multilevel governance and metropolitan regionalism in the usa_urban studies

8/20/2019 Multilevel Governance and Metropolitan Regionalism in the USA_URBAN STUDIES

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Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 5–6, 851–876, 2000

Multilevel Governance and Metropolitan

Regionalism in the USA

Clyde Mitchell-Weaver, David Miller and Ronald Deal Jr

[Paper received in nal form, January 2000]

1. Introduction

Metropolitan regionalism may once again beon the American political agenda, after ahiatus of a quarter of a century. Since themid 1990s, a burgeoning ow of popular andacademic books and articles, as well as re-ports from leading liberal US think-tanks,1

have focused public attention on the prob-lems of big cities and their surrounding re-

gions (Rusk, 1993, 1999; Pierce, 1993;Downs, 1994; Wallis, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c;Cisneros, 1995; Walker, 1995; Foster, 1997;Oreld, 1997; Barnes and Ledebur, 1998;Lindstrom, 1998). Notably, at the turn of thenew millennium, the Brookings Institution inWashington, DC—founded during FranklinRoosevelt’s ‘New Deal’—the Ford Foun-dation and the Democratic Clinton adminis-tration have sounded a clarion call to alertcivic leaders to the growing ‘crisis of themetropolis’ (Brookings Institution, 1998;Ford Foundation, 1999; US HUD, 1999).

The immediate causes of such high-levelconcern are threefold. First, socioeconomicand scal disparities between metropolitancentres and their outlying settlement clustershave reached a critical level in the US, andcurrent domestic demographic trends portend

an ever-worsening gulf in terms of economicresources. Secondly, sharp competitionwithin the global economy increasingly

threatens the economic base of US core citiesand their inner-ring suburbs. New productiveinvestments and industrial growth are pre-dominantly in the outer suburbs and edge-cities. And thirdly, urban sprawl—uncontrolled land development and ‘leap-frogging’—is visibly threatening the sustain-ability of the physical environment of large

urban communities (Weitz, 1999; Berke andConroy, 2000). Twenty-ve years of ‘benignneglect’, in terms of both urban and socialpolicy, have exacted a very real historicalcost on metropolitan America. The plight of the cities could be a prime concern in the USgeneral elections in November 2000.

In major urban areas across the US, anemerging ‘Regional Coalition’ is formingaround city-centred and environmental inter-est-groups (Rothblatt and Sancton, 1998;Phares, 1999). As we discuss in this paper,the Coalition argues that metropolitangovernmental fragmentation is the primarycause of US urban problems, and that someform of regional governance is the necessaryrst step towards a solution. Furthermore, thehyper-complex nature of US federalism re-quires multilevel intervention, using state

and federal powers to reinforce local movesin the direction of regional co-operation andconsolidation. Intergovernmental strategies

Clyde Mitchell-Weaver and David Miller are in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh,3N28 Forbes Quadrangle, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Fax: 001 412 648 2605. E-mail: mithweav [email protected] (Clyde Mitchell-Weaver);redsox [email protected] (David Miller). Ronald Deal Jr is with the law rm of Kirksey and McNamee, PLC, Brentwood, TN, USA. E-mail:

[email protected].

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CLYDE MITCHELL-WEAVER ET AL.852

are essential to promote metropolitan rev-enue-sharing, ‘smart growth’, the ‘new ur-banism’ and the targeting of skills training,housing and transport opportunities to matchthe changing intraurban location of employ-ment expansion and job needs (Katz, 1994;

Oreld, 1998; Brennan and Hill, 1999; Im-mergluck, 1999; Katz and Allen, 1999;American Planning Association, 2000).

In the sections which follow, we presentan overview of the Regional Coalition’sanalysis of US metropolitan problems andtheir agenda for public action. It is important,in order to set the context, to begin with anhistorical sketch of the role played by metro-

politan regionalism in the evolution of USurban policy.

2. A Note on the History of US Metropoli-

tan Regionalism

Metropolitan regionalism was the rst ap-proach to urban problems in the US, begin-ning in the early 19th century. Even beforethe growth of second industrial revolutioncities, consolidation of city and county gov-ernments was undertaken in commercial cen-tres such as New Orleans (1805), Boston(1821), Nantucket, MA (1821), Baltimore(1851), Philadelphia (1854), San Francisco(1856) and St Louis (1876). By the turn of the 20th century, the modern City of NewYork had been created by the merger of NewYork, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond

counties in 1898, and Denver (1904) andHonolulu (1907) had been added to the list.Other 19th-century cities became the soleunit of government and the general metro-politan service provider through annexation(for example, Boston, Chicago, Detroit andPittsburgh) (Stephens and Wikstrom, 2000,pp. 29–34; Herson and Bolland, 1998,p. 250; Ross and Levine, 1996, p. 324).2

Private civic organisations—what todaywould be called public–private partner-ships—like the Chicago Commercial Cluband the National Municipal League, sup-ported metropolitanisation through their re-gional leadership activities and publication of the National Municipal Review (later the

National Civic Review). The whole August1922 issue of the Review was devoted toChester Maxey’s early synthesis, “The politi-cal integration of metropolitan communi-ties”, which identied

the fundamental problem of the metrop-olis … [as] the decentralized or fraction-ated nature of local government (Stephensand Wikstrom, 2000, p. 35).

This was followed by another League pub-lication, Paul Studenski’s comprehensivebook, The Government of Metropolitan

Areas in the US (1930).With the onset of the Great Depression,

the US federal government rst became in-volved with metropolitan problems, inspiredby a ‘Chicago School’ of local governmentreform. Major statements of the ChicagoSchool’s agenda appeared over the next dec-ade: Roderick D. McKenzie (1933) The

Metropolitan Community; Charles E. Mer-riam, Spencer D. Parratt and Albert Lep-awsky (1933) The Government of the

Metropolitan Region of Chicago; WilliamAnderson (1934) The Units of Government inthe US ; the National Resources Committee(1937) Our Cities: Their Role in the National

Economy; and Victor Jones’ great classic Metropolitan Government (1942), written asa doctoral dissertation under the direction of Charles E. Merriam during the late 1930s.The most important contribution of Chicagowriters, in our view, was to link metropolitan

regional governance with the changing econ-omic and social structure of cities and theirrole in the national economy.3

At the turn of the 20th century, Chicagowas also the rst home of metropolitan plan-ning in the US, which grew up alongside thecity planning movement. Many of the earliesturban planners were forceful proponents of a‘regional perspective’, and they soon came to

include entire metropolitan areas within thescope of their plans. US metropolitan plan-ning was a reaction to the second industrialrevolution, and was composed of four separ-ate but overlapping elements.

Housing reform was the earliest strand.Investigative commissions (1856, 1884,

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METROPOLITAN REGIONALISM IN THE USA 853

1894) and tenement house laws (1867, 1879,1895, 1901) in New York led up to the FirstNational Conference on City Planning, heldin Washington, DC, in 1909, where housingreform was still a very controversial issue.

Park and boulevard planning and the ‘City

Beautiful’ movement—the next two ele-ments of metropolitan planning—developedtogether. Frederick Law Olmsted began theUS tradition of metropolitan park-buildingwith Central Park in New York City. Thepurpose of the Chicago World’s Fair (1893)was to show that America’s cities, too, couldaspire to be beautiful. With a layout designedby Olmsted, it started Daniel H. Burnham on

the road to preparing one of the earliestmetropolitan regional plans, the Plan of Chicago (Burnham and Bennett, 1909).

In 1904, Burnham was approached by theCommercial Club of Chicago and asked toprepare a plan for the city, expanding on hisoriginal scheme for lakefront redevelopmentwith a system of regional ring-roads, radialhighways and parkways. After some delay,work began on the plan in 1907, and twoyears later the grand opus emerged as alimited edition of magnicently illustratedvolumes, selling for $25 each. The plan wasgenuinely metropolitan in scope, and by1925 Chicago had spent some $300 millionto implement it.

