Urban Governance in Southern Europe

Abel Albet, João Seixas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138266940
• eBook ISBN: 9781317003878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

The concept of governance has evolved into one of the most important but also controversial concepts in urban politics. While it encourages co-operation, participation and collective construction, at the same time, it has brought about new forms of public demission, oligarchic regimes and less local democracy. The dilemmas accompanying these changes are particularly relevant when observing the cities of Southern Europe, whose socio-cultural specificities very much structure local political and policy materialisations. Bringing together a team of leading scholars from across the social sciences, this volume examines the issues of urban governance in the Southern European context. Illustrated by case studies of several main cities and metropoles on the North Mediterranean coast, it introduces and critically analyses the latest theories and approaches to urban governance. It questions how the 'real' or socio-cultural notion of city seems to have been separated from that of the 'political' city and explores how more integrated socio-political forms might be developed. It looks at current structures, dynamics and cultures of governance in urban development and questions whether they are well adapted to new realities and challenges or whether there are significant imbalances causing limited or fragmented political-administrative visions. By considering both the long Mediterranean history along with the recent but enduring global economic and political developments, this book argues that Southern European cities will have to depend greatly upon its own socio-cultural networks, dynamics and cosmopolitan evolution, making the most of the region's characteristic urban strengths, as trading hubs, with rich hinterlands and large and varied population.

Chapter 1
The Improbable Metropolis: Decentralisation and Local Democracy Against Metropolitan Areas in the Western World¹

Christian Lefèvre²

Introduction

In the most recent literature on economic geography, urban planning, urban sociology or political science, metropolitan areas or city-regions are presented as the new ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 1985) of the present period of capitalism that is globalisation. In other words, metropolisation is viewed as a process very much connected with globalisation in which city-regions are put forward as loci where the most salient societal issues are taking place: economic growth and wealth, social inequalities, environmental degradation, multicultural integration and so on.

Saskia Sassen in her seminal work (1991) showed that some cities concentrated headquarters and executive offices of some crucial international activities, notably in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, and as such were becoming places of command in the global economy. She thus identified three ‘global cities’, London, New York and Tokyo. Although, or because, Sassen’s theory has very much been criticised, it paved the way for a long series of research in the fields of urban economy and geography. All have subsequently demonstrated the importance of the largest metropolitan areas for the economic development of the world for various reasons. Allen Scott (1998) has shown that city-regions were attractive for firms because they provided low transaction costs and this largely explained their concentration in metropolitan areas. Michael Storper (1997) has stressed the significance of non-market interdependencies to explain why city-regions were so appealing to business. Pierre Veltz (1996) has presented city-regions as places offering what he called assurance-flexibilité [insurance-flexibility] for enterprises but also for individuals, meaning by this expression that metropolitan areas are attractive because they provide firms and people with choices, alternatives and opportunities (in finding jobs, in finding the appropriate qualified staff, etc.) that no other territories could offer. All these works were largely corroborated by sophisticated comparative international data, studies and rankings produced by Peter Taylor’s team in his Globalization and World Cities Research Network (Taylor 2003).

In all these works, the political dimension of the metropolisation process as a new spatial fix of global capitalism is absent either because it is not taken into consideration or because it is viewed as automatic. For instance, Allen Scott (1998) assumes that once a city-region³ develops economic agency, political organisation will automatically follow in a rather functionalist way.

If city-regions are relevant and crucial spaces for the production of actions and policies necessary to deal with most important societal issues (Rodríguez-Pose 2008), this means they must be governed for these policies to be produced and implemented. To be governed, they must become political spaces.

What is a political space? We can define it as a space of involvement of political, economic and social players (Cox 1998) where a legitimate collective action is produced, an action necessary to address existing issues and orient the future. Following Boudreau and Keil (2004), a political space contains three inter-related elements: a) a political and institutional entity; b) public policies; c) modes of social regulation. Regarding city-regions, by political and institutional entity we mean any political and institutional structure or arrangement at the metropolitan scale possessing political legitimacy and responsibilities; by public policies we mean the production of policies dealing with societal challenges and problems and their implementation at the metropolitan scale by various actors (states, local governments or any other public bodies); by modes of regulation we mean the existence of structures, arrangements, mechanisms and instruments at the metropolitan level capable of producing the mobilisation of actors, creating mediation between actors, allowing processes conducting to the production of collective action at the metropolitan scale.

