We give an overview of an approach to qualitative spatial reasoning based on directional orientation information as available through perception processes or natural language descriptions. Qualitative orientations in 2-dimensional space are given by the relation between a point and a vector. The paper presents our basic iconic notation for spatial orientation relations that exploits the structure of the spatial domain and explores a variety of ways in which these relations can be manipulated and combined for spatial reasoning. Using this notation, we explore a method for exploiting interactions between space and movement in this space for enhancing the inferential power. Finally, the orientation-based approach is augmented by distance information, which can be mapped into position constraints and vice versa.

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In the debate on metropolitan governance, a commonly expressed hypothesis is that the reconstruction of statehood can take metropolitan governance along a variety of paths. This is especially true for Germany, where we can identify a great diversity of organizational forms of cooperation at the level of metropolitan agglomerations. This article addresses the question of how diversity within a country with more or less uniform institutional structures can be explained on the basis of a comparison of three German regions. We examine whether and how such differences can be explained as a combination of structural and other variables. Our starting hypothesis is that casespecific structural variables matter -for example, the position of the core cities of the regions in the international hierarchy of cities, the economic structure of the regions, or the dominance or polarization within the regional party system. Furthermore, the hypothesis will be considered that spatially embedded cooperative actor behaviour and actor-related factors, including political leadership and specific incentive structures or windows of opportunities, also matter. We conclude that such a double reading of the transformation of metropolitan governance is the most appropriate way to understand differences in metropolitan governance arrangements.

The paper seeks to describe whether reflections about the legitimacy metropolitan governance arrangements found consideration in metropolitan reforms in five German metropolitan regions. Metropolitan regions are an increasingly relevant scale for political decision-making but mechanism for legitimacy and accountability did not keep pace. Given the fact that in most metropolitan institutions only indirect mechanisms of legitimacy such as regional assemblies with representatives from municipal councils or public-private governing boards are at work, one may expect that output legitimacy or legitimacy by performance is the dominant source for legitimacy in metropolitan governance. In fact, citizens care much about the quality and the prize of services such as waste management or public transport but less about the transparency of decision-making procedures behind these services -at least on the scale of the region. The results show a mixed picture. In two out of five regions, directly elected regional assembly have been established and now constitute genuine tiers of metropolitan politics where input and output legitimacy are combined. In other regions, the turn to flexible forms of governance opened up decision-making arenas for societal actors, but it seems that this opening of the policy process is very selective and comes at the expense of citizen participation.