The high-water mark of pre-World War IImetropolitan planning in the US was reachedwith publication of the Regional Plan for

New York and Its Environs (Committee onPlan of New York, 1929–31). The New York project was started in 1920 by Charles DyerNorton, the same insurance executive whohad fathered the Chicago venture. The staff’sdirector was Thomas Adams. Of the 10 vol-umes eventually published for the Com-mittee, the rst 2, The Graphic RegionalPlan (1929) and The Building of the City

(1931), contained the bulk of their recom-mendations. There is little doubt that thisseries of impressive volumes represented themost imposing metropolitan planning effortever attempted. Its real departures from theearlier Chicago Plan, however, lay mainly inits extensive use of social statistics and its

emphasis on newly legitimised land-use con-trols. (The US Supreme Court upheld theconstitutionality of zoning in the case of Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co.

(1926).) The principal objective of the planremained much the same: to promote the

continued expansion of the metropolis bydeveloping an ever-greater land area, lacedtogether by a network of highways.

Government reform was the fourth andlast theme of metropolitan planning. It hadtwo main goals: professionalising localgovernment and, as we have already seen,expanding the geographical boundaries of thecity in order to reect the new realities of

metropolitan growth. It is here, with the subject of metropolitan budgeting and the terri-torial expansion of municipal jurisdiction,that the work of Charles E. Merriam and hisChicago colleagues discussed above comesinto the picture. Their views on metropolitangovernment reform were summarised inMerriam’s preface to The Government of the

Metropolitan Region of Chicago, cited ear-lier:

[This book focuses on]: (1) considerationof the governmental possibilities of theRegion as a whole; (2) emphasis on theactual functioning of public agencieswithin the Area … (3) emphasis on theprinciple of interlocking directorates as ameans of obtaining consolidation; (4) at-tention to the importance of interstate

agreements as a basis of regional organis-ation; (5) discussion of the possibilities of independent statehood as a means of metropolitan development; [and] (6) de-velopment of a system of central scalcontrol over local governments without es-tablishment of a new unit of government(Merriam et al., 1933, preface).

These themes were to be rediscovered dur-

ing the 1950s–1970s surge of urban-industrial growth in the US, and again re-cently in the second half of the 1990s. Dur-ing this 50-year period, the emphasis of metropolitan planning changed from guidingnew growth to limiting the geographical ex-pansion of the metropolis.




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From the late 1940s through the early1970s, metropolitan regionalism remained afavoured remedy in the US for dealing withurban development and the increasingly evi-dent social disparities reected in the geogra-phy of the metropolis. The new Advisory

Commission on Intergovenmental Relations(ACIR), founded under federal law in 1959,focused once again on restructuring metro-politan government (Advisory Commissionon Intergovernmental Relations, 1961, 1962,1966). In his majestic tour d’horizon, LutherHalsey Gulick (1962), The MetropolitanProblem and American Ideas, reected thespirit of John Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’.

Gulick’s main points, almost paraphrasingMerriam 30 years earlier (quoted just above),were that:

(1) our focus on the core city of metropoli-tan areas must be replaced by a broaderview of socioeconomic and govern-mental development across the metro-polis;

(2) all levels of US government—especially

the states—must be brought to bear onemerging urban problems; and

(3) some form of metropolitan ‘federalism’was probably the appropriate intergov-ernmental approach.

The second half of the 1960s brought therenewed social activism of the civil rightsmovement and urban riots in major cities, aswell as ‘New Deal’-like expansion of federal

government programmes, as reected in Bol-lens and Schmadt (1965) The Metropolis,and H. Wentworth Eldredge’s two-volume1967 collection, Taming Megalopolis. Butwith the exception of metropolitan-level co-ordination agencies, such as Councils of Governments (COGs) (1965), MetropolitanPlanning Organisations (1966) and A-95Clearing Houses (1969), the metropolitan

agenda remained very similar to that outlinedby Jones in 1942 (see Committee on Econ-omic Development, 1970; Advisory Com-mission on Intergovernmental Relations,1973–74). City–county consolidations—as inthe 19th century—and limited regional co-ordination and special service districts were

typical of the period. By the time ACIR’sseries on Substate Regionalism appeared inthe early 1970s, the Nixon administrationhad taken steps to defund Kennedy/ Johnson-era federal initiatives and, withthem, further moves towards metropolitan

governance. The next 25 years, until the late1990s, with few exceptions, marked a retreatfrom intergovernmental approaches to localproblems. The ‘Reagan Revolution’ of the1980s was especially important for this.Executive Order 12372 ended the A-95 re-view process and, between 1980 and 1990,COGs lost federal funding and fell in numberfrom 670 to 435, or by 35 per cent (Ross and

Levine, 1996, p. 357). ACIR was closed in1996, and only in the second term of theClinton administration has the call for metro-politan change truly become focused.

3. The Major Problem: Governmental

Fragmentation

The doctrine of metropolitan regionalism has

insisted for 70 years that governmental frag-mentation is the major source of US urbanproblems. Ross and Levine (1996, pp. 310–313), arguing more from conviction than evi-dence, present the “strong program” againstfragmentation:

Local autonomy has produced a system of metropolitan fragmentation whereby themetropolitan area is divided into many

smaller jurisdictions with no governmentpossessing the power to look out for thegood of the entire region. No local jurisdic-tion is required to look at the effects of itsactions on other jurisdictions. Few suburbsare willing to alter land use, housing, andschool arrangements when such alterationsimpose new costs on existing residents.

The consequences of suburban autonomyand metropolitan fragmentation are nu-merous. They can briey be summarizedas follows:

1. Racial imbalance in the metropolis2. Income and resource imbalance in the

metropolis




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3. The protection of privilege4. Increased business power 5. The impact of suburbs on central cit-

ies … [the] exploitation hypothesis6. Problems of housing affordability and

homelessness

7. The lack of rational land use planningand commitment to environmental

values

8. Problems in service provision …citizens denied the advantages of econ-omies of scale (emphasis in original)

Governmental fragmentation is certainly pro-nounced in urban America, and settlement

patterns are becoming ever-more decen-tralised. Table 1 was constructed by Stephensand Wikstrom (2000, p. 8) from Census of Governments information (taken every veyears by the US Bureau of the Census, begin-ning in 1932). The idea of the governmentcensus itself was part of the regionalistmovement.

For the latest reporting year, 1997, therewere more than 87 000 units of local govern-ment in the US; all of them devolved legalcreations of the individual states (‘Judge Dil-

lon’s Rule’; see, City of Clinton, Missouri, v.Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad

(1868)). In terms of the most basic form of general-purpose government, counties haveremained steady at a count of just over 3000for the last seven decades.4 The count of

municipalities (urban places) has gone upfrom 16 400 to 19 400, or by 18 per cent; notconsidering, of course, the geographical orpopulation size of the places concerned.Non-urban towns and townships have fallenby about the same proportion. This decades-long pattern of rural decline and urbangrowth is reected more clearly by the aban-donment of rural school districts at an amaz-

ing overall rate of minus 94 per cent; as wellas the growth of urban-service-type specialdistricts by 240 per cent.

This last statistic is indicative of the mistbetween the increasing number (and implic-itly, the size) of municipalities and the stilllarger geographical area absorbed by urbangrowth. Looked at from another angle, localgovernment complexity fell by 57 per centwith rural–urban change from 1932 to 1972,and then increased once again by 12 per centwith continued urbanisation through 1997.

Table 1. Local governments in the US, 1932–97

Towns and School SpecialYear Counties Municipalities townships districts districts Totals

1932 3 062 16 442 19 978 128 548 14 572 182 602(1937) 3 053 16 332 19 183 113 571 9 867 162 0061942 3 050 16 220 18 919 108 579 8 299 115 067(1947) 3 049 16 360 18 051 95 521 9 302 142 2831952 3 050 16 778 17 202 56 346 12 319 105 6841957 3 050 17 215 17 198 50 454 14 424 102 3411962 3 043 17 997 17 144 34 678 18 823 91 6851967 3 049 18 048 17 105 21 742 21 264 81 2481972 3 044 18 517 16 991 15 781 23 885 78 2181977 3 042 18 862 19 822 15 174 25 962 79 8621982 3 041 19 076 16 734 14 851 28 078 81 7801987 3 042 19 200 16 691 14 721 29 532 83 1861992 3 043 19 279 16 656 14 422 31 555 84 955

1997 3 043 19 372 16 629 13 726 34 683 87 453

Notes: Various census reports for later years sometimes differ slightly from the date reported inearlier census reports as to the exact number of local governments for a given Census of Governmentsyear. The years shown in parentheses (1937 and 1947) are estimates.

