Metropolitan Political Systems and the Administrative Process

As Victor Jones and Richard Forstall point out in the introductory chapter of this book, the contemporary metropolis generates "sufficient economic activity to produce highly concentrated and complex human settlements." ¹ As a result of this complex interaction between the core city and its surrounding regional hinterland, the contemporary metropolis has coalesced into what William Robson and Luther Gulick have referred to as an "economic and social reality . . . closely tied together . . . by daily human movements and activities." ² Yet, while the modern metropolis may have achieved an economic—and perhaps even a social—unity, many metropolitan areas have not developed into viable political communities in any meaningful sense of this term. On the contrary, most evidence indicates that the modern metropolis is suffering from a bewildering degree of administrative fragmentation, which makes it extremely difficult to identify and implement consensual goals on a metropolitan-wide basis.