The question of city-regions as political spaces is not new. Already in the 1960s, the ‘Reformers’ (Wood 1958), considering metropolitan areas emerging as social and economic spaces notably because of the evolution of transport and communication technologies, forecast that such an economic and social ‘community’ should have a political representation. But they assumed this political representation could not be the ‘natural’ result of the evolution of societies and cities and as such should be imposed. The history of metropolitan reforms in the United States and in Europe, which is largely a history of failures, proved they were wrong (Lefèvre 1998). However, they were not wrong in their diagnosis (the making of a new political space is not automatic) but in the way they wanted to create it (i.e. a top-down imposition) because the making of a new political space is inherently a conflicting process.

This is indeed the focus point of both the work of Boudreau and Keil and of our own. Boudreau and Keil apprehend the production of new political spaces as a conflicting process. For them, ‘new political spaces are the result of power struggles for constituting coherence and common objectives’ because they challenge already existing political spaces (the state, the municipality, etc.). As such, the making of city-regions as new political spaces is the result of conflicts between actors and interests and by no means the logical result of the economic agency that city-regions have gained from the process of globalisation.

In this chapter, we will carry this idea of political spaces as a conflicting process in the case of metropolitan areas further by arguing, based on some empirical evidence from Southern European cities, that not only the Western experience has not attained success in this field but several present trends work in other directions. In the first section, we focus on the relationship between decentralisation and the building of metropolitan institutions showing that metropolitan areas have not been either the focus or the target of decentralisation processes and consequently have not gained much from this process. In the second section, we move onto the question of local democracy and show that this process has not favoured metropolitan areas either.

Decentralisation and Metropolitan Areas

The decentralisation processes that can be observed in most European countries and elsewhere in the world have not favoured metropolitan areas on the one hand because they have favoured other territorial scales (regions, provinces, municipalities) and on the other hand because the building of strong metropolitan authorities has been impeded by state and local actors.

Decentralisation against Metropolitan Areas

In most European countries, metropolitan areas have been the ‘forgotten territories’ of decentralisation. Generally speaking, decentralisation laws and decentralisation processes have transferred responsibilities and resources to already existing governmental tiers, that is, municipalities and provinces and in some countries to regions as well. Although the ‘metropolitan fact’ has emerged as a strong socio-economic and spatial phenomenon, it has not had any significant political and institutional responses as we shall see. In the UK, decentralisation – understood as a devolution process – has been given to ‘peripheral regions’ such as Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. In England, the most important attempt to decentralise at the regional level was killed off in 2004 when voters in the northeast strongly rejected a referendum to create a directly elected regional council. Since then, the process has stagnated apart from the relative exception of London. But the establishment of the Greater London Authority (GLA) in 1999 must not be seen as a sign of decentralisation towards the metropolitan level mostly because in the British institutional system, Greater London is indeed a region and the London situation was seen as a pioneering step towards a more general political regionalisation which has not been pursued so far.

Elsewhere the situation is approximately the same. In Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium or the Scandinavian countries, decentralisation, albeit timid in some cases, has favoured the regional level (Germany and Belgium) or counties (Scandinavia and the Netherlands).

The experience of Southern Europe (France, Spain and Italy) confirms this. In France, since the first decentralisation laws of the early 1980s, the state has transferred responsibilities and resources to all local governmental tiers: regions (created in 1982), départements and municipalities. As a whole the various decentralisation laws have been very careful to distribute more or less evenly the various transfers of powers among local governments. In this process, metropolitan areas have been ‘forgotten’ until very recently (2009) but so far no significant changes have yet been made. Generally speaking, the ‘metropolitan phenomenon’ has been institutionally – and in rare instances in public policy-making as well – addressed through intercommunalités, i.e. the voluntary grouping of municipalities belonging to a same urban area. The last intercommunal Act, passed in 1999, established new communautés urbaines for areas grouping more than 500,000 inhabitants (hardly a metropolis by international standards) but these structures are closely politically controlled by municipalities.