Source: Stephens and Wikstrom (2000, p. 8). Data Sources: 1957 through 1992 Census of Governments, Vol.1 and 1997 fax from Governments

Division of the Census Bureau, May 1998; Graves, (1964, p. 699).




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This grand total understates settlement-pattern change though, because it overlooksthe broad nationwide distribution of declin-ing rural school districts and the compara-tively tightly knit pattern of metropolis-centred special district growth.

To calculate changing levels of US metro-politan fragmentation during the most recentreporting periods for which detailed statisticsare available, we developed our own metro-politan fragmentation index (MFI) for thecensus years 1972 and 1992 (see the Appen-dix for details). Over 300 MetropolitanStatistical Areas (MSAs) were broken downinto: population-size groupings; and, geo-

graphical regions (Northeast, Midwest,South and West). These categories werechosen because it is frequently assumedthat large, older MSAs in the Northeastand Midwest will be more governmentallyfragmented than smaller, newer metropolitanareas from the South and West (see, forexample, Stephens and Wikstrom, 2000,pp. 3–28).

In 1972, 311 metropolitan regions of theUS had an average MFI of 3.8 (from atheoretical range of 1 to innity) (see Table2). The distribution was skewed, in that therewere a few regions with very high scores, asdemonstrated by the median MFI of 3.4.

Heading the list was Philadelphia with anindex of 14.3. Rounding out the top sevenmost-fragmented regions were St Louis(12.3), Boston (11.2), Pittsburgh (10.7),Scranton–Wilkes Barre, PA (9.3), Min-neapolis–St Paul (8.5) and Chicago (8.3). Atthe other end of the scale was Midland, TX,with a score of 1.3. The top seven most-cen-tralised MSAs also included Owensboro, KY

(1.4), San Angelo, TX (1.4), Jackson, TN(1.5), Odessa, TX (1.5), Las Cruces, NM(1.5) and Tucson, AZ (1.6).

In terms of both size and geographicallocation, MFI scores tended to follow theexpected pattern. The scale was statisticallysensitive to population size. The upper partof Table 2 presents the 1972 MFIs by MSApopulation-size groupings. As population in-

Table 2. Metropolitan fragmentation index (MFI), 1972

25th 75thPopulation size Count Median Mean percentile percentile

By MSA sizeLarge (over 2 million) 24 5.65 6.64 4.63 8.23Medium-large (1–2 millions) 32 5.03 4.99 3.43 6.54Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 41 4.09 4.23 3.36 4.89Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 73 3.46 3.69 2.92 4.45Small (under 250 000) 141 2.79 3.04 2.17 3.62

Total 311 3.40 3.83 2.58 4.63

F 587.52sig. 000

By regionNortheast 46 5.38 5.85 4.22 7.29Midwest 87 4.14 4.25 2.89 4.89

South 122 2.83 2.98 2.13 3.55West 56 3.10 3.37 2.66 4.17

Total 311 3.40 3.83 2.58 4.63

F 543.61sig. 000

Source: Calculated by the authors from data in US Bureau of the Census (1972).




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Table 3. Metropolitan fragmentation index (MFI), 1972 (by both MSA size and region)

Population size Northeast Midwest South West Total

Large (over 2 million) 8.12 8.66 4.87 5.00 6.67Medium-large (1–2 millions) 6.68 6.30 3.36 5.19 5.38Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 6.40 4.48 3.69 3.01 4.40

Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 4.96 4.30 3.14 3.10 3.88Small (under 250 000) 4.59 3.53 2.38 2.74 3.31

Total 5.85 4.25 2.98 3.37 3.83


creased, so did the index. Density and higherpopulations were related to complexity, as

evidenced by the higher MFIs. A statisticallysignicant relationship was also found be-tween MFI scores and geographical regions,shown in the lower portion of Table 2. TheNortheast, with an average MFI of 5.9, wasindeed more fragmented than the other re-gions. Conversely, the South, as generallyassumed, was more centralised than the otherregions.

Combining population size and geographi-cal region by average MFIs for 1972 pro-duces the data presented in Table 3. Severalanomalies should be noted. First, althoughthe Northeast generally had higher scoresthan other regions, large metropolitan areasin the Midwest were more fragmented thantheir Northeast counterparts. Secondly, al-though the South was generally more cen-tralised than other regions, medium and

medium-small sized MSAs in the Westtended to be more centralised than theirsouthern counterparts. Finally, in all geo-graphical regions except the West, largeMSAs were substantially more fragmentedthan smaller metropolitan areas within thesame region.

Twenty years later, in 1992, the mean MFIfor the same 311 MSAs had increased from

3.8 to 4.2—an 8.6 per cent rise in the index(see Table 4). More importantly, 248 MSAsor 80 per cent had an increase in their MFIs,signifying greater fragmentation. An im-mediate explanatory hypothesis would be toassume that this additional fragmentationshould follow population change: as popu-

lation increases, so should the MFI. How-ever, the correlation between population

change and changes in the fragmentation in-dex is statistically insignicant. Two otherfactors contributed more to a higher scorethan did population. The rst was an increasein the absolute number of governments perMSA, and the second was the fact that subur-ban governments—which experienced thebulk of population growth in metropolitanareas—played a greater nancial role in thedelivery of public services than they had 20years earlier.

Philadelphia continued to have the highestscore on the metropolitan fragmentation in-dex at 15.4. St Louis and Boston retained thesecond and third positions, respectively.Chicago jumped from seventh to fourth witha 46.1 per cent increase in the index, from8.3 to 12.1. Pittsburgh, Scranton–WilkesBarre, PA, and Minneapolis–St Paul com-

pleted the top seven most-fragmented MSAsin 1992. The greatest absolute change in theMFI occurred in Chicago, 3.8 points. Hous-ton and St Louis were next with a 2.1 in-crease in their scores. They were followed byLake County, IL (1.9) and Joliet, IL (1.9).Chicago’s 46 per cent increase in the MFImade it the most ‘fragmenting’ MSA duringthe 1972–92 period. Five other metropolitan

areas also had an increase in their scoresgreater than 40 per cent: Houston (44 percent); Galveston, TX (44 per cent);Tuscaloosa, AL (42 per cent); Greeley, CO(42 per cent); and Midland, TX (41 per cent).This all suggests that MSAs in the Midwest,South and West might have been decentralis-




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Table 4. Metropolitan fragmentation index (MFI), 1992

25th 75thPopulation size Count Median Mean percentile percentile

By MSA sizeLarge (over 2 million) 24 6.73 7.59 4.87 9.30

Medium-large (1–2 millions) 32 5.41 5.39 3.56 7.49Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 41 4.34 4.55 3.37 5.14Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 73 3.68 3.97 3.03 4.52Small (under 250 000) 141 3.04 3.29 2.30 4.01

Total 311 3.67 4.16 2.75 4.97

F 587.52sig. 000

By regionNortheast 46 5.78 6.39 4.63 7.84

Midwest 87 4.32 4.62 2.95 5.13South 122 3.04 3.22 2.30 3.90West 56 3.36 3.69 2.76 4.13

Total 311 3.67 4.16 2.75 4.97

F 543.61sig. 000

Source: Calculated by the authors from data in US Bureau of the Census (1992)

ing more rapidly than the nation as a whole,or than the older, more fragmented northeast-ern region (Table 5).

