Metropolitan Governance
Metropolitan governance focuses on problems of integrating governance across territories.
Most cities have been constrained as they grow by historic boundaries. As suburbs grew with transport innovations more and more tax payers were located outside the historic city boundaries and live in separate jurisdictions even though they often worked in the core city. This provoked a financial crisis for the core city which typically concentrates many of the city’s problems of poor neighbourhoods, but it is also the host of much of the economic activity of the city including its central business district.
In the metropolitan governance theme the focus is on integrated solutions across a metropolitan or city territory in which governance is fragmented because administrative units do not correspond modern functional city regions or polycentric groupings of smaller urban areas. JOINING FORCES and CITY REGIONS NET are linked by addressing a common problem albeit at a different scale. Whereas JOINING FORCES addresses issues arising in large scale metropoles which frequently cross national and regional boundaries, CITY REGIONS NET focuses on smaller core cities that are surrounded by hinterlands under different jurisdictions.
JOINING FORCES starts from the need to integrate governance across metropolitan areas that also cross Member State borders. Their thematic focus includes the role of strategic and spatial planning in urban sprawl, managing mobility through public transport, managing externalities in transport, waste disposal and waste water treatment, building up knowledge economy through education and research, enhancing attractiveness through marketing, promotion of social inclusion, and how to organise metropolitan governance
CITY REGIONS NET starts from the problem of core cities that have much larger economic reach than their current governance permits. Their focus is on medium sized cities with typical populations of about 250,000 people. In the case of Graz there are 17 other administrative districts in the surrounding space. Other cities like Zurich and Munich face similar problems.
Projects in other poles are also active in the same theme and will be grouped in this theme. LUMASEC is working to examine strategic land-use management as a means of intervention on a regional-city level particularly to address supra-local challenges such as land allocation for economic development impacting on the local level. NODUS is looking to develop appropriate planning tools and support effective integrated policy-making. NET TOPIC is examining how intermediate urban areas can seek to create a stronger identity in relation to their metropolitan core city. A classic example of this would be the relationship between Salford and Manchester. EGTC is focuses on how to develop efficient and effective governance models to face the particular challenge of managing cross-border metropolitan areas.
RegGov focuses on disadvantaged areas but explores the relationship with the regional level, especially how Managing Authorities can organise the finance for integrated approaches to urban neighbourhoods.
To find out more about the aims, methods, events and outputs being planned by these networks read the synthesis of their baselines studies.