The innovation may come from the last proposal made in May 2009 by the Commission Balladur on Territorial Reforms which proposed establishing 11 métropoles in the 11 largest urban areas, with these métropoles being local government authorities in their own right with their own directly elected councils and significant responsibilities and fiscal and financial resources. It remains to be seen whether this proposal will be implemented or will be lost in political debate.

There is one major exception to this, the Paris-Ile-de-France region, which is by far the only French metropolis of international ranking. In this territory, decentralisation has always been less important than in the rest of the country and the state has retained major responsibilities and control over the development of the area. In most recent years, although several laws have transferred new powers (planning, public transport) to the regional level, the trend seems towards a ‘return of the state’ with reforms pushing towards a re-centralisation, one good example of this being the establishment of a ‘ministry for the capital region’ in 2008.

In Spain, the decentralisation process has strongly benefited regions, the ‘autonomous communities’, to the extent that Spain is today a quasi-federal country. However, the downwards pursuit of decentralisation has not benefited the metropolitan areas, on the contrary. To start with, one of the first actions taken by the Spanish regions was to abolish the existing metropolitan authorities, established during the Franco period. Thus, the Basque region abolished the Corporación Metropolitana de Bilbao in 1980, the Valencia region got rid of the Corporación de la Gran Valencia in 1986 and one year later the Generalitat de Catalunya eliminated the Metropolitan Authority of Barcelona. None of those metropolitan structures were replaced by democratically elected institutions of the same dimension. Second, the next step in Spanish decentralisation that is pursuing decentralisation processes below the regional level, the so-called pacto local has not taken metropolitan areas into consideration. Although with great difficulties and conflicts, this process has benefited municipalities and not the urban area as a whole. Finally, the most recent laws and national reflections dealing with cities (the 2003 Act for large cities and the 2005 local government white paper) hardly consider the metropolitan scale, except for the white paper suggestion of establishing ‘metropolitan agreements’ on a voluntary basis. In fact, the 2003 Act was more interested in strengthening the powers of central cities than addressing the metropolitan issue.

In Italy, decentralisation has been following a very long and winding path but has benefited all traditional local government tiers, from the regions, established in the 1970s, to the provinces and the municipalities. The process has been and still is rather confusing but, once again, metropolitan areas have not been favoured. On the one hand, it is true that the Italian constitution introduced ‘metropolitan cities’, i.e. metropolitan authorities, as part of the Italian Republic, thus giving metropolitan areas a constitutional legitimacy. But, on the other hand, these ‘metropolitan cities’ do not exist. Indeed, their establishment has been on and off the political agenda for about two decades now (since the 1990 142 Act) but none has been formed as we shall see in the next section. In the late 1990s, Italy was heading towards regional level federalism and part of the political elite seriously envisaged the formation of a national senate body composed of only regions and metropolitan cities. This would have given the metropolitan areas strong political recognition but did not happen for several reasons, among them the political turmoil of this period and the opposition of traditional local governments like the municipalities and in some cases provinces. As a result, those institutions which benefited from decentralisation laws (such as the Bassanini laws of the late 1990s) were those already existing, regions, provinces, municipalities and not the metropolitan areas.

The Failure of Building Metropolitan Authorities

In Europe – although the situation is similar elsewhere in the world – attempts to build metropolitan authorities, that is, local government units covering more or less the urban area and benefiting from political legitimacy with significant and adequate responsibilities and resources (Sharpe 1995), have been many. By and large, they have not met any real success (Lefèvre 1998, 2008, 2009) and in most ‘successful’ cases, these authorities have been weak. At least three major reasons explain this. First, states have been unwilling to decentralise at that level because they have been and remain afraid about establishing strong political counter-powers to their authority. This is all the more the case when dealing with metropolitan areas which are at the same time the capitals of their respective countries (Lisbon, London, Paris). Second, generally speaking, local governments belonging to the metropolis have opposed the establishment of such authorities also out of fear of losing powers and having actions and policies imposed by those metropolitan bodies. Third, when these authorities have been established, they have encountered the rivalry of central cities which have been able to significantly reduce their juridical powers. We illustrate this in the following section by focusing on Southern European countries (France, Italy, Portugal and Spain).

