Governing Cities Through Regions : Canadian and European Perspectives

The region is back in town. Galloping urbanization has pushed beyond historical notions of metropolitanism. City-regions have experienced, in Edward Soja’s terms, “an epochal shift in the nature of the city and the urbanization process, marking the beginning of the end of the modern metropolis as we knew it.”

The emergence of this “real existing regionalism” in urban areas around the world finds expression in new literatures and publication projects to which this book makes a contribution.Governing Cities through Regions broadens and deepens our understanding of metropolitan governance through an innovative comparative project that engages with Anglo-American, French, and German literatures on the subject of regional governance. It expands the comparative angle from issues of economic competiveness and social cohesion to topical and relevant fields such as housing and transportation, and it expands comparative work on municipal governance to the regional scale.

With contributions from established and emerging international scholars of urban and regional governance, the volume covers conceptual topics and case studies that contrast the experience of a range of Canadian metropolitan regions with a strong selection of European cases. It starts from assumptions of limited conversion among regions across the Atlantic but is keenly aware of the idiosyncratic and remarkable differences in urban regions’ path dependencies in which the larger processes of globalization and neoliberalization are situated and materialized.

Roger Keil is York Research Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. A former director of York’s City Institute, he researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, and regional governance. He is the editor of Suburban Constellations (2013) and co-editor (with Pierre Hamel) of Suburban Governance: A Global View (2015).|Pierre Hamel is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal. He is affiliated with CÉRIUM at the same university. His research interests focus on three themes: 1) urban policies; 2) collective action; 3) institutional regulation of social and economic inequalities. He has published extensively on social movements, urban politics, governance and local democracy. He is the editor of the journal Sociologie et sociétés.|Julie-Anne Boudreau has her doctorate of Urban Planning from UCLA. Professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, she held the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005-2015 and was editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) from 2010 to 2015. Her most recent book is Global Urban Politics (2016).|Stefan Kipfer teaches urbanization, politics and planning in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He has published widely on social and political theory, the city and urbanization, and comparative urban politics.