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Planning the development of metropolitan areas makes use of various forms of cooperation between associated territorial units. Regardless of the cooperation form adopted, dialogue is a factor that significantly facilitates solving spatial problems and gaining social acceptance for the selection of project locations. Its characteristics, including content, course, and participants, additionally determine the specificity of governance in a particular metropolis. The article aims to suggest a study of the emergence and improvement of an institutional dialogue and soft planning by comparing the experiences of selected Polish and French metropolitan areas. They represent different approaches to the use of dialogue in emerging metropolitan spaces resulting from different legal conditions, the length of time it takes for units to integrate, and the scale and orientation of strategic or operational interconnections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been largely sidelined during the mainstream international debate on city-regional (or metropolitan) planning and governance. As the formal institutionalization of city-regions in CEE is relatively weak, the voluntary bottom-up approach to city-regional visioning is the only alternative. Through the empirical analysis of the experience of the Poznań city-region in Poland, based on face-to-face interviews with policymakers and a study of planning documents, the paper discovers the political relations of power behind the consensus-based strategic visioning and limitations of a voluntary approach when confronted with long-lasting local development policies embedded within the formal planning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]