Changes in the MFI between 1972 and1992 by population-size group and geograph-ical region are presented in Tables 6 and 7.Two notable trends emerged. First, overallpopulation size was not a statisticallysignicant factor. Indeed, all population

groups were fragmenting at approximatelythe same rate. A higher rate of increase forlarge metropolitan areas, 14.3 per cent, was,however, suggestive that areas which already

had a higher MFI were apt to fragment fasterthan MSAs that were not already as frag-mented as others. This observation was sup-ported by index changes in the 75thpercentile MSAs in medium-large and smallmetropolitan areas. These MSAs, relative totheir population groups, had comparablyhigher MFIs. They also experienced moreaccelerated growth in their scores: 14.5 per

cent and 10.8 per cent, respectively.Secondly, geographical region was alsonot signicantly associated with changes inthe fragmentation index. However, although

Table 5. Metropolitan fragmentation index (MFI), 1992 (by both MSA size and region)


Large (over 2 million) 8.93 10.36 5.61 5.71 7.65

Medium-large (1–2 millions) 7.04 6.96 3.56 5.85 5.85Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 7.22 4.77 3.92 3.11 4.76Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 5.40 4.67 3.31 3.35 4.19Small (under 250 000) 4.99 3.75 2.61 2.99 3.59

Total 6.39 4.62 3.22 3.69 4.16





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Table 6. Metropolitan fragmentation index, 1972–92 (percentage change)

Population size Count Mean 25th percentile 75th percentile

By MSA sizeLarge (over 2 million) 24 14.2 5.2 13.0Medium-large (1–2 millions) 32 8.2 3.8 14.5

Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 41 7.6 0.3 5.1Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 73 8.1 3.8 1.6Small (under 250 000) 141 8.6 6.0 10.8

Total 311 8.7 6.6 7.3

F 50.15sig. ns

By regionNortheast 46 9.0 9.7 7.5Midwest 87 7.4 2.1 4.9

South 122 8.9 8.0 9.9West 56 10.3 7.8 2 1.0

Total 311 8.7 6.6 7.3

F 51.299sig. ns

Source: Calculated by the authors from the data available in Tables 2–5.

Table 7. Metropolitan fragmentation index, 1972–92 (percentage change)


Large (over 2 million) 10.4 19.6 14.8 13.8 14.2Medium-large (1–2 millions) 5.5 10.4 7.4 11.6 8.2Medium (500 000 to 1 million) 11.1 7.0 6.8 6.8 7.6Medium-small (250 000 to 500 000) 9.1 8.3 6.9 9.8 8.1Small (under 250 000) 9.2 5.6 10.2 10.5 8.6

Total 9.0 7.4 8.9 10.3 8.7

F 5 0.549sig. ns

Source: Calculated by the authors from the data available in Tables 2–5.

location was ‘statistically insignicant’, thepossible implications of this fact were farfrom insignicant: metropolitan Americawas becoming more governmentally frag-mented regardless of geographical location.

As can be seen in the lower section of Table6, all regions experienced fragmentation.

To interpret further these changes, we as-signed MSAs into the six groupings for 1972shown in Table 8. Twelve per cent wereclassied as ‘centralised’ and 4.8 per cent as‘super decentralised’. Of the centralised

MSAs, 36 of 37 were located in the South orWest. Conversely, all 15 of the ‘super decen-tralised’ metropolitan areas were in theNortheast and Midwest.

Another grouping was made to capture the

trend in fragmentation between 1972 and1992. Five groups were created based on therate of change in MFIs, as seen in Table 9.5

As mentioned earlier, 80 per cent of metro-politan areas fell into a decentralising cate-gory. Conversely, only 63 MSAs (out of 311)were centralising. In the Northeast and West




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Table 8. Fragmentation group membership by region, 1972

Group 1972 Score Northeast Midwest South West Total

Highly centralised 1.00–2.00 1 26 10 37Moderately centralised 2.00–3.00 2 21 42 15 80Slightly decentralised 3.00–4.00 8 19 33 17 77

Moderately decentralised 4.00–5.00 10 26 17 5 58Highly decentralised 5.00–7.50 15 16 4 9 44Super decentralised 7.501 11 4 15

Total 46 87 122 56 311

Source: Calculated by the authors.

Table 9. Fragmentation trend group membership by region, 1972–92

1972–92 trend group Percentage change Northeast Midwest South West Total

Centralising 2 5 or more 5 16 7 28Slow centralising 0–5 3 18 13 1 35Slow decentralising 0–10 24 34 41 16 115Rapid decentralising 10–20 15 20 33 22 90Hyper decentralising 20 or more 4 10 19 10 43

Total 46 87 122 56 311


this represented only 6.5 per cent and 14.3per cent, respectively. Over 26 per cent of Midwest MSAs were centralising, as were 24per cent of Southern areas. At the high end of the scale, 42.8 per cent of all US metropoli-tan areas fell into the ‘rapid’ or ‘hyper decen-tralising’ categories.

The percentage of southern and western

MSAs that were included in this latter group-ing exceeded those in the Northeast (41.3 percent) and Midwest (34.5 per cent). In fact,57.1 per cent of western MSAs and 42.6 percent of southern areas increased their frag-mentation over the 20 years by greater than 10per cent. So while the Northeast and Midwestwere the most fragmented regions, the Southand West were the most fragmenting. The

‘highly centralised’ category, see Table 10,had 37 entries in 1972, but only 20 in 1992—a signicant decline. While at the other ex-treme, the number of ‘super decentralised’MSAs across the country increased from 15 to25, for a 67 per cent gain in only 20 years.The trend through the early 1990s in metro-

politan America was, thus, toward increas-ingly uniform governmental fragmentation.

The questions then are: what has happenedduring the rest of the decade; and, how arewe to evaluate these continuing changes, inrelation to the Regional Coalition’s policyagenda? We address these issues in the nexttwo sections.

4. ‘Hollowing-out’ of the US Metropolis

Tentative answers to such questions require abroad perspective. First, we will considerdemographic change—the root cause of governmental adaptation—during the secondhalf of the 1990s. A hundred years ago,metropolitan growth in the US was rst doc-

umented by Adna F. Weber (1899) in TheGrowth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century.6

Three-score years later, Jean Gottman (1959)wrote his classic study of Megalopolis: TheUrbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the US ,analyzing the ‘vertical arm’ of the‘Boswash’/Great Lakes urban system com-




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Table 10. Fragmentation group membership by region, 1992

Group 1992 Score Northeast Midwest South West Total

Highly centralised 1.00–2.00 17 3 20Moderately centralised 2.00–3.00 1 22 42 14 79Slightly centralised 3.00–4.00 5 13 34 24 76

Moderately decentralised 4.00–5.00 10 24 22 5 61Highly decentralised 5.00–7.50 16 19 6 9 50Super decentralised 7.501 14 9 1 1 25

Total 46 87 122 56 311


plex. John Friedmann (Friedmann and

Miller, 1965) expanded the metropolitanconcept to include “The Urban Fields”, likeSouthern California: a veritable island on theland. C. F. Whebell (1969) proposed his“Corridors: a theory of urban systems” toexplain Canadian metropolitan clusters alongthe St Lawrence River. And Brian Berry(1973a) completed this celebration of metro-politan growth with his massive, nationwide

empirical study of Growth Centers in the American Urban System. This was the end of an era, however. In the same year Berry(1973b) also published The Human Conse-quences of Urbanisation , and by 1980 wroteof “Urbanisation and counter urbanisation inthe United States”. From this intellectualquestioning of large-scale urban growth dur-ing the second half of the 1970s and through-

out the 1980s, the 1990s proved a time of actual metropolitan decline in America.It is impossible to present an accurate

analysis of changing US urban populationpatterns until after the decennial census of 2000. But the US Bureau of the Census hasreleased population estimates for the decade1987–97. These show that average 10-yearpopulation growth for MSAs was 9.9 percent, compared with a national average of 10.4 per cent (Mitchell-Weaver et al., 2000,p. 4)—i.e. the growth rate for MSAs was 0.5per cent lower than the national average.

Declines in the central cities have beencommon as Americans headed for suburbsin recent decades, but now the metropoli-

tan areas—city and suburb—are losing to

the countryside … (Pittsburgh Tribune- Review, 1997, p. A8).

In the same vein,

Growth areas are able to offer countryliving with proximity to the city … For therst time, more Americans are migratingfrom major metropolitan areas to rural ar-eas, often referred to as exurbs (Pittsburgh

Post-Gazette, 1997, p. S8).

