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The complexity of metropolitan polycentric governance is still challenging scholars and practitioners, who have mostly been engaged in a normative debate in which scant attention has been paid to the coexistence and interdependence of institutional solutions. The ecology of games framework (EGF) can be used to remedy this gap. By incorporating the analysis of institutional variation into EGF propositions about venues' interdependence, this article examines the mechanisms of metropolitan governance configuration resulting from institutional complexity at the inter‐municipal level. Provincial forums, municipal associations, and inter‐municipal agreements are the policy venues studied in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile. Official documents reporting formal agreements in 2017–2021 help to capture the inter‐municipal governance network to which we apply exponential random graph models (ERGMs). The results show the positive effects of mandated provincial venues on inter‐municipal ties and the absence of the effect of self‐organized municipal associations, tendencies that prevail even when incorporating other relevant covariates into the models. These results nourish the EGF debate about interdependencies between coexisting policy venues, emphasizing the role of the different institutional attributes framing the policy venues and the effects of these differences on governance formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French territorial system is marked by a historical very large communal dispersion. Strangely the French State, although considered very strong, has never managed to impose the merger of these municipalities, as was the case in most other European countries. This resistance of local elected representatives, often also national parliamentarians, then led the central government to use another strategy: their grouping in public institutions of intermunicipal cooperation (EPCI). The creation of the Metropolis of Lyon is, therefore, very original. Created by the law of 27th January, 2014, it is the only “metropolis” with the status of territorial collectivity and merges on its territory the Rhône department and the former “urban community” of Lyon. This metropolis is thus unique in France, and the authors will tend to verify whether it could serve as a model to follow by other metropolises, considering the case of the first institutionalised metropolis in Poland, namely the GZM Metropolis, which is struggling with structural problems. The GZM Metropolis was established in 2017 by the Polish Parliament’s law and provided with a specific governance regime comparable to the “manager and council model” and decision-making based on a double majority of the municipalities and population. After the first five years of functioning, the leaders of this first Polish metropolis seem to be ready to adjust their metropolitan institutions, understanding its limits and searching for inspiration at the international level.

This article explores the interplay between Integrated Urban Plans (IUPs), introduced by Italy’s post-Covid National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), and Metropolitan Cities (MCs) established in 2014 and still pursuing institutionalization. We investigate if IUPs empower MCs as innovative strategic bodies through their direct engagement in urban regeneration. Drawing from institutionalization theory, we analyze documents and interviews from three selected MCs. Findings reveal diverse approaches to IUPs; varying success in aligning projects with strategic missions; distinct MC models and degrees of consolidation, shaped by legacies and capacities. The NRRP proves an effective window of opportunity for the institutionalization of MCs.

Metropolitan areas represent nowadays the main drivers of European development. This puts traditional spatial governance models into crisis, with existing territorial units that are challenged by phenomena hardly manageable within their fixed administrative boundaries. A growing number of governance experimentations have emerged in Europe aiming to address the metropolitan dimension. In the Italian context, this process led to the introduction of 14 Città Metropolitane, that substituted the respective provinces in particularly complex territorial contexts. Due to its nature, however, the reform raised a number of challenges in relation to the actual role that small and medium towns should play within the new governance arrangement, and how their cooperation with the large urban core they gravitate around can bring reciprocal benefits and added value. This paper sheds some light on the matter, discussing the state of the art of metropolitan governance and planning in the country, to then use the cases of Torino and Bari to highlight how different levels of territorial fragmentation contribute to raise different challenges for metropolitan governance and planning. In doing so, the authors reflect on the advantages and disadvantages that small and medium towns encounter when participating to metropolitan governance.

