Governing Metropolis : The Improbable Metropolitan Government
This article discusses the government of cities. After clarifying the concepts of government, governance, governing and governability as well as the metropolis in a first part, the author focuses on the so many attempts to create a metropolitan government in recent decades. He thus provides a tough but realistic assessment of failures and partial success of institutional reforms engaged in the most democratic countries, but also more recent initiatives presented under the concept of governance (strategic planning, “new regionalism” cooperation between actors, urban political regimes, etc..). In a second step, he explains the rather negative assessment because of the permanence of unresolved obstacles as the ambiguous role of the states, the reluctance and even the opposition from local communities and city centers and finally, the refusal of the populations through the instruments of local democracy. The last part focuses on the importance of political action and the two main projects that must be implemented to make metropolis of political territories : the construction of a metropolitan identity and that of a territorial leadership otherwise, the metropolitan government will remain unlikely.