Such marginal net rates change annually.While the 1995–96 report concluded that“More people left than moved into metroareas in 1995–96”, the 1997 County Popu-lation Estimates argued that the “fastest-growing counties [were] predominantlySouthern, Western and Metropolitan” (USBureau of the Census, 1997, p. 1; US Bureau

of the Census, 1998, p. 1).But this could be misleading, because the

averages are skewed by changes in thelargest US county, Los Angeles, with morethan 9 million residents—larger than aboutone-third of all US states and most membersof the United Nations. California reversed itspopulation decline during the mid 1990s: in1994, at the bottom of its long recession, the

state lost 430 000 residents, but in 1997 itspopulation grew by 410 000 (Baker, 1998).Thus, Southern California’s turnaround,alone, from post-Cold War aerospace lay-offs, signicantly changed the averages fornational metropolitan net growth in the latestreporting year, 1997. The reality is that, from




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at least 1990–97, many US metropolitancounties, even by generous geographicaldenitions of MSAs, lost population.

Los Angeles County accounts for approxi-mately 200 per cent of all net gain/loss esti-mates during the latest two reporting years.

National averages for metropolitan growthare even more equivocal, however, given thenational-regional nature of both rates of growth and absolute population growth byMSA. According to the 1997 County Popu-lation Estimates, the top 10 counties in termsof growth rate were all located in the USWest and South. The 10 biggest numericalgainers in population were, in order: Mari-

copa, AZ; Los Angeles; Clark, NV; Orange,CA; San Diego; Harris, TX; Riverside, CA;Broward, FL; Dallas and Collin, TX (USBureau of the Census, 1998, p. 2). LA, Or-ange, San Diego and Riverside, California,are all part of the Southern California conur-bation. Maricopa, AZ, and Clark, NV, areboth just ‘next door’. With the exception of Broward, FL, all other major growth countieslie in metropolitan central Texas. The pointis that these 10 counties experienced an in-crease of nearly one-half a million inhabi-tants, which means that real growth in themajority of other MSAs must have beennegative. This also suggests that in 6 or 7 of the 10 US federal government regions,metropolitan hollowing-out may be thenorm.

‘Hollowing-out’—the doughnut effect—

occurs when regional population shifts moveboth people and jobs away from cities to-wards surrounding outlying ‘suburbs’. Sub-urbs grew twice as fast in 1996–97 ascentral-city counties. More strikingly, in thissame reporting period, metropolitan countiesfollowed a similar pattern, with 1.3 per centgrowth rates, while outlying counties in thesame general population cluster increased by

2.6 per cent. This was most marked in metro-politan areas like Minneapolis–St Paul, At-lanta, Nashville, TN, Dallas–Fort Worth andSan Antonio, TX (Baker, 1998). In economicterms,

could it be that it’s not the suburbs that

depend on the hub, but that it is instead theexact opposite?” (Pittsburgh Tribune-

Review, 1998).

Concerning the so-called dependency hy-pothesis, quoted earlier from Ross and

Levine (1996) (see p. 312), if anything, itseems that the core city is probably“dependent on its edge cities and suburbs forits economic vitality” (Pittsburgh Tribune-

Review, 1998). A recent study of the Pitts-burgh MSA found similar results, with thehighest wage bill in the region paid by outly-ing low-skill manufacturing industries(Mitchell-Weaver et al., 2000, p. 16).

So what does this suggest about core–periphery relations in US metropolitan re-gions? It contradicts the classical hypothesissummarised by John Friedmann (1972) in his“A general theory of polarized develop-ment”. Starting with Gunnar Myrdal (1957),polarised development theory was alwayspainted with very broad brush strokes, and itsgeographical scale of reference—to say theleast—was ambiguous. In terms of USmetropolitan regions, its stark spatial dualismwould appear to be unfounded. Rather thanendless ‘cumulative causation’ or revolution-ary decentralisation, ‘core-area rot’ and‘dribbling’ peripheral growth would seem tobe the unspectacular outcome. Perhaps this isone possible manifestation of Friedmann’s‘urban elds’.

However this may be, there is something

signicantly more complex unfolding herethan can be portrayed by simple physicalanalogue models (such as ‘doughnuts,’ orwater droplets spreading across a table top)or virtual-reality representations on a com-puter. It also appears to be something quitedifferent from unending urban-like sprawltextured by Chancy Harris and Edward Ull-man’s (1954) multiple-nuclei pattern of ur-

ban growth (see Friedmann and Weaver,1979). As quoted above, Americans wouldappear to be actually moving out of themetropolis into rural areas and smaller townsand cities, some of them apparently free-standing; escaping the metropolis and reset-tling the countryside. This observation




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cannot be ‘proved’ or documented for two orthree more years, until the rst statisticalsummaries are produced comparing the 1990and 2000 US Censuses of Population. Eventhen, the Census Bureau’s propensity togather and analyse minimal information

about non-metropolitan areas may lead tosome rather unrepresentative conclusions.

It could be argued that politically and so-cially conservative groups and upper-incomeclasses within the population have frequentlytried to escape the hassle, expense and dan-ger of living in the city centre, throughout thelong history of rural–urban relations (seeMitchell-Weaver, 1995). This though would

miss the crucial structural economic-geographical changes taking place in the UShuman landscape. A simple scenario sum-marising US experience might run somethinglike the following.

For over a hundred years after the Ameri-can Civil War (1861–65), the US space econ-omy was integrated on a nearly continentalbasis by the processes and social forces of the second industrial revolution. ‘Manifestdestiny’, the God-given right to controlNorth America, was not limited by pre-industrial economic organisation and socialformations, like continentalist imperial Rus-sia or China. The US national economy,ordered into a hierarchical system of urbanplaces, marched across the continent. Largeurban corridors along the eastern seaboardand Great Lakes, and then in California and

Texas, made the US an urban-industrial be-hemoth, with a highly concentrated thoughdecentralised metropolitan core. During therst quarter-century following World War II,rapid metropolitan growth and continuing in-ternational and rural–urban migration fuelleda dramatic process of suburbanisation, basedon cheap energy, the automobile, suburbanroads and highways and middle-income

ight from the increasingly heterogeneous,polluted, worn-out and crime-ridden metro-politan core cities—rst to inner-ring sub-urbs, then to outer-ring communities andnally ‘exurbs’. The centre city becamepoverty-stricken as it lost higher-incomegroups, jobs, tax base: economic-geographi-

cal power in general. And by the late 1960sand early 1970s, it became the focus of concentrated government attention and redis-tribution payments, because of widespreadsocial unrest, civil disobedience and rioting.Urban policy and new planning measures

were a response to domestic political crisis(Friedmann, 1973).

By the end of the 1970s, the same middle-and higher-income people who were movingto the urban fringe voted by an overwhelm-ing majority for passage of Proposition 13 inCalifornia, which cut property taxes in thestate by 60 per cent. (Property taxes or ratesare the basis of urban public nance in the

US.) Proposition 13 proponents argued thatgovernment spending could be cut by asmuch as 25 per cent without any deterio-ration in public services (to middle-classhome-owners). A wide spectrum of votersresented the growth of governmental subsi-dies for the poor, with two-thirds of thosecitizens who voted yea believing that welfarepayments should be cut. This marked thebeginnings of the conservative Reagan Rev-olution of the 1980s, when all manner of federal support for urban-focused redistribu-tion programmes was drastically cut back (Herson and Bolland, 1998, pp. 352–355).During the 1990s, these same people appar-ently continued ‘voting with their feet’, mov-ing out of megalopolis back to thecountryside.

Since the 1890 US Census, rural areas had

been losing population. Farmers left the land.Central-place market centres dried up andbecame ghost towns, and the settlement sys-tem was dominated by higher-level serviceand manufacturing centres in the urban hier-archy. One hundred years later—starting per-haps only a decade ago—the politically andeconomically dominant white middle classbegan, selectively, moving back to small and

mid-sized cities, and rural areas on the ex-treme periphery of urban clusters along theUS Defense and Interstate Highways System.This population shift has been accompaniedby a similar locational change in jobs andservice activities. The outlying metropolitanperiphery and freestanding towns of 5000–




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15 000 (and larger) are now the sites of major greeneld (automated, low-skill) man-ufacturing plants, vast shopping malls—offering ‘everything’ that can be bought inthe big city—and tracts of pleasant suburb-like, upper-middle-class homes, surrounded

by large lawns and protected by geographicalisolation and locally controlled police forces.