Metropolitan governance focuses on democratic participation, citizen-centered services and local growth. In Bangladesh, urban sprawl, rapid population growth, and multiple public agencies providing services make inter-organizational cooperation essential, yet problematic. Limited autonomy, unwieldy institutional procedures, unproductive inter-agency coordination and disjointed collaboration often hinder policy and program execution. Consultation, collaboration, negotiation, and mutual adjustment are aimless, incoherent or ineffective. This exploratory-interpretive study using survey data examines the challenges of inter-organizational coordination in Chittagong, the second-largest city in the country. The focus is on institutional mechanisms, organizational culture, leadership, administrative dualism, accountability, integrity, management quality, and program monitoring and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the Romanian legal framework for metropolitan areas (MAs) and functional urban areas (FUAs) over the past decade, examining changes and developments in this area. It provides an overview of the legal provisions concerning MAs and FUAs in Romania, and discusses the various laws, regulations, and policies that govern their formation and operation. The article also analyses the status and the challenges that have emerged in the implementation of the legal framework and highlights the main obstacles faced by Romanian metropolitan areas and functional urban areas. Ultimately, the article seeks to provide insights into the effectiveness of the Romanian legal framework in supporting the development and governance of metropolitan areas and FUAs and identifies areas for further improvement.

The French territorial system is marked by a historical very large communal dispersion. Strangely the French State, although considered very strong, has never managed to impose the merger of these municipalities, as was the case in most other European countries. This resistance of local elected representatives, often also national parliamentarians, then led the central government to use another strategy: their grouping in public institutions of intermunicipal cooperation (EPCI). The creation of the Metropolis of Lyon is, therefore, very original. Created by the law of 27th January, 2014, it is the only "metropolis" with the status of territorial collectivity and merges on its territory the Rhone department and the former "urban community" of Lyon. This metropolis is thus unique in France, and the authors will tend to verify whether it could serve as a model to follow by other metropolises, considering the case of the first institutionalised metropolis in Poland, namely the GZM Metropolis, which is struggling with structural problems. The GZM Metropolis was established in 2017 by the Polish Parliament's law and provided with a specific governance regime comparable to the "manager and council model" and decision-making based on a double majority of the municipalities and population. After the first five years of functioning, the leaders of this first Polish metropolis seem to be ready to adjust their metropolitan institutions, understanding its limits and searching for inspiration at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, urban governance has attracted more academic attention. There have been some review articles on the state of urban governance research, as they are in the form of selected themes by the authors, it is difficult to gain a systematic understanding of the field.This review article conducts bibliometrics and domain knowledge map analysis of 1280 papers on urban governance. It produces a comprehensive picture of the intellectual structure, the evolution and trends of the research topics on urban governance. The findings show scholars from three disciplines covering three subfields of urban governance: urbanity, publicity and technology. USA, UK and mainland China are the main contributors to urban governance research. University College London, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Sheffield are key players in international collaboration. However, the international research collaboration network is rather weak. There are nine highly researched topics: citizenship, urban monitoring and evaluation, global south development and challenges, urban mobility and sustainable development, institutional concept and challenge, technological change and governance transformation, metropolitan governance and innovation, urban politics and intergovernmental relations, and urban governance in China. Based on highlighted words in the research themes, urban governance research gradually moves from the connotation and theoretical basis to the subject and practice model of urban governance, and then to the influencing factors and evaluation of urban governance as well as the innovation and challenges of urban governance.

Metropolisation is a process that includes the consequences of global phenomena transferred to the level of metropolitan areas, being the result of various legal and social processes, which is best illustrated by the example of French and Polish institutional solutions. France has been chosen to perform the analysis on due to the uniqueness of its legal regulations in the field of the issues covered in the study (e.g., the institution of metropolitan poles [le pôle métropolitain]). The possibility of creating a metropolis in its current form has existed in France since 2010, but the legislative bodies are still introducing changes to strengthen the legal position of this institution. The French legal order continues to reinforce the role and importance of the metropolis as a unit of inter-municipal cooperation that can take over the department and region’s essential competences to manage the metropolitan area more effectively. In a sense, France is becoming a model of organisation and functioning for contemporary metropolises in Poland, which are beginning to emerge as a certain remedy to the effectiveness issue of performing supra-regional tasks. This article provides an analysis of the law as it stands for legal regulations concerning the organisation and functioning of metropolises both in France and Poland in a comparative and legal context, with the aim of making postulates regarding the choice of a right formula for performing tasks in contemporary local governments.

