Metropolitan Governance—Different Paths in Contrasting Contexts: Germany and Israel
Metropolitan Governance—Different Paths in Contrasting Contexts: Germany and Israel
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大都市治理——对比背景下的不同路径：德国和以色列
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
A. Frank
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作者：
A. Frank
Regional, metropolitan governance or to use the more contemporary term “city-regions” are once again capturing academic and political minds and debates. This book is one amongst a handful of volumes on the topic published in 2011 alone. Unlike Futures of City-Regions (Newman & Hull, 2011) which reviews a collection of previously published eminent research articles, this book is based on a recent cross-national research project that contrasted, compared and evaluated the governance arrangements of selected city-regions within Germany, and between Germany and Israel. The debate around how to best plan and make decisions at the metropolitan scale essentially derives from the mismatch between political-administrative boundaries and the actual extent of functional urban space. The associated concerns of metropolitan regional governance are by no means new, yet this group of authors argues that in seeking answers to novel challenges from globalization and growing socio-economic fragmentation, scholars and politicians are re-framing the traditional discourse on metropolitan governance. In fact, metropolitan governance arrangements developed over the last two decades display a wide variety of formats ranging from loose networks to statutory bodies with special legal powers, established either bottom-up or through top-down intervention. The conditions and contexts that favour one format over another are unclear as is the efficiency of different forms of governance. Thus, the researchers, on one hand sought to explore the underlying reasons for this considerable variance of governance arrangements, and on the other hand to evaluate the particular models. Research activities are framed via four research questions and adopt a largely positivist attitude. The first question examines the potential impact of national institutional specificities on the development of particular governance arrangements comparing case study regions cross-nationally. The second question explored in greater detail why within the same national setting, i.e. Germany, vastly different models of metropolitan governance emerged. As the legal-administrative context is eliminated as an explanatory variable, other factors are being tested such as placerelated structural factors (polyversus monocentricity, economics, international ranking, inequalities or party politics). The third and fourth research questions focus on evaluation and assess the different arrangements along one of two dimensions: effectiveness and democratic quality. Structurally the volume is organized into four chapters. The first chapter provides contextual background information and a summary of the scholarly discourse of the European Planning Studies Vol. 20, No. 8, August 2012
