Governing the new metropolis

Abstract

The expansion of globalising cities into global city-regions poses fundamental questions about how best to govern the new metropolis. Partly because of the relentless pace of change, these newly emerging metropolitan spaces are often reliant on inadequate urban-economic infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements. Moreover, as the demand for more 'appropriate', widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance increases, new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict are emerging around issues of increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the collective provision of services, and further governmentalised remapping(s) of state space. We identify four central tenets of the metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These, we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the emerging new metropolitan paradigm.

Governing beyond the metropolis: Placing the rural in city-region development

“…In making this argument we join a growing number who claim an important juncture in cityregion policymaking and the construction of city-regionalism as a geopolitical project of capitalism has been reached (see Jonas, 2013;Harrison and Hoyler, 2014;Scott, 2012). In the context of our present argument, the recent work of Coombes is particularly enlightening for revealing a shared concern.…”

Megaregions: foundations, frailties, futures

“…urban spatial form (Dühr, 2007;Faludi, 2009;Kunzmann, 1996), are now more commonly associated with functionally-dominant global-city inspired networked approaches (Hall and Pain, 2006;Hoyler et al, 2008a;Pain and Van Hamme, 2014;Reades and Smith, 2014;Taylor et al, 2009). Distinguishing between these two traditions highlights how the type of megaregion that is constructed varies depending on whether you take rapid urbanization (form) or global economic integration (function) as your starting point for framing globalized urbanization (Harrison and Hoyler, 2014).…”

China's Emergent City‐Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State‐orchestrated Rescaling

“…Originally, city‐regionalism is mainly regarded as having emerged as a result of globalization and consequently of the global economy. However, some scholars (Jonas and Ward, ; ; Jonas ; Jonas et al ., ) argue that the formation of city‐region governance is a deliberate process of scale building, which involves both state and non‐state actors (Harrison and Hoyler, ). Brenner's (; ) seminal research on ‘state spatiality' describes how the rise of regional governance can be broadly understood as a process of ‘state reterritorialization', and the specific form of the city‐region as ‘state spatial selectivity', which means that a specific scale has been chosen or built by the state.…”