Mayors are important intergovernmental actors. Understanding how they conceptualize their roles in intergovernmental relations can help us better understand metropolitan governance. Network institutionalism and institutional role theory frame this investigation of how mayors discuss their metropolitan policy engagement in the Rockford, Illinois, USA Metropolitan Statistical Area. Through an exploratory case study of this mid-sized American metropolitan region, including in-depth interviews, social network analysis, and review of media coverage, embeddedness in metropolitan-wide policy dialogue is contrasted with clique-based interactions that advance policy goals for smaller groups of local governments in the region. Differentiating how mayors participate in metropolitan intergovernmental relations aids in a refined theoretical understanding of polycentric metropolitan governance while also highlighting practical challenges for political leaders in metropolitan collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I propose an analytical approach to describe the institutional trajectory of metropolitan authorities by using theory-based institutional models that, like 'ebbs' and 'flows', alternate over time. By employing a comparative, qualitative case-based approach, I empirically validated this analytical approach by reconstructing the divergent institutional trajectories of the metropolitan authorities in Barcelona, Spain and Milan, Italy over a period of 70 years. Furthermore, I examine to what extent the different institutional trajectories of both metropolitan authorities have had an indirect impact on land-use patterns by comparing longitudinal datasets (1950s-2010s) at different territorial scales. Results show that the different institutional models characterizing both metropolitan authorities cannot be clearly associated with a higher or lower proportion of urbanized areas. Rather, findings suggest that it is the inter-mediating role that metropolitan authorities routinely perform that can promote efficient land-use development and sustainable use of land as a scarce resource (equifinality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the Romanian legal framework for metropolitan areas (MAs) and functional urban areas (FUAs) over the past decade, examining changes and developments in this area. It provides an overview of the legal provisions concerning MAs and FUAs in Romania, and discusses the various laws, regulations, and policies that govern their formation and operation. The article also analyses the status and the challenges that have emerged in the implementation of the legal framework and highlights the main obstacles faced by Romanian metropolitan areas and functional urban areas. Ultimately, the article seeks to provide insights into the effectiveness of the Romanian legal framework in supporting the development and governance of metropolitan areas and FUAs and identifies areas for further improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regional discourses around organisational forms offer little evidence to analyse and guide cooperative processes in a context-specific way. Design criteria can contribute to overcoming this deficit. This paper operationalises a proposed set of design criteria by drawing on the discourses on collaborative governance and land management. Subsequently, these design criteria are used to analyse an ongoing process for the development of a housing development concept in the Leipzig city region and to reflect on the criteria. This contributes to the question of how collaborative governance of land-use development in city regions should be designed. Important points of reference for the design of cooperations are the conscious selection of the actors to be involved and the development of mutual trust between them, joint definition of rules of the game for cooperation, determination of the nature of the emerging institution, orientation of the joint work towards the future and the development of a common understanding of the situation to be improved. [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]

In the now thirty-year-long history of the construction of a formal dimension of the metropolisation process in Italy, the dynamics of administrative reorganisation triggered by Law 56/2014 saw the emergence of the metropolitan city as an element of rupture in the relations between territorial levels. These dynamics are explored through the Roman case, in which the process of institutionalisation of the metropolitan city presents numerous criticalities with respect to the central city’s value as capital, the organisational structure within the metropolitan territory, the relationship with the Latium Region and the relationship with the State regarding European programming.

