New Regionalism

The Old Regionalism

The traditional approach to regionalism in the United States developed out of the political reform movement that began toward the end of the nineteenth century. One of the principal objectives of that movement was to develop alternatives to the control of city governments by political machines, which reformers characterized as corrupt and inefficient.

Reformers started by crafting a model city charter, then a model county charter, and by the late 1920s, they began focusing on the issue of metropolitan regional governance. Initially, reformers advocated city-county consolidations or agglomerations as the preferred solution for the development of metropolitan government. Consolidations involved merging the central city and its surrounding county into a single government. The first such consolidation was the city and county of Philadelphia in 1854. Agglomerations consist of a city taking parts of one or all or parts of more than one of its surrounding counties to create a city- county or a city containing counties within it. The [Page 547]most significant example of an agglomeration is Greater New York, which was forged out of five boroughs (counties) in 1898.

Through consolidation, agglomeration, and the unilateral annexation of suburban municipalities and unincorporated areas, reformers proposed to give central cities administrative control over their urban region. They believed that such unitary administration would assure orderly and efficient land and infrastructure development, greater accountability, and increased economic competitiveness. But by the 1920s, affluent suburban municipalities had gained enough political influence with their state legislatures to reduce or eliminate unilateral absorption by their central cities. Consequently, reformers shifted their strategy to emphasize the coordination of local governments and the development of voluntary comprehensive regional plans. At the same time, reformers opposed addressing regional challenges through the creation of special districts and single-purpose authorities, which they felt would aggravate metropolitan jurisdictional fragmentation.

The regional agenda of the reformers, specifically, the idea of coordination to overcome fragmentation, was adopted by the Progressive movement at the federal level beginning in the 1930s. But the aggressive implementation of this reform commenced only in the late 1950s when federal programs began attaching requirements for regional coordination to the granting of funds for a wide variety of programs. In addition to advocating coordination to achieve greater efficiency, coordination was employed to address the growing social and fiscal inequities between declining central cities and their increasingly affluent suburbs and to deal with problems of environmental pollution. Assuming coordinating responsibilities, Associations or Councils of Governments (COGs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) formed in virtually every region of the county. By the end of the 1970s, there were 37 such federal programs and additional state programs requiring some form of regional coordination.

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