Political Organization and Conflict and Regional Governance Structures

While governance and the role that governance can play in affecting a region are important, I do not believe that governance can do anything but manage regional problems. I am not saying that good governance is impossible but that great governance is nearly impossible considering the political conflicts inherent in managing such a large endeavor. The piece on organizations as political entities intimately describes how collaboration and conflict are inseparable ingredients in all organizations. The article intimates that well functioning organizations have some cohering or coalescing affect on their employees that ensures that the pull of collaboration is, at least somewhat, stronger than the pull of conflict. For one, I would put forward that most employees identify with the firm for which they work ahead of other firms: “I work for the Sierra Club”. The problem that I see as inherent in the organizations that make up regional governance structures are that almost none of the decision-making actors identify with the regional organization for which they are working: “I am a member of the city council of Berkeley,” rather than, “I am an ABAG board member”. This orientation of identity away-from regional governance structures, I believe, is one of the reasons that there are so few regions that have great governance.

This is why I don’t think that regional governance will ever be able to solve regional problems as effectively as some a combination of governance and government. The piece about the history of regional government initiatives in the Bay Area left me wanting for more information. Why have all the regional government (large or small) failed to pass the State Legislature? Which initiatives came the closest to passage and why did they still fail? While California will never have land use controls similar to Oregon there are other States like Washington, Maine, and Maryland where State Legislatures have passed laws that enable and enforce institutional arrangements that make ‘thinking regionally’ a basic tenet of certain governmental policies. Before we can design effective regional governance structures for California I think we need to compare best practices from other states with the failed regional initiatives from California’s past in order to bridge the political gap. Until the State creates regional institutions that more effectively balance collaboration and conflict in regional governance structures California will be doomed to solving regional problems rather than creating functioning, efficient, and livable regional places.

Metropolitan Government vs. Metropolitan Governance

Perhaps it is the Midwestern American in me but I can see both the supposed benefits of metropolitan government and metropolitan governance alike. I agree with Oakerson wholeheartedly that above a certain number in population the representational ability of elected officials is seriously diminished – he quotes Dahl that this number is somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000. On the other hand I think his argument that small homogeneous cities are less adversarial assumes is fatally simplistic if not overtly wrong (besides maybe being racist). Different cities in regions have different social, political, and economic needs, something as simple as their inherent geography relative to the region as a whole would make them more heterogeneous than Oakerson would like to admit. In the end I think Oakerson’s argument for something like the status quo leaves much to be desired while advocates for metropolitan government miss some of the inefficiencies and deficiencies that would make a metropolitan government less advantageous than they would like to imagine.

What most intrigued me is Studenski’s idea of the ‘federated city’. While the bi-lateral agreements that cities share constitute some form of federation these agreements are not nearly comprehensive enough to constitute a true federation. Why is this? If 27 nations in the European Union can come together to form a functional federation what is stopping a group of cities of forming a union? Some of the roadblocks preventing city federations are obvious: revenue sharing will always be contentious, perceived loss of power to the federation will always have to be minimized, and voting schemes that balance the representation issue that Zimmerman raises: one citizen – one vote vs. one municipality – one vote. Furthermore the continued existence of local municipalities in a federated system, in contrast to a true metropolitan government, maintains their ability to represent their citizens. Obviously the state would have to enable legislation allowing cities to federate in some way – although I’m not familiar enough with the legal details of existing governmental structures that states have enabled to say whether new legislation would have to be passed.

Planning for the Fourth Migration

I took issue with more than a few assertions made by Carl Sussman in Planning the Fourth Migration. Sussman's uncritical excitement for the RPAA's ideal of a planned regionalization of decentralized urban culture facilitated and implemented by a centralized and socialized Federal government strikes me as sad commentary on the depth of theory about regionalism in the United States. While the RPAA's quaint ideals of the planned socialist city may seem high-minded they completely ignore the complex nature of the economies of cities. I think the regional vision of the city-region put forth by Jane Jacobs in Cities and the Wealth of Nations is more pragmatic and reasonable regarding how cities actually function than anything the RPAA ever produced. Like the RPAA Jacobs asserts that central cities and the regions that surround them are intimately bound together. Where Jacobs departs from the RPAA is the nature of this relationship. Jacobs spends most of the book describing how, more often than not, cities negatively impact the social and economic fabric of the surrounding area within a region. In Jacobs' opinion it is much has to go right for a city to succesfully integrate the areas in a city-region into a comprehensive whole without negatively impacting the non-central areas. The RPAA's lack of understanding that the push and pull of this change is the mark of a vibrant economy, and thus a vibrant city, leaves their vision devoid of many scraps of theory or idealism to which we can hold.

Jacobs' does not address the ideal political structure that balances the push and pull between cities and city-regions. And while I believe her theory of city-regions is more germane than that put forth by the RPAA, I'm not sure that it is viable in a globalized age where so many of our resources, people, and capital come from tens of thousands of miles away.

The article I was most intrigued by was the Savitch and Vogels chapter. Existing regional structures, their strengths and weaknesses, and their successes and failures are the best place to begin a real exploration of whether regional governance is worth pursuing. If the European Union can get 27 populaces to sign up for cooperation and revenue sharing then it cannot be impossible to get five or ten cities and counties to create a functioning regional structure that benefits us all.

On another note, I also take issue with Sussman's assertion that metropolitanism has an homogenizing effect on culture. I would argue that, in fact, the only cultural differences that will survive the end of the 21st Century will be those born out of vibrant city-regions around the world. The regional cultural variation that the RPAA glorified when 'folk dancing' during their weekend jaunts are more cultural histories than lived culture. Furthermore, the syncretism of the dynamic city-region gives rise to living culture of the present while, in my opinion, the homogenization of the society occurs more often in the decentralized urban areas (suburbs) than in the city itself.