If this is indeed a real demographic shift, atrend which continues and accelerates intothe 21st century, then metropolitan Americais likely to become even more fragmented.The large city will experience a changedecology and increasing economic, social andpolitical difculties (Waste, 1998, p. 6). So

what is to be done in public-policy terms? Inthe next section, we examine this secondquestion, how does the agenda of the newRegionalist Coalition propose to cope withthe ‘hyper-fragmentation’ of urban America?

5. The Regional Coalition Agenda

David B. Walker (1987) published a widelyused breakdown of types of intergovernmen-tal co-ordination in the venerable and ad-

mirably persistent National Civic Review.We present his classication scheme here inTable 11. Walker grouped modes of inter-governmental co-operation according to theperceived degree of political difculty in ini-tiating and managing them. The rst two

groups primarily refer to regional approachesto urban-type service delivery; limited re-gional governance, if you will. The easiestare informal, non-binding and contractual ar-rangements, as well as federal or state en-couraged or mandated co-ordination.Moderately difcult co-ordination generallyincludes special districts, annexation and re-formed ‘urban’ counties (i.e. counties with

modern governmental structures that provideurban-type services).

The “Very difcult” category (numbers15–17), refers to actual units of metropolitangovernment, and what Stephens and Wik-strom (2000, p. 102, T5.1) call “limited re-gional structures”. This group requires afuller explanation—because it is here that theRegional Coalition Agenda tends to lead, andit is here that it will be the most difcult toachieve its objectives.

Table 11. Types of intergovernmental co-ordination, governance andgovernment

Relatively easy1 Informal co-operation2 Interlocal service agreements3 Joint powers agreements4 Extraterritorial powers5 Regional councils of government (COGs)6 Federally encouraged single-purpose districts7 State planning and development districts (SPDDs)8 Contracting from private vendors

Moderately difcult 9 Local special districts

10 Transfer of functions11 Annexation12 Regional special districts and authorities

13 Metropolitan multipurpose districts14 Reformed urban county

Very difcult 15 One-tier consolidation: city-county and area-wide consolidation16 Two-tier restructuring: federal structures17 Three-tier reform: metropolitan-wide structures

Source: Adapted from Walker (1987, p. 16).




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“One-tier consolidation” means a totallynew level of regional government. Histori-cally, it has been established by city-countyand area-wide consolidation. There were sev-eral such mergers in the 19th century, asmentioned above in section 2; 7–10, depend-

ing on how one counts. These were typicallyestablished by state legislative authority.Since World War II, there have been in theneighbourhood of 20, including well-knownexamples like Baton Rouge, LS (1949),Nashville, TN (1962), Jacksonville, FL(1968) and Indianapolis, IN (1970). Mostwere in the South and required voter ap-proval. The last notable one, in 1970,

‘Unigov’, which involved a ‘northern indus-trial city’, Indianapolis, could only beachieved by legislative at . Ten smaller‘growth anticipation’ consolidations took place between 1971 and 1992 in the Southand West (specically, Alaska).

Consolidations are the epitome of metro-politan regionalism, bringing everything un-der one governmental unit. They areextremely hard to get past the voters, how-ever. In 1997, the Province of Ontario pro-posed an area-wide consolidation of sixexisting cities that since 1953 had made upToronto Metro, a two-tier structure. Seventy-ve per cent of voters, perhaps following thelead of the six municipal mayors, all of whom opposed amalgamation, voted againstthe measure. Nevertheless, provincialofcials enacted Bill 103 in May 1997, and

in January 1998 the six cities and Metro werereplaced by a unitary City of TorontoGovernment. It is hard to imagine such high-handed manipulation across the border in theUS at this point in time.

“Two-tier restructuring” involves metro-politan-level ‘federalism’. Area-wide func-tions are separated from ‘local’ ones. Thebest example is Miami–Dade County,

Florida (1957), a two-tier ‘urban county’.Localities control zoning, lot sizes, educationand other lifestyle choices (‘amenities’),while the county arranges for system-servingfunctions such as highways, transport, sew-ers, water treatment, solid waste disposal,etc. This allows the region to benet from

rather obvious scale economies, without lo-cal citizens losing control of their neighbor-hoods. There are distinct advantages andlimitations, in terms of metropolitanefciency and equity. But it is frequentlyadvocated as the best possible compromise

(Stephens and Wikstrom, 2000, pp. 167–174).

There are merely two examples of three-tier reform in the US today: Minneapolis–StPaul and Portland, OR. Both are celebratedby the new Regional Coalition (see Leo,1998, and Rusk, 1999). They represent ahalfway house between federated structuresand consolidated metropolitan government.

Each has unique characteristics. The older of the two, Minneapolis–St Paul, was estab-lished in 1967. It was done by the statelegislature of Minnesota, and has a 16-mem-ber regional council, appointed by the gover-nor, which exercises policy-review powersand provides regionwide services. The regionalso benets from revenue sharing, eveningout the scal resources of local governmentalunits.

Portland Metropolitan Service Districtcame into existence in 1979. It was based ona long history of regional co-operation, in-volving special service districts and the localCOG, the Columbia Regional Association of Governments. ‘Metro’ was part of a packageproposed by Oregon governor Tom McCallas a radical ‘no growth’ policy, to protectnorthern Cascadia from the fate of sprawl-

infested California. It was passed by the statelegislature and approved by the voters. Metrohas a seven-member elected council withpolicy-review and service-delivery functions.As part of its land-use planning mandate, itoperates a regional ‘greenbelt’, called themetropolitan urban growth boundary, UGB.The UGB was approved by the statewideOregon Land Conservation and Development

Commission, and specically operates tostop urban sprawl beyond the boundary andpromote more intensive, ‘new urbanism’-type development in the City of Portland andits inner-ring suburbs (see Weitz, 1999).

Portland and Minneapolis–St Paul, withoutcreating another level of general government,




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represent the ideals of the new RegionalCoalition Agenda. State–regional–local fed-eralism provides co-ordinated planning andinfrastructure development, regionwide pro-vision of municipal services, metropolitanrevenue sharing, and ‘smart growth’, limiting

sprawl and redeveloping the core. From thisperspective, all that remains to be added is areactivated national government, creating amore powerful nancial and legal carrot-and-stick system. This will probably depend, inthe rst instance, on the outcome of theNovember 2000 elections.

Publicists for the new Regional CoalitionAgenda present a now familiar argument,

almost ex nihilo. Bruce Katz, director of theBrookings Institution’s Center on Urban andMetropolitan Policy, gives an overview of the Coalition’s argument in the Brookings

Review (Katz and Bernstein, 1998):

—Americans have been content, for the mostpart, with a public sector that consists of afragmented maze of local governmentsand special districts and a private sectorthat builds mostly unrelated subdivisionsrather than integrated communities (p. 4).

—While hundreds of independent jurisdic-tions still partition most of our metropoli-tan areas, their economic activities areborderless (p. 4).

—In the past few years, metropolitanism hasreemerged as a notable force in dozens of major metropolitan regions—and it is even

beginning to alter market practices (em-phasis added; p. 4).

—They are appalled by explosive sprawl intoperipheral farmlands and open space, ris-ing suburban trafc congestion, andslower growth or absolute decline in manycentral cities and older suburbs (pp. 4–5).

—In many American metropolitan areas, es-pecially in the Northeast and Midwest,

central cities and older inner-ring suburbshave been left behind … Consequently,these once-proud places now harbor higherand higher concentrations of the poor, par-ticularly the minority poor, without thescal capacity to grapple with the conse-quences: joblessness, family fragmen-

tation, failing schools, and deterioratingcommercial districts (emphasis added;p. 5).

—In metropolitan areas across the country,these changes are creating an impetus forthe formation of new, powerful, some-

times-majority coalitions at local and re-gional levels. Elected ofcials from citiesand inner suburbs; downtown corporate,philanthropic, and civic interests; minorityand low-income community representa-tives; environmentalists; no-growth advo-cates in the new suburbs; farmers and ruralactivists; and religious leaders all are real-izing that they lose as sprawl accelerates

(p. 5).—Some states are joining the action …

Maryland enacted “smart growth” … NewJersey is considering … preserv[ing] hun-dreds of thousands of acres … Minnesotahas upgraded metropolitan govern-ment … Oregon continues its landmark land use law … Missouri, Ohio and Penn-sylvania … debate similar reforms (p. 6).7

—Even the federal government has gotteninto the act … [when] Congress preserved[the] metropolitan focus when it reautho-rised the [1991 Intermodal Surface][T]ransportation [A]ct … earlier this year(p. 6).

