ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks the evolution of American local government and demonstrates how institutions stretching back to the founding of the United States impacted the origins and structures of regionalism. It highlights how the strength of local autonomy in the American political experiment ensured that local governments were the key building blocks of emerging regional organizations. The chapter argues that the professionalization of local government functions and officials, coupled with rapid urbanization and increasing local externalities, created conditions that encouraged the development of mechanisms of regional coordination and the political will to respond but on their terms. There were four very separate and distinct routes along which the development of local government cross-boundary approaches occurred. Urban land use planning, economic development, region-wide governmental convening, and transportation planning started as independent actions that, over time, evolved into and were the foundations for many of Regional Intergovernmental Organizations.
