Governance Restructuring in Los Angeles and Toronto: Amalgamation or Secession?

The article discusses governance restructuring in Los Angeles, California and Toronto, Ontario. In Toronto an aggressively neoliberal provincial Ontario government decreed an amalgamation of six individual municipal governments and one regional administration. The consolidationist argument, often associated with dirigiste government and compact central city ideals, has now become the means of choice to integrate regional blubber belt hegemony in more than one jurisdiction in Ontario. In Toronto and Los Angeles, what appear to be limited struggles over local jurisdiction and administration of service delivery, are struggles over the urban dimensions of a globalized work, at least in part. Amalgamation and secession become fighting metaphors of change in the war of position in which urban actors find themselves in the age of the global city. Although the old City of Toronto, had retained its hegemony in the region since the introduction of Metro government exactly because it has become one, albeit the strongest, player in a regionally federated system of metropolitan governance, its position had also been waning in the final years of the Metro model.