France may be described as the ‘good pupil’ of metropolitan government because – with the important exception of the Ile-de-France area – all major big cities possess their own metropolitan authorities: the communautés urbaines for the largest and the communautés d’agglomération for those with between 50,000 and 500,000 inhabitants. In this chapter, we focus on the largest urban areas.

The eight largest cities (Lille, Lyon, Marseilles, Nice, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse) are all covered by a communauté urbaine. Such a body is a grouping of municipalities (a grouping imposed by the state in Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Strasbourg at the end of the 1960s, on a voluntary basis for the others) which by law has responsibilities for most policy sectors of metropolitan interest (public transport, economic development, planning, waste management, etc.) and financial and fiscal resources of its own to carry out these responsibilities. In theory, communautés urbaines can be considered strong metropolitan authorities. When looked at closely, the situation is different.

First in terms of their geographical scale, most communautés urbaines do not cover their real functional areas (measured by daily trip patterns for instance), the reason being that most of them were established at the end of the 1960s and have not expanded their territorial range since, although urbanisation was already taking place in that period. Second, in political terms, municipalities belonging to the same metropolitan area, whatever their political partisanship, have agreed to limit the powers of those authorities and have been able to do so because they control the boards of the communautés, very often dominated by the central city. The rule has been that the communautés should not impose any decision or policies on a single municipality. As a result, until very recently, the communautés have been politically very weak and have not been able to produce and implement metropolitan policies in most cases. This situation has been constantly denounced by several national reports and reviews (Dallier 2006), accusing municipalities of getting together more to benefit from central government financial help⁴ than to work collectively. One of the most illustrative examples of such a failure is the Marseilles metropolitan area situation, where, although this area is functionally completely integrated, it is ‘administered’ by no less than four communautés, each controlled by a central city (the most important being Marseilles itself) and each pursuing its own strategy and its own policies.

In Spain, as we have seen, metropolitan corporations were abolished in the 1980s and have not been replaced by metropolitan authorities since. True, the Corporación de la Gran Valencia was replaced in 1986 by the Consell Metropolità de l’Horta, a much less powerful body, but this council was also abolished in 1999. In Barcelona, the Corporació Metropolitana de Barcelona was replaced in 1988 by a Mancomunidad, i.e. a joint authority grouping 31 municipalities essentially in the domains of urban planning and land protection. This body is very weak and is chaired by the city of Barcelona like other smaller structures such as the Metropolitan Transport Entity. By and large, the metropolitan area of Barcelona has no metropolitan authority (however see the next section).

The same can be said of all the largest Spanish urban areas with the exception of Madrid. Indeed, Madrid may be the only big world city with a metropolitan government in its own right. However, this metropolitan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Improbable Metropolis: Decentralisation and Local Democracy Against Metropolitan Areas in the Western World
• 2 The Institutional Dimension to Urban Governance and Territorial Management in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area
• 3 Competitiveness and Cohesion: Urban Government and Governance’s Strains of Italian Cities
• 4 Urban Governance and the ‘Profiles’ of Southern Italy Cities
• 5 The Challenges of Urban Renewal: 10 Lessons from the Catalan Experience
• 6 Cities and Urban and Metropolitan Regions in Spain: A New Agenda in a Global Context
• 7 The Governance of French Towns: From the Centre–Periphery Scheme to Urban Regimes
• 8 Integrated Urban Interventions in Greece: Local Relational Realities Unsettled
• 9 A City Hall for the Competitive City: Urban Management and Urban Governance in Slovenia
• 10 Urban Governance in Istanbul
• 11 Urban Governance in the South of Europe: Cultural Identities and Global Dilemmas
• Index