ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years a lot has been written about the rising political and economic relevance in of city-regions and often authors refer to neoliberalism as an explanatory frame. There is no doubt that, due to fragmented and particularistic local government structures, most city-regions are in need of integrated and more coherent governance. Whether this has happened is open for debate. The chapter gives an overview of the academic debate on city-regions and metropolitan governance in geography, planning studies and political science and defines the categories for the comparison of city-regions in France, Italy and Germany. In both Germany and France, inter-municipal associations are a consistent and indispensable form of provision of services of general interest and spatial planning. In France and Italy, consolidated solutions for city-regional governance are implemented since 2014–2015. The neo-liberal plot thus seems to be too simple as an explanatory scheme for the recent developments. A more balanced comparative framework allows for the evaluation of change in the dimensions of institutions and governance, functions (social-reproduction and competitiveness or production), ideas (such as austerity, simplification, legitimacy) and space (referring to the debate on amalgamations and territorial reforms in political science as well as soft spaces in planning and geography).
