Regionalism

In the twentieth century, America's urban communities have experienced unprecedented growth. Today's urban areas may cover multiple counties and even cross state borders. But while cities have been rapidly growing and changing, the traditional institutions of city government for the most part have remained untouched. Government reforms often meet significant resistance from politicians at both the state and local levels, and frequent attempts to consolidate cities and counties are rarely supported by citizens at the polls. As city governments struggle to adapt to new realities, an approach known as regionalism has emerged.

The term regionalism refers to the methods and the process of adjusting the institutions of metropolitan government to reflect the regional character of changes in city geography, demography, and economics. Regionalism tends to favor gradual, incremental approaches to urban problems over strategies that tackle them with hard-to-implement solutions and complicated government reforms. Regionalism is “both a policy agenda and a genre of public sector interventions designed to deal with that agenda,” in the words of urban scholars Hank V. Savitch and Ronald K. Vogel, writing in 2000 (161).

Its measures are intended to address growing disparities between central cities and suburbs, to provide communities with a competitive edge in a globalizing economy, and to improve efficiency in the management of large urban areas (see Table 1).

The difference between traditional municipal reforms and regionalism can best be seen in the distinction between government and governance. Metropolitan government is a fixed mechanism that requires legislative modifications in order to react to changing economic and political environment; it is a monopoly that both provides and delivers urban services. On the contrary, governance is a flexible network of government institutions, capable of adjusting to new challenges by entering into voluntary agreements and creating cooperative links between authorities. According to Savitch and Vogel (2000, p. 161), “Governance conveys the notion that existing institutions can be harnessed in new ways, that cooperation can be carried out on a fluid and voluntary basis among localities and that people can best regulate themselves through horizontally linked institutions.” Governance emphasizes self-regulation and local cooperation. It is flexible, and it allows communities to contract for delivery of services with other governments, nonprofit organizations, and private companies. Researchers often use the terms “regionalism” and “metropolitan governance” interchangeably.