ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 we estimated that soon after World War II there were some 10 agencies around the world that had been set up to manage the growth of city regions or what were usually called then “metropolitan regions.” We make a very rough estimate that there are 150 of these agencies in the world today. Most began life as commissions of central government, often set up to manage the growth of the national capital, like Berlin in the first decade of the century or London and Paris in the 1930s, or they were set up to manage an industrial region, like the Ruhr in Germany in the 1920s. Gradually most of these earlier commissions of central government have been transformed into agencies which are more directly accountable to the regional population itself. These new agencies, as the data show, have taken on many different forms and levels of power and responsibility. Most have been the subject of constant experimentation, as in Greater London, which has had three quite different institutions of governance in 40 years and is now in the process of setting up a fourth. Of the 11 city regions in this book which have some form of representative government, the Madrid region probably represents the agency with the most power and influence over the affairs of the region. The weakest by some way is the agency for the Boston region.
