Governing Metropolitan Areas Growth and Change in a Networked Age [Paperback]

Interest and research on regionalism has soared in the last decade. Local governments in metropolitan areas and civic organizations are increasingly engaged in cooperative and collaborative public policy efforts to solve problems that stretch across urban centers and their surrounding suburbs. Yet there remains scant attention in textbooks to the issues that arise in trying to address metropolitan governance. Governing Metropolitan Areasdescribes and analyzes structure to understand the how and why of regionalism in our global age. The book covers governmental institutions and their evolution to governance, but with a continual focus on institutions. David Hamilton provides the necessary comprehensive, in-depth description and analysis of how metropolitan areas and governments within metropolitan areas developed, efforts to restructure and combine local governments, and governance within the polycentric urban region.

This second edition is a major revision to update the scholarship and current thinking on regional governance. While the text still provides background on the historical development and growth of urban areas and governments' efforts to accommodate the growth of metropolitan areas, this edition also focuses on current efforts to provide governance through cooperative and collaborative solutions. There is also now extended treatment of how regional governance outside the United States has evolved and how other countries are approaching regional governance.

1. Growth of Urban America. 2. Public Policy Issues and Regional Governance. 3. Suburbanization and Annexation. 4. Government Centralization Responses: Consolidation and Metropolitan Government. 5. The Impact of Federal and State Government Policies on Regionalism. 6. Providing Services in the Decentralized Metropolis. 7. Providing Services in Decentralized Metropolitan Areas through Intergovernmental Cooperation and Contracting. 8. The County and Regional Govl3‰