Julie Hamel

The region is back in town. Galloping urbanization has pushed beyond historical notions of metropolitanism. City-regions have experienced, in Edward Sojas terms, an epochal shift in the nature of the city and the urbanization process, marking the beginning of the end of the modern metropolis as we knew it.

The emergence of this real existing regionalism in urban areas around the world finds expression in new literatures and publication projects to which this book makes a contribution.Governing Cities through Regions broadens and deepens our understanding of metropolitan governance through an innovative comparative project that engages with Anglo-American, French, and German literatures on the subject of regional governance. It expands the comparative angle from issues of economic competiveness and social cohesion to topical and relevant fields such as housing and transportation, and it expands comparative work on municipal governance to the regional scale.

With contributions from established and emerging international scholars of urban and regional governance, the volume covers conceptual topics and case studies that contrast the experience of a range of Canadian metropolitan regions with a strong selection of European cases. It starts from assumptions of limited conversion among regions across the Atlantic but is keenly aware of the idiosyncratic and remarkable differences in urban regions path dependencies in which the larger processes of globalization and neoliberalization are situated and materialized.