Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One was the need to
develop and co-ordinate transport, land use and utility net-
works
within these emergent functional regions, especially to plan the location of fu-
ture growth within the region. A second comes from growing interest in
sustainabil-
ity issues
, especially the reduction of the ecological footprint of settlements within
these city-regions and especially the negative externalities they create in pollution
and waste generation. A third issue is a cost problem, recognizing that delivering
services for individual units can be expensive, whereas delivery on a city region
scale can lead to
economies of scale
. Fourth was the problem of creating more
em-
ployment
, given that globalization or increased mechanization reduced jobs in many
western centres, which might be easier to achieve given the larger and cheaper land
resources in the city region compared to high price central city land. A fifth point was
the recognition of a
size bonus
in image and marketing by using the population of
the city-region not the central city alone. For example, Vancouver and Stuttgart are
now marketed as centres of metropolitan areas of 2.3 and 2.67 million respectively,
rather than being viewed as central city municipalities of only around 600,000 peo-
ple. A sixth point is associated by the way that the conservative governments elected
in most western countries from the late 1970s viewed existing planning regulations
as restrictive to potential growth, so more
entrepreneurial governance was recom-
mended
in order to attract employment and create new infrastructure and amenities
to support this growth. Many adopted pro-business policies by reducing regulations,
modifying or replacing the older, more restrictive managerial approaches to what
amounted to controlling growth in the past (Harvey
2005
). This led to an increasing
desire to facilitate global linkages, in additional to traditional local and national con-
nections, by developing new infrastructures and amenities in the city-regions. Yet it
is quite incorrect to see these global linkages of large cities and their regions as al-
ways being new. Many large industrial cities in western countries developed on the
basis of their world connections. For example, Swansea and Cardiff in South Wales
cannot be seen just as centres of city-regions serving their local areas. The growth
of the former centre in the nineteenth century was based on its role as the node of
the most important copper and non-ferrous smelting and manufacturing region in
the world, which led one historian of the area to call it Copperopolis (Hughes
2000
).
Similarly, Cardiff had important global connections; by 1913 it was the largest port
in tonnage in the world because of the volume of steam coal being exported from
its docks, which led to its Coal Exchange setting the price for this energy source for
many decades.
All these problems meant that there has been growing public acceptance of the
need to plan on a regional scale, recognizing the functional interdependency of
these city-regions. But the path to regional governance has not been easy. The in-
ertia effect, the reluctance of higher levels of government to change existing local
government structures, is still considerable. Also local municipal interests are still
powerful among the smaller entities in the emergent city-regions, while their fear of
the potential dominance of the biggest cities in any regional grouping makes them
reluctant to give up powers. In addition, in many countries most higher levels of
government seemed reluctant to reduce local government powers by intervening to
grant exclusive new powers to these larger city-regional entities, either because they
