Decoding the Newest “Metropolitan Regionalism” in the USA: A Critical Overview

This article provides a critical overview of contemporary debates on metropolitan governance and region-wide cooperation in US city-regions. Many commentators have interpreted the recent proliferation of metropolitan reform experiments in US city-regions as evidence that a new “regional coalition” is being consolidated or as the expression of a singular, unified and internally coherent political agenda. In contrast to such assumptions, it is argued that contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects in the USA are extremely heterogeneous, both institutionally and politically, and are permeated by significant internal conflicts and contradictions. Contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects are interpreted here as place-specific political responses to the new forms of sociospatial polarization and uneven geographical development that have been crystallizing in US city-regions under conditions of postfordist urban restructuring and neoliberal (national and local) state retrenchment. From this perspective, the current explosion of debates on metropolitan cooperation represents not a movement towards a putative “new regionalism” but rather a “new politics of scale” in which local, state-level and federal institutions and actors, as well as local social movements, are struggling to adjust to diverse restructuring processes that are unsettling inherited patterns of territorial and scalar organization within major US city-regions. A concluding section suggests that such metropolitan rescaling projects are redefining the geographies of urban governance throughout the advanced capitalist world.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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