Christian Lefèvre
pp. 223–242
Record
Abstract
This article discusses the government of cities. After clarifying the concepts of government, governance, governing and governability as well as the metropolis in a first part, the author focuses on the so many attempts to create a metropolitan government in recent decades. He thus provides a tough but realistic assessment of failures and partial success of institutional reforms engaged in the most democratic countries, but also more recent initiatives presented under the concept of governance (strategic planning, “new regionalism” cooperation between actors, urban political regimes, etc..). In a second step, he explains the rather negative assessment because of the permanence of unresolved obstacles as the ambiguous role of the states, the reluctance and even the opposition from local communities and city centers and finally, the refusal of the populations through the instruments of local democracy. The last part focuses on the importance of political action and the two main projects that must be implemented to make metropolis of political territories : the construction of a metropolitan identity and that of a territorial leadership otherwise, the metropolitan government will remain unlikely.
Hank V. Savitch and Daniel Weinstein
pp. 243–268
Record
Abstract
How have major metropolises changed in the last 20 years ? Have their populations and economies gained, lost or remained stable ? Have theses societies centralized or decentralized ? Have metropolises gained status as governing entities or do they continue to remain as politically inchoate entities ? In answering these questions we survey over 120 metropolises in and lay out basic trends. The metropolises cover North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan and Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We also examine the “global pecking order” of metropolises ; we do this by assessing change in the nominal Global-and-World-Cities ranking schema ; these changes are also compared to national level of human development. In some ways a study of this kind probes possible linkages between the onset of globalization and its consequences for the development of global and world cities. As we see it, metropolises around the advanced world have moved from various politico-socio-economic states to another — hence, our title.
Emmanuel Négrier and Mariona Tomàs
pp. 269–292
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Abstract
In this paper, our purpose is to identify the influence of politics for building a metropolitan solidarity. Our purpose is based on a double comparison between France and Spain, two countries that have experienced phases of centralization and decentralization of metropolitan issue. The first national comparison makes us identify ambivalences state policy on the metropolitan debate. A second comparison between two separate metropolitan narratives (Montpellier and Barcelona), allows us to identify the weight of the political variable when observed - over time and the plurality of levels of power - the conditions for metropolitan solidarity. If politics should not be overstated — in the sense that everything could be summarized on politics in the cities, and the economy would be its simple joystick — it should not be underestimated. We propose somehow to put politics back into its place.
Nelson Rojas de Carvalho and Luiz Cesar de Queiroz Ribeiro
pp. 293–319
Record
Abstract
Recent reflection about the challenges faced by the construction of entities of metropolitan governance has been centred on analysis of the politico-institutional effects of a double process : those of globalisation and neoliberalisation. Associated to a dynamic of power resource allocation upwards and downwards, the globalisation process of the metropolitan economies has been translated into the strengthening and autonomisation of local and supranational political actors, with weakening of intermediate instances of power — locus of the national state and metropolitan government. The neoliberalisation process, in turn, implies not only the deactivation of instances of regulation of already known distributive conflicts and market externalities, but equally the disincentive to activation of regulatory mechanisms for new externalities and conflicts, inherent in the metropolitan dynamic. The two processes combined would imply configuration of the metropolises as zones with deficits of governance, in the strict sense, and of politics, in the broad sense. If the perverse effects of this double process with regard to the construction of metropolitan governance seem unquestionable, in this paper we follow a complementary analytical path, focused on the brazilian metropolisation process : we try to verify to what extent internal variables of the metropolitan dynamic in Brazil are equally generators of politico-institutional blockages to the construction of metropolitan governance.
