Metropolitan Institutional Reform and the Rescaling of State Space in Contemporary Western Europe

Abstract

Throughout western Europe, metropolitan governance is back on the agenda. Since the early 1990s, new forms of city-suburban cooperation, regional coordination, regionwide spatial planning and metropolitan institutional organization have been promoted in major city-regions. In contrast to the forms of metropolitan governance that prevailed during the Fordist-Keynesian period - which emphasized administrative modernization, interterritorial equalization and the efficient delivery of public services - the newest wave of metropolitan governance reform is focused upon economic priorities such as territorial competitiveness and attracting external capital investment in the context of geoeconomic and European integration. This article develops an interpretation of the new metropolitan governance in western Europe in two steps. First, I situate the new metropolitan governance in historical context by underscoring its qualitative differences from earlier waves of metropolitan institutional reform. Second, building upon a critique of contemporary `new regionalist' discourses, I develop an interpretation of current metropolitan reform initiatives as important structural and strategic expressions of ongoing, crisis-induced transformations of state spatiality. To this end, I relate contemporary metropolitan reform projects: (a) to various broader trends and counter-trends of state spatial reorganization; and (b) to newly emergent political strategies oriented towards a reconfiguration of inherited approaches to entrepreneurial urban governance. From this perspective, contemporary forms of metropolitan institutional reform are interpreted as key expressions of ongoing processes of state rescaling through which territorial competitiveness is being promoted at a regional scale, albeit in highly contradictory, often self-undermining ways. The article concludes by summarizing some of the methodological implications of this analysis for future studies of urban-regional restructuring and the production of new state spaces.