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.

In Europe, metropolitan policies emerge in a multi-scalar system of supranational, national and regional scales. Besides national policies on metropolitan issues, more and more European policies address metropolitan regions. They propose varying attributes of what characterizes a metropolitan region, for instance, defining them as functional and statistical areas, or as nodes for European spatial development. These conceptualizations of metropolitan regions have implications for institutional forms of metropolitan governance. However, existing research has not yet comparatively explored the development of metropolitan concepts in national and supranational policy contexts. This paper compares the changing concepts of metropolitan regions in the European Union, France and Germany. It raises the question of how different policies conceptualize metropolitan regions. Thereby, the paper proposes a comparative perspective on concepts in policies addressing metropolitan regions, such as policy documents, planning strategies, regulations or reports. It analyses shifts in metropolitan policies by describing the change of concepts and the reference to frames of spatial development such as polycentricity, competitiveness or integrated development. Three analytical perspectives contribute to understanding the change of metropolitan policies. First, the comparison of concepts in different national and supranational policy contexts develops an understanding of metropolitan regions beyond national specificities. Second, a historical comparison contributes to understanding changes in metropolitan concepts since the late 1990s. And third, analysing the development of metropolitan policies comparatively explores similarities of concepts and frames between policy contexts, despite differences in institutional settings.

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‘Who governs’ Berlin’s metropolitan region—and how? The article addresses this question by inquiring into the way metropolitan space is being constituted in current economic development policies for Berlin–Brandenburg. It follows the hypothesis that no single-unitary understanding of metropolitan space exists in Berlin as expression of an explicit metropolitan project, but rather a heteronomy of policy practices which express diverse and possibly competing ‘implicit’ metropolitan issues and agendas. Accordingly, rescaling in the Berlin metropolitan region is not occurring in a comprehensive political–institutional form, as an ‘explicit project’. The more significant, however, is that rescaling is occurring—as an ‘implicit project’—through policy and governance practices which constitute a variety of understandings of metropolitan space. Metropolitan space appears therefore as an emerging construct defined by strategic-relational interplays between public and private actors and by the selective involvement of their interests and resources in the domain of specific spatial-economic development policies. Analyzing the construction of metropolitan space within specific policy arenas therefore offers a significant perspective on ‘who governs’ metropolitan development and on how this is possibly tied to the emergence of hegemonic understandings of scalar references for metropolitan policies.

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