Being metropolitan: The effects of individual and contextual factors on shaping metropolitan identity

Regional or parochial? Support for cross-community sharing within city-regions

“…Also, longer residence may strengthen attachment to the city-region, which may increase concern for the metropolitan area, inclusive of collective problems within it (Kasarda & Janowitz, 1974;Vallbé et al, 2015). Therefore, we predict that the length of residence in a city-region will affect support for the regional perspective among citizens of city-regions: The longer one has resided in a city-region the broader and stronger their regional perspective will be relative to citizens with shorter residences.…”

“…Residences, employment, and places of leisure/culture tend to be spatially separate, even if the home spaces of citizens are in particular places. The trifurcation of the core activities of life may influence how people in city-regions think, especially the scale at which they do it (e.g., neighborhood vs. metropolis), the degrees of attachments they feel to a particular scale (see, e.g., Kübler, forthcoming;Vallbé et al, 2015), and what they think governments in their city-regions should do to sustain or improve the quality of life. The trifurcation also may foster metropolitan-level affinity and "spatially expanded attachment" (Lowery, Hoogland DeHoog, & Lyons, 1992, p. 84).…”

“…What factors influence the attitudes citizens may hold in city-regions that could support or weaken initiatives and institutions for regional government and governance? Drawing from the emergent scholarship on political attitudes and behavior in European city-regions (e.g., Kübler, forthcoming;Lidström, 2010Lidström, , 2013Vallbé, Magre, & Tomàs, 2015) and the U.S.-based literature on new regionalism (e.g., Downs, 1973;Orfield, 1998;Steinacker, 2004;Swanstrom, 1996), we focus on the concept and possession of a particular political orientation in city-regions -the "regional perspective" (Downs, 1994, p. 183). The regional perspective values intraregional cooperation among citizens and communities.…”

The metropolitan name game: The pathways to place naming shaping metropolitan regions

“…Such an upscaling has potentially positive impacts on the pursuit of a fair distribution of economic benefits, the wider legitimacy of metropolitan governance structures and the role of citizens in deciding matters pertaining to the larger scale (Vallbé et al, 2015;Lidström, 2015;Kübler, 2016). This implies that identity at this scale can be developed and should be nurtured.…”

“…They are seen as fragile policy constructs, lacking a relation to historical, cultural or geographical features of the territory, and too fragmented to create a sense of shared identity among the individual and collective actors enclosed by their ad-hoc boundaries (Van Houtum and Lagendijk, 2001;Lambregts, 2006;Healey, 2009). Shared identity is defined here as a generally agreed recognition of the metropolitan region as a functionally, socially and politically relevant spatial arena (Vallbé et al, 2015;Kübler, 2016), as well as the manifestation of emotional ties to the specific locality that lead to the emergence of expectations and goals shared by citizens, communities and institutions (Nelles, 2009).…”