Metropolitan governance in Germany

Advantageous Fragmentation? Reimagining Metropolitan Governance and Spatial Planning in Rhine-Main

“…The latest federal spatial planning report repeats earlier calls for the creation of a new level of strong regional governance in metropolitan areas to enhance international territorial competitiveness (BBR, 2005, p. 188), an argument that follows to some extent the dominant and often neoliberal narratives of globalization and interspatial competition that have informed much of Western European metropolitan policy discourse in recent years (Brenner, 2003, p. 18). However, the realization of effective planning and governance structures in specific agglomerations varies substantially between German metropolitan regions (Blatter, 2005;Fürst, 2005;Hesse, 2005), as the implementation of any such reforms depends on the cooperation of a multitude of political and economic actors within different institutional contexts. The diversity of forms of regional governance is in part due to contrasting historical trajectories and socio-economic structures of the metropolitan regions, and to the organization of the German federal system, built on the principles of subsidiarity and strong regional (Länder) and municipal autonomy.…”

“…The municipalities of such a regional planning association participate in the development of the regional plan through a regional assembly. While cooperation between major German cities and their neighbouring municipalities has a long history in terms of collaborative regional planning and issue-specific modes of cooperation through the formation of special purpose associations (for example, Zweckverband for public transport or waste management), the strong constitutionally safeguarded autonomy of local government has often hindered the development of comprehensive modes of metropolitan governance (Fürst, 2005). In addition, territorially fragmented regional identities and state competition in the federal system pose specific challenges for metropolitan regions that extend functionally across state boundaries, an issue that is particularly relevant in the case of Rhine-Main.…”

Land Use Planning Tools and Institutional Change in Germany: Recent Developments in Local and Regional Planning

“…As such, regional-level governance has generally been concerned itself with enhancing metropolitan economic competitiveness and attracting external capital investment (Brenner, 2003). As regions have become more important, regional governance structures have increasingly experimented not only with the number and type of actors involved in governing, but also with the geographic scale and functional scope of a variety of institutional arrangements (Fürst, 2005;Blatter, 2006). Third, the shift towards strategic economic development implies a shift away from "government" towards "governance" (Pierre & Peters, 2000), and decision-making has been decentralized and diversified throughout a wide range of public, private organizations and actors.…”

“…They tend to involve and be more reliant on voluntary cooperation and informal arrangements (Thierstein, 2002) as opposed to legal guidelines. They also tend to vary widely from region to region in terms of its scale, scope, form and degree of institutionalization (Fürst, 2005), whether formed through bottom up processes by local actors, or encouraged through active state and federal level intervention (Fürst, 2006). Municipalities therefore have many forms of co-operation available to them, which differ with regard to substance, geographic scale, number and type of actors involved, degree of formality, democratic content and legal competencies.…”

“…As such, European planning has seen a shift away from the more traditional administrative and regulatory approaches, as characterized by the post-war welfare state's emphasis on wealth redistribution and equalization of opportunity, towards a greater emphasis on economic development and increasing global competitiveness. Consequently, private and non-profit actors have taken on a more prominent role in planning and land use decision-making (Fürst, 2005;Thierstein, 2002). Inherent in this development is an increasing emphasis placed on the "enabling" role of government: "Government seeks cooperation with other organizations who carry out the actual service delivery, and a whole range of new procedures are devised to regulate and monitor this relationship" (Salet et al, 2003, p. 8).…”