In the same issue of the Brookings Review,Anthony Downs (1998, p. 11) summarisesthe recommendations in his 1994 book:

—The rst [specic tactic to stop sprawl] issome type of urban growth boundary tolimit the outward draining of resourcesfrom the core areas.

—The second tactic is regional coordinationand rationalization of local land use plan-ning, done by some regional planningbody, such as the Metropolitan Council inthe Twin Cities.

—The third tactic is some form of regionaltax-base sharing, with all additions tocommercial and industrial tax bases sharedamong all communities in the region, not

just captured by the places where thosedevelopments are built.

—The fourth tactic is regionwide develop-




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ment of housing for low-income house-holds, either by regional vouchers or re-gional new subsidies or by requiringdevelopers to build a share of affordablehousing in each new project.

—A fth tactic is regional operation of pub-

lic transit systems and highways, includingnew facility construction.

—A nal tactic is vigorous regional enforce-ment of laws against racial discrimi-nation.8

—Effectively adopting any of these tactics,or certainly most of them together, wouldlikely require a strong regionwide imple-menting body.

Myron Oreld, head of the MetropolitanArea Research Corporation in Minneapolis,gives an in-depth statement of the RegionalCoalition’s analysis in Metropolitics: A Re-gional Agenda for Community and Stability

(1997), and provides a summary for action inhyper-fragmented Chicago by the US Con-gress (1998):9

In order to stabilize the central cities andolder suburbs and prevent metropolitanpolarisation, there are six substantive re-forms that must be accomplished on ametropolitan scale. The reforms are inter-related and reinforce each other substan-tively and politically. They are: (1)property tax-base equity; (2) reinvestment;and (3) fair housing. Together these re-forms provide resource equity, support the

physical rebuilding necessary to bringback the middle class and private econ-omy, and gradually relieve the concen-trated social need that existsdisproportionately in older suburban com-munities. The second three—(4) land plan-ning/growth management coordinated withinfrastructure; (5) welfare reform/publicworks; and (6) transport/transit reform—

reinforce the rst three and allow them tooperate efciently and sustainably. In ad-dition, these reforms provide for growththat is balanced socioeconomically, ac-cessible by transit, economical withgovernmental resources, and environmen-tally conscious (Oreld, 1998, p. 35).

In June 1999, the US Department of Housingand Urban Development published its thirdannual The State of the Cities report. It con-tains a succinct statement of the waning Clin-ton administration’s urban policy which, ineffect, is adoption of the Regional Co-

alition’s essential analysis and agenda (USHUD, 1999):

Three Major Findings

Finding #1. Thanks to a booming national

economy, most cities are experiencing a

strong scal and economic recovery. How-

ever, too many central cities are still left

behind and continue to face the challenges

of population decline, loss of middle-class

families, slow job growth, income in-

equality, and poverty.

Finding #2. Some older suburbs are expe-

riencing problems once associated with

urban areas—job loss, population decline,crime, and disinvestment. Simultaneously,many suburbs, including newer ones, are

straining under sprawling growth that cre-ates trafc congestion, overcrowded

schools, loss of open spaces, and othersprawl-related problems, and a lack of af-fordable housing.Finding #3. There is a strong consensus

on the need for joint city/suburb strategies

to address sprawl and the structural de-

cline of cities and older suburbs. We nowhave an historic opportunity for co-operation between cities and counties, ur-

ban as well as suburban, to address thechallenges facing our metropolitan areas(emphasis in the original, p. vi).

The 21st Century Agenda for Cities and Sub-urbs is composed of four parts:

(1) Opening Doors to New Markets. TheAdministration’s New Markets Initiativeis designed to ensure communities can

access the risk capital and technical ex-pertise they need to take advantage of their untapped markets for labor, retail,and land.

(2) Investing in America’s Working Men and Women. The Agenda provides tools toensure that central city residents have the




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skills needed for today’s job market andthe means to learn about and access jobsthat may be distant from their neighbor-hoods.

(3) Expanding Homeownership and Afford-able Rental Housing. Homeowners can

build strong neighborhoods both in citiesthat are beginning to do better and inthose that have been left behind. Provid-ing more assistance for rental housing iscritical: for alleviating the distress of worst case housing needs and homeless-ness; for overcoming the “housing/jobsmismatch” created by metropolitan de-velopment patterns; and for providing

families with the support and stabilitythey need to become part of the new labormarkets …

(4) Promoting Smarter Growth and LivableCommunities. To realize the billions insavings that could be generated bystrengthening existing developed com-munities, the Agenda includes a majorinitiative to promote livable communi-ties. The agenda also includes measuresto ensure public safety, strengthen ourschools, and preserve natural resourcesand historic amenities. By providingcommunities with strong tools to tacklethese challenges, we can help enhancetheir attractiveness for residents, busi-nesses, and investors (US HUD, 1999,pp. 46–47).

6. Conclusions

The Clinton administration has adopted thelanguage of the new Regional CoalitionAgenda. Its urban and socioeconomic pro-grammes are presented as the needed federalboost to get metropolitan regions co-operating in terms of governance: taxation,service delivery and growth management. It is

therefore appropriate to make a number of critical observations. First, the Administrationis now a ‘lame duck’, and will be even morehard pressed than before to move ambitiouslegislation through an opposition-controlledCongress. These issues should be part of the2000 electoral campaign and brought before

the voters, if they have merit. Otherwise, theywill remain an arcane subject for élite think-tanks and ‘Beltway’ experts.

Secondly, the Regional Coalition and theClinton administration both bring a heavyload of ideological baggage to the metropoli-

tan growth debate. Rather than focusing onshared governance in system-serving func-tions that has demonstrated some appeal inMSAs across the US (Wallis, 1993), theyboth emphasise government intervention inso-called lifestyle choices, immediately rais-ing the suspicions of the middle-class ma-

jority. Urban policy is being used as asubstitute for national social programmes. If

urban problems are important public issues, inand of themselves, as we believe, then everyeffort should be made to broaden the spec-trum of supporters for workable solutions. AsBruce Katz enumerated in the last section, the‘regional coalition’ can contain a wide cross-section of mainstream interests. Interests thatmust be mobilised if metropolitan regionalismis to be more successful now than in the pastin North America.

Kathryn Foster (2000, p. 91) observed, in areview of Donald Rothblatt’s MetropolitanGovernance Revisited (1998):

Top-down directives, though out of favor,are necessary for managing metropolitandevelopment and ensuring scal equaliza-tion. These are increasingly unlikely inCanada and a long shot in the US. Nonpub-

lic groups, a potential regional force, lack unity and coherence. Voluntary consensusbuilding is nice but not enough to shaperegional patterns.

State and federal government must act—if there is to be action—and in the US thismeans that the majority must approve of government’s intentions.

There are even more fundamental ques-

tions to be asked, though, than worries aboutpolitical timing and strategies. The new Re-gional Coalition has gone some way to gainpublic attention in the press (see, for example,Pierce, 1998, 2000; Firestone, 1999), butseems largely innocent of an ‘historical im-agination’, and even less concerned with an




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empirical understanding of changing regionalsettlement patterns and economic structures.Their objectives—centralised control of ur-ban development and redistribution of income(Niebanek, 2000, p. 92)—are unclouded byanalyses of American political history and the

US space economy.10In this paper, we have begun to ll in the

lacunae. Metropolitan regionalism and plan-ning have played a unique role in the USurban reform movement. From the early yearsof the republic, local government consolida-tion has been seen as a tool to overcomemunicipal fragmentation, and thus solve along list of urban problems. Before the days

of activist state and federal government,metropolitanism was one of the few ap-proaches open to reformers to cope with whatSinclair Lewis called ‘the shame of the cities’.There is a large collection of public docu-ments and a wealth of scholarly publicationsthat paint in vivid colours the hopes of thereformers and detail their successes and fail-ures. This is now the third generation of metropolitan reform in the US (see Wallis,1994a, 1994b), and we would be profoundlynegligent not to learn from earlier experience.This includes the limited acceptability of cen-tralised metropolitan government within USpolitical culture, with its celebration of thelocal community and individual liberties.