This paper aims to capture a given spatio-temporal fix in the regional and metropolitan formation processes within two Polish regions: Lubelskie and Silesia. The strategic–relational approach (SRA) to the state analysis was adopted to discern the key elements of regional and metropolitan discourses. The wide SRA framework allows us to situate these discourses within formal and substantive dimensions of both scales, and then – using the territory–place–scale–networks (TPSN) framework – to connect them to the other aspects of socio-spatial relations. The selected regions occupy a special place within regional policy in Poland and discourse at a national level due to structural problems within their territories. Therefore, different actors have identified the need for thorough regional transformations. In turn, they should be analysed in the context of the state transformation, which began in Poland in 1989, with its currently unknown direction when it comes to the modes of regional and metropolitan policies. The results of the research prove that specific actors adopt regionally different strategies, aiming at pursuing their own goals as well as supporting regional raison d’états. At the same time, however, it is difficult to indicate evidence of political rescaling concerning the transfer of tasks and resources to the regional scale, except for its strengthening resulting from the implementation of European Union funds, which can be considered in terms of governance or meta-governance failure. The ‘stewards of hope’ image has been assigned in this context to new metropolitan-scale institutions.

Production of housing in London is driven by three factors: a housing crisis that requires the construction of more than 1.6 million homes by 2025, a model of social housing production mainly delivered through private developers’ contributions, and a metropolitan governance structure through which housing targets are allocated to municipalities with highly unequal pressures, being inner London boroughs the ones with the highest targets to meet. In the context of a non-prescriptive and liberalised planning system, this threefold scenario has resulted in the construction of unprecedented residential landscapes, dominated by high-density and high-rise buildings. Tower Hamlets Council is at the forefront of this challenge both in the UK and Europe and is trying to develop planning tools to shape them. This article discusses three innovative supplementary planning documents (SPDs) produced by the policy team that have had unequal success in shaping different aspects of this form of development: the South Quay Masterplan SPD, the High Density Living SPD, and the soon-to-be-adopted Tall Building SPD. A comparative analysis of these planning documents and the perception of urban planners working at different stages of the planning process on the effectiveness and limitations of these SPDs in shaping vertical neighbourhoods shed light on the key factors influencing the role municipal planning can have in delivering a built environment that supports residents’ quality of life. By doing so, this case study illustrates the limitations of municipal planning and planners in local government, pointing to more structural and strategic issues of metropolitan governance.

Complex processes, specific to the countries in transition, have had major impacts on restructuring the territorial management systems. The removal of restrictions of limiting urban expansion, imposed by the totalitarian regime, has allowed the rapid expansion of cities, beyond administrative boundaries, since 1989. The concept of emerging metropolitan area is explained by the multitude of problems posed by the sketching of these areas and especially by their functioning. Synthesizing, there are presented some managerial experiences considered inchoate, of some emerging Romanian metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on Bucharest’s metropolitan area. The conclusions of these descriptive analysis show the complexity of the problems that can occur during the process of building of the metropolitan areas under the circumstances of lack of an inter-municipal cooperation culture. Integrated management takes into account two realities: firstly, that the management of emerging metropolitan areas is trans-scalar, achieving the partial mergence of the management types (including the collegiate one), and secondly, that insuring a multi-level governance without implementing a polycentric intra-metropolitan development policy, is not sufficient.

