ABSTRACT
Throughout western Europe, metropolitan governance is back on the agenda. Since the early 1990s, new fonns of city-suburban cooperation, regional coordination, region-wide spatial planning and metropolitan institutional reform have been promoted in major western European city-regions. In contrast to the forms of metropolitan governance that prevailed during the Fordist-Keynesian period, which emphasized administrative modernization, inter-territorial equalization and the efficient delivery of public services, the newest wave of metropolitan institutional refonn is focused upon economic priorities such as promoting territorial competitiveness and attracting external capital investment in the contextofsupra-regional trends such as globalization, European integration and intensified interspatial competition. In short, metropolitan governance is today being mobilized increasingly as a form oflocational policy (Standortpolitik) through which national and local political-economic elites are attempting to enhance place-specific socioeconomic assets within their territories. From London, Glasgow, Manchester, the Randstad, Brussels, Copenhagen-0resund-Malmö, Lille, Lyon and Paris to Berlin, the Ruhr district, Hannover, FrankfurtlRhine-Main, Stuttgart, Munieh, Vienna, Zürich, Geneva-Lausanne-Montreaux, Madrid, Barcelona, Bologna and Milan, national and local economic policies are being linked ever more directly to diverse forms of spatial planning, infrastructure investment and political-economic coordination on metropolitan or regional scales. In each of these city-regions, and in many others throughout western Europe, the introduction ofnew frameworks for city-suburban cooperation and new regionally configured administrative structures has been widely justified as abasie institutional precondition for promoting territorial development in a context ofrapid geo-economic restructuring.