The distinction drawn so often between‘place prosperity’ and ‘people prosperity’ bythe great American planner, Harvey S.

Perloff, seems crucial here. Metropolitan gov-ernance may be the appropriate means of improving the quality of life and competitive-ness of particular places, but it probably is notthe way to ensure the well-being of people. If people suffer from class-based and race-baseddisadvantages in the US, it is class- andrace-based problems that should be addressedin the national political discourse and by

national policy (Powell, 1998)—not the formof metropolitan government, which KathrynFoster (2000, p. 90) dares to suggest

simply does not matter that much for re-gional development. Regardless of form,metropolitan systems … prove too power-

less, purposeless, or discouraged to shapeurban outcomes.

John Kain’s (1992) famous ‘spatial mismatchhypothesis’, and the related central-city–suburb ‘dependency hypothesis’, need to be

thoroughly analysed—and perhaps rejected.Decades ago, when these ideas were rstformulated, the ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’linkages within metropolitan economies werewell documented. Regional industrial com-plexes within the urban economy were re-sponsible for much of an MSA’s growth and

job creation. Suburbs and residential growthcorridors depended on the central city and

centralised industrial zones for their jobs andeconomic well-being. None of these relation-ships necessarily holds true today, with thehollowing-out of metropolitan cores, and in-vestment and job creation in the exurbs andrural-greeneld locations purposely targetedby international corporations. We need a newtheoretical basis for our understanding of urban and regional economics in the US.Generalisations, based primarily upon the cir-cumstances prevailing in the 1960s and 1970s(or the 1920s and 1930s), cannot provide anadequate basis for informed public policy.Pop economics supplied by journalists cannotll the gap.

Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson (1998)of the University of Southern California pointthis out from another perspective, carrying onRichardson’s well-known crusade against

‘optimum city size’ concepts at the turn of the1970s. They argue that we simply do notknow enough about the costs and benets of urban sprawl to make informed policy deci-sions. We need to do our homework beforewriting slogans and entering the national pol-itical fray. Janet Rothenberg Pack (1998) of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, writing in the Brookings

Review, argues that we also do not knowenough about city–suburb relations, and thather preliminary work suggests that city–sub-urban links change signicantly from onenational region to another, as well as withinthe regions themselves. We need much moredetailed analyses of various groups of MSAs




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before appropriate public policy decisionscan be made. Arthur Nelson and KathrynFoster’s (1999) careful study of “Metro-politan governance structure and incomegrowth” is a step forward in creating thisnew knowledge-base about urban political

boundaries and socioeconomic processes.Much more work is needed, however.

Our own analysis here of governmentalfragmentation in US MSAs points to anothernecessary research thrust. For the rst time,we are able to make precise statistical gener-alisations about metropolitan fragmentationwhich are sensitive to most of the importantaspects of the fragmentation debate. As new

data become available from the 1997 Censusof Governments, the model needs to be up-dated, and analyses of the relationship be-tween the metropolitan fragmentation index(MFI) and a number of critical socioeco-nomic variables can be undertaken. Analysesof the MFI and particular forms of metropoli-tan governance should also be high on the21st century research agenda. We can thenbegin to make specic public-policy recom-mendations about when different types of metropolitan governance might be a practicalalternative, and when it is unlikely to im-prove a particular urban setting.

Metropolitan regionalism has a contribu-tion to make in solving US urban problems atthe turn of the 21st century. This idea cannotbe approached in a doctrinaire mannerthough. Regional governance must stand or

fall on its merits. It should not be expected toprovide a conduit for other liberal or con-servative social policy agendas. In the lastweeks of 1999, the Brookings Institutionshelved a book project entitled The Interde-

pendence of Central Cities and Suburbs, aproject meant apparently to demonstrate theravages of suburban-dominated central-citydependency: “the cities left behind”.11 This

seems to us to be a healthy retreat fromideology. A reasonable debate of the USmetropolitan crisis, informed by an under-standing of changing rural–urban settlementpatterns and increasing nationwide metro-politan fragmentation, may draw in respon-sible elements from both the major political

parties. This could then be incorporated inelection-year political platforms, and the is-sue would be put before the electorate. Thisis the only way the Regional CoalitionAgenda can nd a place in the new USadministration that will take ofce in 2001.

Notes

1. The dual use of the term ‘liberal’ in USpolitical discourse must be kept in mind.Confusingly, ‘liberal’ can refer either to ‘freemarket economy’ solutions to public prob-lems or to ‘progressive, activist government’.In this paper, we mean to invoke the latterset of ideas and concepts.

2. This section is drawn primarily fromStephens and Wikstrom (2000), Kweit andKweit (1999), Herson and Bolland (1998),Ross and Levine (1996) and Friedmann andWeaver (1979). Stephens and Wikstrom’s200-page treatment of Metropolitan Govern-ment and Governance is invaluable. Chapter11, “Beyond the Central City: Cities, theirSuburbs and their States” (pp. 230–265), of the recent second edition of Herson and Bol-land’s well-known urban politics text adds anumber of important insights. And Ross andLevine’s three solid chapters on metropolitanregionalism offer a concise but systematicsource of reference. All three books adherevery closely to the political science and soci-ology literature, however, and must be com-plemented with material from thetraditionally more technical areas of urbanstudies: urban-regional economics, urban-economic geography and urban and regionalplanning.

3. The crucial linkage of metropolitan politicalinstitutions and political geography with theempirical analysis of other socioeconomicfactors is still uncommon over 50 years later.

4. Counties are the fundamental unit of localgovernment in the US, originally chargedwith the maintenance of roads and someform of local police protection. Municipali-ties are urban localities, which means theymust deliver a range of urban services—forexample, water, sewer, re, police, parks,solid waste disposal. Towns and townships

are typically basic sub-divisions of counties,but in some states they may also have urban-type service responsibilities. School districtsare special-purpose local governments whichonly provide elementary, secondary and per-haps community-college level education toresidents. Special districts are urban-typeservice units outside the realm of education,




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such as water, sewer or re protection.Names, legal descriptions and responsibili-ties vary for all of these different designa-tions from state to state and over time.

5. MSAs with negative change of 5 per centwere classied as ‘centralising’; those with anegative score of less than 5 per cent were

classied as ‘slow centralising’. Negativechange means a decrease in the MFI. Thelower the index, the more the MSA is gov-ernmentally centralised. Therefore, a de-crease in the index represents a centralisingtrend, and the resulting percentage would bea minus or negative number.

6. Originally a PhD thesis, submitted to Colum-bia University in 1898.

7. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passedSenate Bill 300 at the end of December

1999. This bill amends the state’s 1968 Plan-ning Code, and allows local government ju-risdictions to band together and designate‘urban growth boundaries’ (URBs). Unlikethe Oregon law, however, there is no staterequirement to create URBs around existingcities.

8. The dean of American land-use lawyers,Charles M. Haar (1996a, 1996b) of HarvardUniversity, argues that court-mandated pro-vision of affordable housing to overcomesegregation must be focused on the metro-politan level.

9. Special thanks to Heather Tureen and un-known members of the Brookings Institutionstaff for helping us track down stray publica-tions.

10. Paul Niebanek (2000, p. 92), the conscienceof US urban planning, categorised the sub-stance of the new Regional Coalition Agendain a review of David Rusk’s Inside Game/ Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Sav-ing Urban America (1999):

—require regional land use planning;—ensure that all suburbs have their fair

share of low- and moderate-incomehousing;

—implement regional revenue sharing.

11. Telephone conversation between the seniorauthor and an anonymous employee of theBrookings Center on Urban and Metropoli-tan Policy, 29 December 1999.

12. The use of the standard deviation as a mea-

sure of fragmentation has limited utility. Be-cause it is a measure of dispersal around themean, one government with all the expendi-tures and 100 governments each with 1 percent of the expenditures would both have astandard deviation of 0. Yet, the rst casewould represent a highly centralised systemand the second a highly decentralised system.

13. Unfortunately, after 1992, austerity measuresat the Census Bureau have drastically re-duced the information available to the public.Detailed data for the 1997 Census of Govern-ments are much abbreviated and still unavail-able at the time of writing.

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