Speaker
Description
Ongoing urbanization is fundamentally reshaping cities and their surrounding regions. As cities are growing well beyond their administrative boundaries to form highly complex, functionally integrated city-regions with their surrounding municipalities, coordinating spatial development between core cities and neighboring suburban and rural municipalities becomes a key policy challenge. How do city authorities interact with public and private actors from surrounding municipalities when elaborating decisions on the future development of the urban territory? What is the role of higher level (provincial, regional) governments in facilitating inter-municipal cooperation in local planning?
This contribution draws on a comparative case study analysis conducted in Brescia (Italy) and Kassel (Germany) to seek an answer to these questions. Comparable in size and local territorial context, the two cities chose different institutional solutions for inter-municipal cooperation in local planning. Through document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, this research offers insights into the perceived benefits and challenges of inter-municipal coordination in local planning and traces the various types of actors (be they municipal planning authorities, economic actors, or higher-level government) who play a role in city-regional planning. This research is embedded in a multi-level governance framework that understands local planning decisions as a product of i) the vertical embeddedness of cities in national political and planning systems, ii) the horizontal embeddedness of cities in institutionally fragmented city-regions, and iii) the involvement of non-state actors (e.g. economic actors or civil society organizations) in local policymaking. The outcomes of the comparative case study analysis offer a better understanding of how municipal planning processes adapt to the challenges of urban growth and interdependency with their surrounding territories.
| Keywords | inter-municipal cooperation, city-region, urban-rural, multi-level governance |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
