example of eightmetropolitan areas (Lublin, Palermo, Krakow, Paris, Stuttgart, Madrid, Geneva, and Linz). It was revealed that there is no metropolitan governance model, which is always more efficient for all objects. As the result of the analysis for Geneva, the degree of need for management reforms was described as “high” with a recommendation for a transition to a decentralized metropolitan governance model. For Linz, Stuttgart and Madrid, the degree of need for reform is characterized as “low” with a recommendation for a transition to decentralization (Stuttgart) and centralization (Linz and Madrid). The rest of the metropolitan areas of the sample do not need reforms.

The Radical Right, the National Municipal League Smear File, and the Controversy over Metropolitan Government in the United States during the Postwar Years

This paper reports on activities undertaken by the National Municipal League (NML) and the Public Administration Service (PAS) during the 1950’s and 1960’s to counter libelous and slanderous actions taken by grass roots activists in opposition to efforts to reform metropolitan governance across the United States. I utilize records from the NML archives—and give special attention to their “Smear File”—to chronicle and analyze the key events and actors. Specifically, I focus on the ideas of opponents of metropolitan government reform from the South and West in the United States including Jo Hindman, Dan Smoot, and Don Bell. These individuals used right-wing idea distribution vehicles including magazines, small-town newspapers, and subscription newsletters to disseminate their arguments and rally support for their cause. I also analyze the actions of their foes at the NML and PAS—namely those of Alfred Willoughby, Executive Director of the National Municipal League; H.G. Pope, President of the Public Administration Service;Richard S. Childs, former President of the National Municipal League; and Karl Detzer,Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest and contributing writer for the National Municipal Review, the academic and professional journal of the National Municipal League. This study adds to the literature explaining the lack of metropolitan governmental frameworks at the local level in the United States, which has been built on the work of Charles Tiebout, Vincent Ostrom, Robert Bish, Ronald Oakerson, and Roger Parks. Although this analysis is idiographic and historical in perspective, it does not necessarily challenge the core empirical results of the nomothetic modeling of these scholars.

Metropolitan integration in Poland: the case of Poznań Metropolis

ABSTRACTThe political and socio-economic transition in Poland brought many spatial problems, including dynamic processes of suburbanization around the bigger cities, which require metropolitan-wide approach. But the national metropolitan reform process is still in an initial stage, and the only form of integrated governance in urban areas is provided by some bottom-up initiatives based on the cooperation of local governments. While the experience of ‘top-down’ approach to metropolitan region building in Poland is too short and incomplete in context of its impact on territorial polarization at the national level, the ‘bottom-up’ initiatives of local governments for metropolitan integration are key instruments to more balanced development and territorial cohesion within the metropolitan areas. In terms of metropolitan integration, the case study – Poznań Metropolis – is one of the most interesting examples for an evolutionary way from informal to legally binding institutional arrangements of urban–suburban cooperation.

‘Mr Peel’s Amendments’ in New South Wales: Imperial Criminal Reform in a Distant Penal Colony

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the benefits of modernized metropolitan criminal law? Even as successive local and metropolitan Acts imposed new constraints on the civil rights of convicts in New South Wales, the Supreme Court insisted that even the most notorious recidivists in the colony should be protected against the Bloody Code from the moment it was reformed at home. In doing so, the court ignored the terms of section 1 of the Criminal Statutes Repeal Act passed at the request of a former East India Company officer to preserve the operation of the Code in India. Thus the peculiar reception controversy in New South Wales shows not only how disruptive metropolitan reform could be for colonies, it performed a growing racial gap in the imagination of legal subjecthood in different corners of empire.

Trouble in Suburbia: Localism, Schools and Conflict in Postwar Johnson County, Kansas

Suburban public schools have become the predominant form of American education in the past fifty years. As a number of commentators have noted, however, historians have devoted relatively little attention to the development of these educational systems. This is surprising, given the importance of schools in the development of many suburban communities, especially during the postwar era. Education became a critical element in suburban struggles to create distinctive local identities in the wake of metropolitan development and liberal reform. Neighborhood schools were sites of political conflict over these issues in Southern California and elsewhere, as suburbanites asserted their independence as property owners. Recent studies have documented how this contributed to a widespread “tax revolt” during the latter 1970s, and a sharp conservative turn in politics that accompanied it. Little has been written, however, about how the rise of such “localism” in suburban political culture affected the schools.

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.