ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between decentralisation and the building of metropolitan institutions showing that metropolitan areas have not been either the focus or the target of decentralisation processes and consequently have not gained much from this process. In the most recent literature on economic geography, urban planning, urban sociology or political science, metropolitan areas or city-regions are presented as the new 'spatial fix' of the present period of capitalism that is globalisation. In other terms, the modalities of local democracy development may be analysed as being at odds with the making of metropolitan areas as political actors. The chapter also focuses on two major obstacles preventing such a process from succeeding: the opposition of political-institutional actors such as the state and local governments in their use of decentralisation and the ways local democracy is developing and practised, at least in Europe and North America.