Recent decades have seen a flurry of administrative division adjustments (ADAs) in major Chinese cities, including ADAs that reconfigure multiple local government units at once. Despite the growing visibility of such reforms, it remains unclear how they come about and how profoundly they change cities' governance and development prospects. To address these questions, this paper examines cases of ADA in Nanjing and Ningbo that had varying practical and political significance. Nanjing's 2013 ADA, though broad in scope, primarily served the purpose of administrative streamlining. By contrast, Ningbo's 2016 ADA marked a political and economic turning point, furthering the city's agenda of territorial consolidation. This detailed case comparison traces how varying ADA outcomes emerged from different intergovernmental relationships between cities, urban subunits, and provincial authorities, highlighting the territorial interest conflicts that play out within Chinese cities and the broader political challenges surrounding efforts to improve metropolitan governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this work is to verify if there is evidence of strategic alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the initiatives instituted within the scope of the Development Council of the Metropolitan Region of Ribeirão Preto (CDRMRP), the highest governance and collegiate decision-making body in the region. To this end, the agendas and official minutes of the Board meetings held since its inception were analyzed. The evidence pointed to the potential alignment of the instituted initiatives with 10 SDGs out of 17, and 37 goals out of 169. As a result, it appears that the SDGs and their structured set of goals provide a consistent frame of reference for metropolitan leaders build a strategic and qualified agenda to guide their decisions and actions in line with the challenges and contemporary transformations that have increasingly affected localities, regions and countries. As an original contribution, the present work offers a methodological proposal to analyze the alignment between the decisions of the Metropolitan Development Council and the SDGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the impact governance types can have on the transfer of city-scale climate change policy. We develop a new adaptation of the policy transfer heuristic (based on the work of Dolowitz and Marsh 1996) which draws attention to different types of multilevel governance systems (Hooghe et al. 2003). This new adaption, "Policy Transfer Across Governance Systems" (PTAGS) heuristic helps to anticipate challenges and opportunities for potential transfer (Manwaring 2016). To demonstrate this, we present three hypothetical scenarios of policy transfer from the European Union Green Capital Awards (EUGCA) to Australia. Using PTAGS reveals three main complexities that policy actors' may face when developing city-scale climate change policy. These are: problem identification; the type of transfer networks used; and what aspects of policy contents and goals can be transferred. We argue that the adapted PTAGS heuristic enables a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of transfer across different governance systems. This can better equip policy actors and relevant stakeholders to develop more holistic city-scale climate change adaptation policy that draws on the strengths of governance systems rather than amplifying their weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the evolvement of metropolitan governance in Brazil and uses greater São Paulo as an in-depth case study to demonstrate how metropolitan governance is organized in a megacity region in the Global South. This is of interest as many publications in this specific academic field focus on European or North American city regions that are, on average, smaller in size and part of multi-level governance systems. Hence, many theoretical positions that are established in the scholarly debate do not work well in the context of megacities. The study will describe how the metropolitan governance arrangement in greater São Paulo evolved and reflected on the setbacks and success of metropolitan planning and policies in the context of uncertain state support. Metropolitan regions have been established in Brazil by the military regime in the mid-1970s for industrialization and comprehensive top-down planning. After the fall of the regime in the 1980s, the question of metropolitan regions was delegated to the states which created a sort of institutional vacuum and a lack of dedicated policies. In 2018, however, Brazil had 76 institutionalized metropolitan regions but these differ in size and institutional strength. The metropolitan region of São Paulo is the biggest as it comprises 39 municipalities with approximately 20 million inhabitants. However, given the dynamic of expansion, the question of establishing an appropriate scale emerged. Attempts to create a governance arrangement for regional development and strategic planning for the so-called São Paulo Macrometropolis with 172 municipalities and roughly 32 million inhabitants failed. However, in a separate process, over decades, seven metropolitan regions emerged on a smaller scale (the São Paulo Metropolitan Region being one of them). The study is based on a literature review, document analysis (laws in particular), and workshops with Brazilian colleagues that happened within the context of a research project on environmental planning and water governance in the greater São Paulo Metropolitan Region.

Metropolitan government is still an unfinished business in Spain. An example of this is the metropolitan area of Valencia. The aim of this article is to learn about the process that has led to the current situation of a lack of metropolitan government and to propose actions that will help to make it a reality in the not-too-distant future. To this end, it analyses the history and the current regulations, and it is completed with the opinions and contributions of academics and politicians. The result is that, although there is no political will to include the consolidation of a metropolitan government in Valencia in the current political agenda, it is possible to set in motion initiatives of different types, on the part of local administrations and civil society, which can take advantage of the existing governance structures to advance toward a metropolitan government in the medium term.

