Post-suburbia and City-region Politics

Abstract

Robert Beauregard (2006) has noted that the suburbanization and fragmentation of cities effectively produced the metropolitan problematique. Since at least the Second World War, cities in North America and Europe, later also in other parts of the world, were physically extending into the surrounding regions, metabolically connecting into material streams way beyond that region, and economically into the national, and later international and world economies that constituted the roles played by each city-region in the international division of labour. A number of governance problems emerging from this extension have been widely researched. Since the 1950s, metropolitan regions or conurbations were the subject of a broad debate in geography, planning and political studies. While the community power literature continued to focus predominantly on the central city, metropolitan integration of services and consolidation became an important field of study. In the 1990s, the literature on the new regionalism added a considerable body of work. Scholars and practitioners working in this context commonly assume that city-region politics is mainly about the reconciliation of the metropolitan paradox: suburbanization leads to fundamentally different politics, socio-economics, socio-cultures, and socio-ecologies in the centres as opposed to the peripheries of cities, and the ensuing gulf between cities and suburbs needs to be addressed through territorial, functional or institutional policies and arrangements that narrow the gulf in socially just and environmentally sustainable ways (e.g. Dreier et al, 2001).