ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a long-established academic debate on metropolitan regions and policies in Western European states. It explores the increasing visibility of metropolitan regions, both as issues in European Union (EU) policy and as scales in the supranational arena. In a broad sense, metropolitan policies can be defined as public programmes, documents or other practices that refer to the spatial, economic or infrastructural development and governance of metropolitan regions. The chapter argues that the piecemeal incorporation of metropolitan regions into EU discourse can be attributed to processes of rescaling and reframing. In this sense, the analysis confirms the thesis that metropolitan regions are currently becoming new scales in the EU. The empirical analysis reveals that the piecemeal rise of metropolitan regions can be interpreted as an outcome not only of political rescaling, but also of political reframing.