This article focuses on mobility issues in Montreal, whose metropolitan transportation policies are presented as one of the major ambitions of large North American metropolitan areas. Empirically, we are interested in a recent transportation megaproject: the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) in Montreal, an electric light-rail transit network spanning 67 kilometers in the Greater Metropolitan Area. These types of megaprojects involve significant governance challenges and certain criticisms due to the involvement of several actors from different backgrounds and defending different interests, which places. This is why we believe that it is important to address this issue from the point of view of metropolitan governance through the agenda-setting of urban megaprojects. The originality of this article is that it demonstrates how presenting the REM project as a public-public partnership, between the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the Government of Québec, opened the door to favoritism for the Caisse which influenced the choice of a political solution in Greater Montreal. By mobilizing Kingdon's model, we conclude that windows of opportunity cannot open without choosing a governance model during the agenda-setting phase.

This paper aims to capture a given spatio-temporal fix in the regional and metropolitan formation processes within two Polish regions: Lubelskie and Silesia. The strategic-relational approach (SRA) to the state analysis was adopted to discern the key elements of regional and metropolitan discourses. The wide SRA framework allows us to situate these discourses within formal and substantive dimensions of both scales, and then - using the territory-place-scale-networks (TPSN) framework - to connect them to the other aspects of socio-spatial relations. The selected regions occupy a special place within regional policy in Poland and discourse at a national level due to structural problems within their territories. Therefore, different actors have identified the need for thorough regional transformations. In turn, they should be analysed in the context of the state transformation, which began in Poland in 1989, with its currently unknown direction when it comes to the modes of regional and metropolitan policies. The results of the research prove that specific actors adopt regionally different strategies, aiming at pursuing their own goals as well as supporting regional raison d'états. At the same time, however, it is difficult to indicate evidence of political rescaling concerning the transfer of tasks and resources to the regional scale, except for its strengthening resulting from the implementation of European Union funds, which can be considered in terms of governance or meta-governance failure. The 'stewards of hope' image has been assigned in this context to new metropolitan-scale institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German cities and their hinterlands have a long tradition of cooperation; however, there remains considerable challenges when developing integrated governance models, especially in those metropolitan regions that cross state-boundaries. The Rhine–Neckar Metropolitan Region (MRN), with its unique location of a tri-state intersection, explored ways out of the governing dilemma and has pioneered cooperative federalism in Germany. To determine how the cross-jurisdictional cooperation is organized and realized in the MRN, and how well this model has worked in terms of regional planning, attributing land resources, and the reality of long-term governance, a series of interviews with involved officials and planners and MAXQDA software were employed to decode the transcribed text content. A second-hand qualitative database, including, but not limited to, meeting memos, protocols, and published works were added to examine our findings. The results indicated that diversified actors, a combined instrument, multiple collaborative contents, and the networked joint decision-making structure have strengthened the governance of the MRN. However, their public association-centered structure raised concerns in terms of inadequate participation of private agents and an excessive pursuit of regional balance as well. Ultimately, this paper discusses the inefficiency challenges facing the MRN and further reflects on the need for, and impacts of, high-level government participation in constituting a regional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regional discourses around organisational forms offer little evidence to analyse and guide cooperative processes in a context-specific way. Design criteria can contribute to overcoming this deficit. This paper operationalises a proposed set of design criteria by drawing on the discourses on collaborative governance and land management. Subsequently, these design criteria are used to analyse an ongoing process for the development of a housing development concept in the Leipzig city region and to reflect on the criteria. This contributes to the question of how collaborative governance of land-use development in city regions should be designed. Important points of reference for the design of cooperations are the conscious selection of the actors to be involved and the development of mutual trust between them, joint definition of rules of the game for cooperation, determination of the nature of the emerging institution, orientation of the joint work towards the future and the development of a common understanding of the situation to be improved.

