Metropolitan challenges and reform pressures across Europe – the perspectives of city mayors

Abstract

Oliver Dlabac leads the research group on Local Democracy at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau and teaches on decentralisation at the University of Zurich. He has published on local and regional democracy in Switzerland and is currently leading a research project on the democratic foundations of urban planning in the city regions of Birmingham, Lyon and Zurich. Lluís Medir lectures in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interests include local government and public policy, and his most recent publication is 'Dealing with Austerity: a case of local resilience in Southern Europe' in Local Government Studies, 2017. He researches in the GREL (www.ub.edu/grel). Mariona Tomàs is associate professor of Political Science and member of the GREL at the University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on metropolitan governance and urban policies, publishing several articles, book chapters, and comparative studies in the field. She received the Academic Gold Medal of the General Governor of Canada for her PhD in Urban Studies and she won the first prize of the political book of the Parliament of Quebec.

Intermunicipal Cooperation in Metropolitan Regions in Brazil and Mexico: Does Federalism Matter?

“…Longer tenure reduces uncertainty and promotes decision-making based on long-term considerations of the collective benefits of collaboration (Brown and Potoski 2003;Clingermayer and Feiock 2014;Feiock 2007, p. 55;Hawkins 2017;Hefetz, Warner, and Vigoda-Gadot 2012, p. 756). Also ideological changes affect IMC; evidence suggests that right-wing mayors tend to cooperate less (Bel, Fageda, and Mur 2014;Dlabac et al 2018), but this finding still remains to be confirmed in other parts of the world.…”

Dynamics of metropolisation: the institutional construction of the Città Metropolitana di Roma Capitale in the national and regional context

“…Three broad schools of metropolitan governance have been identifiedreform school, public choice theory and new regionalismbut the assumptions of each partly influence the approaches of policy makers (Dlabac et al 2018).…”

Conceptualising Metropolitan Regions: How Institutions, Policies, Spatial Imaginaries and Planning Are Influencing Metropolitan Development

“…For all this, the relentless pace of global urban change poses fundamental questions about how best to plan and govern metropolitan regions. The problem facing metropolitan regions-especially for those with policy and decision-making responsibilities-is that these spaces are typically reliant on inadequate urban economic infrastructure and fragmented planning and governance arrangements (Dlabac et al 2018;Fedeli 2017;Harrison and Hoyler 2014;Kantor et al 2012). As the demand for more appropriate, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance has increased, new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict continue to emerge around issues and agendas of infrastructure investment, housing, land-use planning, environmental management and other social forms of collective provision.…”