ABSTRACT
The vast sprawl of contiguous and overlapping sites for human activity that makes up a metropolitan complex is fragmented and inchoate in its policy. The metropolitan complex has housekeeping tasks as old as the history of cities. Failure to accomplish these tasks at the level expected by the corporate citizens is a major source of most "metropolitan problems." The organization of the local polity in metropolitan communities has moved in a direction opposite that of other important segments of the society. A major result of the lag and lack in local political organization has been discrepancy between the goods and services produced by government and those produced by exclusive membership organizations, between the public and the private sectors of the American economy. Technological change and other aspects of increasing scale have altered the organizational structure of the society, radically transforming the shape of the urban complex.