The discourse of sustainability-by-density is dominant in urban policies and climate-friendly urbanism today. Yet, with current failures and disparities in the regulation of dense development and land speculation, the effects of such policies are not exclusively positive. In this article, we address citizen opposition to densification in urban peripheries of the Global North, especially in the North American context, with particular focus on a case at the urban fringe of the Montreal metropolitan area (Canada). We contribute to existing scholarship on a relational approach to urban sustainability with the objective of better understanding the narratives and governance dynamics that unfold in urban peripheries. In the case studied, the gap between residents' subjective experience of the ongoing transformations and the State discourses at different scales is particularly important, yet little understood after several years of public participatory meetings and two lawsuits. We develop the notion of situated expectations to show how actors entertain different expectations of the performance of State and citizen practices in favor of sustainability, which are grounded in their respective relationships to place, scale and the urban boundary. The lack of circulation and mutual recognition between these expectations makes the construction of coalitions and shared participatory governance practices much more problematic.

The paper uses qualitative analysis in the public transport arena to provide a thorough understanding of governing coalitions in Mexican cities and expand Urban Regime Analysis to the context of Mexico. The evidence suggests that Mexican urban regimes are organic-instrumental. In such regimes, private economic interests play a key role; the state government becomes the leading actor, and its collaborative management capabilities become crucial to achieving coalition goals and preserve the alliance between actors. About multilevel governance, the cases show that the differences in the party affiliations of authorities are insignificant for collaboration when an urban regime exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan governance studies have traditionally focused on factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of public goods and services. Yet, we have recently seen the resurgence of debates around metropolitan democratic governance at the same time as the consolidation of new structures of metropolitan government have occurred in several European countries. In spite of that, there is still an important knowledge gap about metropolitan models of government and metropolitan electoral systems. Through the comparative analysis of metropolitan governments in the United Kingdom, France and Germany we identify four main models: metropolitan presidentialism, localist metropolitan parliamentarism, consolidated metropolitan parliamentarism, and full metropolitan government. Moreover, the comparative analysis shows not only the influence of the respective local institutional contexts in the metropolitan government and electoral systems, but also how these reforms are opportunities to introduce innovative institutional designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Istanbul's metropolitan development in the light of current economic and administrative policies in theoretical perspective. In order to do so, the following research questions are explored: What do metropolitan development processes tell us about the relationships between the state and the economy in Istanbul? How do changes in public-private relationships affect the governance of metropolitan development in Istanbul? What are the outcomes of these processes for Istanbul's metropolitan development? The article is structured as follows. We start our account by describing the position of Istanbul in the national and international context, first by highlighting its economic and functional role in the Turkish urban system, and then by outlining its political and administrative structure of state-local relationships. This is discussed as a result of the features taken by the neo-liberal turn in Turkish political economy since the 1980s. Against this background, we discuss the main features of governance in the Istanbul metropolitan region and introduce its main strategic lines of development as an expression of its features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at metropolis models in various European countries with the aim of identifying successful models or possible limitations. The concern for this analysis is justified by the fact that the administrative legislation of EU Member States is no longer shaped only at national level but is subject to European influence in numerous ways. The challenge involved by this research was to work with a concept that is not specific to the Romanian context, governance. By examining governance issues, we tried to identify the types of administrative arrangements (metropolitan areas versus individual administrative units) that are needed at the local level to effectively manage spatial planning. We have therefore looked at how polycentric development is approached under the assumption of growing local communities, through significant urban sprawl to neighboring communities. In this context we ask whether metropolitan governance achieves its aim of creating a polycentric region and whether these policies will bring the benefits we expect. It remains to be seen whether local territorial governance becomes a sustainable mechanism and framework to produce polycentric development or rather encourages the development of unbounded urban agglomerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, particularly in high-cost urban areas, local resistance to multifamily housing development has been widely noted. In many metropolitan areas, legal authority over land-use regulation is assigned to jurisdictions that often are very small, and some scholars argue that this small-scale local control institutionalizes neighborhood-level opposition to new construction. Using census tracts as units of analysis, we assess the relationship between the population size of the city, county, or township that regulates a tract's land use and the change in multifamily units between two recent waves of the American Community Survey (2008–2012 and 2014–2018). Results of regression analysis indicate that larger jurisdictional population size is indeed associated with increased multifamily construction. However, the relationship applies only for jurisdictions with populations exceeding 100,000 and decays at jurisdictional populations of more than 1 million. This nonlinearity may reflect quasi-monopolistic land-use control in the largest jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has identified the potential of the metropolitan scale, and indeed metropolitan bodies, in achieving greater coordination and more effective land-use management. In this paper, we have undertaken a systematic scoping review of the English-language literature (2014–2019) on metropolitanisation and metropolitan governance, with a view to understanding the potential relationship with more sustainable land management. Our scoping review identified several dominant trends within current research on metropolitanisation and metropolitan governance illustrating the complexity between sustainable land management and issues of territorial politics, resourcing, and power relations. The centrality of collaborative working relationships in supporting sustainable land management is identified, yet collaboration and effective metropolitan scale governance is not always an easy task or readily implemented. The paper identifies a series of challenges and concludes that while there is general consensus that the metropolitan arena may be an appropriate scale through which to support more sustainable land management, there is no agreement on the mechanisms to enable this. Steering and more strongly directing metropolitanisation processes through either formal metropolitan governance structures or other tools could provide a potential approach but will require significant adaptation in power and funding structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust metropolitan governance is increasingly viewed as necessary to address important economic, social and environmental problems. In this context, this article surveys recent developments in Canadian metropolitan governance. Canada was admired in the post-war period for the effectiveness of its two-tier and unitary metropolitan governments; however, few survive today as urbanisation patterns have become increasingly polycentric and intergovernmental relations more conflictual. Three models have emerged in Canada, sometimes in combination with one another: the multi-purpose regional intergovernmental organisation, the single-purpose metropolitan agency, and the provincial metropolitan policy overlay. Examples of each are discussed, with an emphasis on the interplay of horizontal (intermunicipal) and vertical (provincial–municipal) intergovernmental relations. Ultimately, provincial governments are by virtue of their constitutional authority and spending power the only actors capable of establishing and maintaining durable institutions and policies of metropolitan scope, and they have chosen to do so in Canada’s largest and most urbanised provinces.

