Governing cities through regions: Canadian and European perspectives, edited by Roger Keil, Pierre Hamel, Julie-Anne Boudreau, and Stefan Kipfer

《Governing cities through regions: Canadian and European perspectives, edited by Roger Keil, Pierre Hamel, Julie-Anne Boudreau, and Stefan Kipfer》

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来源: JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue2,P.275-276

语言: 英文

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作者单位: Minnesota State University Mankato

摘要: This book is the result of a decade-long collective project to study the “governance of cities through regionalization” (p. ix) in Canada and Europe in the years after the financial crisis of 2008. Regionalism or, more specifically, urban regionalism is a large and ill-defined topic. These parameters set around the work give it some shape: much of the discussion focuses on what might be called “post-globalization” issues that surfaced after the overheated global economy ebbed in the Great Recession. The focus on Canada and Europe tilts the analysis toward relatively recent, often state-led (or province-led) approaches to regional governance, rather than the neoliberal market-led approaches more favored in the United States. The focus on the use of regionalism to govern cities—central cities but also peripheral cities—finesses the thorny problem of defining the boundaries of a region and allows them to talk of regions as “topological” rather than “territorial.”The work is divided into three sections (plus a short conclusion): conceptual considerations, case studies from Canada (three on Toronto, as well as Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver), and case studies from Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, Silesia, Barcelona, Italy [as the national government relates to its metropolitan regions], and England [London and Manchester]).The first chapter sets the table for the case studies which follow. It identifies a shift in the literature from “urban politics” to “regional governance,” constructed from five issues: transcending the jurisdictional boundaries of the metropolis, a shift from regionally bounded territoriality to “topologically constructed relationships of metropolitan spaces that are constituted regionally” (p. 12), issues of scale and whether urban constructs explain regional arrangements, the character of collective action on a regional scale, and a shift from a center-city focus to a web of metropolitan governance. From this, Keil et al. pose the central question of this book as whether a globalized urban region behaves as a “political space in which collective actors emerge” (in other words, an institutional structure) or as a “region acting collectively” (a civil society; p. 13). This, in turn, leads to three other questions: What are the dominant modalities of governance, and are they converging or diverging? Are urban regions predominantly defined, singly or in some combination, by economic forces, social forces, political forces, or bioregional forces? And, finally, is regional governance shaped primarily by conflict or by collective action?Some of these questions are further developed in the four chapters remaining in this section. The second chapter explores the issue of social agency and collective action as a force for structural change. The authors point out that “urban protest has rarely succeeded in being deployed at a metropolitan scale” (p. 32). They also argue for including forms of collective action outside the political realm, including actions that are not “intentionally, willfully, strategically political” (p. 36). The third chapter reviews movements and politics in the metropolitan region, characterizing European regional collaboration as a matter of local government consolidation from above, whereas in North America the focus is on business campaigns for marketing an area. The United States is characterized as having a bias in favor of local control, privatizing (sub)urban governance to subvert big-city control of the region. Chapter 4 considers the role of neoliberalism and privatization in regional governance. It describes the emergence of a “finance-dominated accumulation regime” (p. 67) that transforms the built environment into a financial asset and shifts the welfare burden from the state to the individual (“personal responsibility”) with consequent economic competition between and within regions. The last chapter examines the tension between regional economic integration into clusters/networks, on the one hand, and internal competition in the region as corporations promote competition among municipalities, on the other. This thesis is explored by comparing the cases of Frankfurt and Toronto, although the analysis never really explains why the Toronto region cooperated more than Frankfurt.The following 13 chapters present thumbnail sketches of specific instances of regional governance in Canada and Europe. Though each case is interesting in its own right, the cases do not directly reflect on each other and do not follow a common format or conceptual structure. This is particularly curious because the Acknowledgements state that the authors have been collectively engaged for a decade, and because the first chapter lays out a set of questions that could have served as the underlying structure for each case study. Further, though an author certainly has the right to set the scope of his/her own work, the absence of U.S. cases seems curious because the United States has had a form of mandated regional governance since 1968 when the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Circular A-95 mandated regional review of local government requests for federal funding. Further, though many of the case studies wrestle with the impact of the neoliberal, private-market agenda, Chapter 3 had previously identified the United States, more so than Canada, for its metrowide efforts focused on equity and collective consumption in response to that agenda. The last line of the book acknowledges this omission: We end this book by turning our attention to the South, where a different history of state (in)formalization processes and a longer experience with flexible spatial and political arrangements may provide us with clues to understanding the current transformation of the transatlantic context. (p. 384)It is hard to identify a place for this book. The first section on conceptual considerations offers an interesting survey of current theories that relate to urban-regional governance. They might generate some useful frameworks for empirical research, although the editor and contributors do not always wrestle with the issue of how to operationalize those concepts so that they can be tested empirically. In fact, much of the conceptual development is descriptive rather than theoretical, couched in assertions that are not readily falsifiable. The case studies are informative, and many cover regions that will probably not be familiar to most readers. Moreover, comparisons between some of the cases could be instructive, although the lack of a common framework makes such comparisons challenging. Still, there is a lot of intriguing and useful information—empirical and conceptual—in this book, and it could be useful in a graduate research course on regional governance.