ABSTRACT
Berlin can be seen as an unusual case of metropolitan rescaling, as competing and overlapping governance practices as well as policy discourses constitute a multitude of metropolitan scales. This chapter addresses the question of how these different metropolitan scales are either explicitly or implicitly constructed by metropolitan policies, and of what the role is of public and private actors in this. First, the institutional set-up and policy competences at different governmental levels are discussed which are involved in the construction of as well as strategic policy discourses at a metropolitan scale. Second, different policies and governance practices are analyzed in order to answer the question of how metropolitan scale is represented in spatial development strategies and of whether we can observe consistency among definitions of metropolitan space. What emerges is that there does not exist a dominant understanding of metropolitan scale, but rather a heteronomy of metropolitan (strategic) discourses and different metropolitan scalar projects building on different ontologies of metropolitan space as well as on partly overlapping and partly diverging discursive arenas. Against this background, the analysis points out the enduring institutional and economic dominance of the core, the city-state Berlin.