To complement Zack Taylor’s paper on Regionalism from Above: Metro Governance in Canada, the journal commissioned four short ‘perspectives’ from Commonwealth countries grappling with similar issues – Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa. The purpose was not in any way to ‘review’ Taylor’s work, but rather to establish a broader picture of issues and trends in metropolitan governance, and to identify common threads. The perspectives from Australia, England and South Africa focus on recent developments and governance issues in particular metropolitan areas. These are respectively the fast-growing outer metropolitan sub-region of Western Sydney; the long-established conurbation of Greater Manchester; and the vast, emerging ‘multi-nodal sprawl’ of South Africa’s Gauteng City Region, centred on Johannesburg. The New Zealand perspective takes a different approach, exploring the implications of shifts in national policy towards a focus on wellbeing and the quality of life in communities, with significant implications for the future of local government and the way metropolitan areas are governed. Nevertheless, all four perspectives reveal similar underlying concerns that metropolitan governance frameworks and practices often struggle to keep pace with global trends, urban growth, community needs and national priorities. Effective inter-government relations are crucial, but local governments may not be at the table, or their views may be largely ignored. The governance of metropolitan regions becomes increasingly fraught, a battleground between the forces of devolution and centralisation. How can meaningful and effective collaborative governance be realised? Who should take the lead and do we have the right tools and skills? In such a complex and fluid environment, can we realistically expect anything more than brief periods of clarity and consensus that at least enable agreement on the next few steps?

This study systematically compares how new growth is directed to the urbanized area in the metropolitan regions of Seattle (USA), Vancouver (Canada), and Stuttgart (Germany). This study is based on a review of planning documents and qualitative interviews with planners at the local, county, regional, and state level. This paper focusses on how the state legislation for land use governance shapes the ability to direct growth to locations favorable from a climate perspective. State legislators, particularly, have a crucial role in drafting overarching rules that enable regional, county, and local decision-makers to work together on directing growth in metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]