Multilevel Urban Governance and the 'European City'

1. Front Matter

   Pages 1-12

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      Pages 13-27

3. Multilevel Urban Governance: Origin, Core Issues, Current Debates

   1. Theories of Urban Politics and Policies in a Changing Context

      Pages 29-51

   2. From Urban Government to Multilevel Urban Governance

      Pages 53-70

   3. Integrated Multilevel Urban Governance Analysis: Comparing Neostructuralist and Neo-Weberian Approaches

      Pages 71-110

4. Metropolitan Governance Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki: An Indicator for Governance Transformations in Sweden and Finland

   1. Explaining the rationale of the research focus

      Pages 111-116

   2. The Nordic Countries: A Comprehensive Political and Societal Model

      Pages 117-149

   3. The Helsinki and Stockholm Regions in Context: Structural Characteristics, Recent Trends and New Challenges

      Pages 151-172

   4. Metropolitan Cooperation, Integration and Conflict: Comparing Modes of Governance in the Finnish and Swedish Capital Regions

      Pages 173-210

   5. Concluding Assessments

      Pages 211-231

5. Back Matter

   Pages 233-238

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“The question is no longer simply what autonomy actually is for local authorities within the state, but rather what capacity territories have to become collective actors of European governance. ” (Le Galès 2002: 235) This book is designed to be an empirical and theoretical contribution to debates on currently changing forms of urban policies and politics in Western Europe. To put it differently, the issue of multilevel urban governance analysis can be found at the heart of this work. Undoubtedly, political decision making in and for cities as well as the academic reflection upon it have been in flux throughout recent decades – and in most instances, these changes have been associated with all-encompassing mac- structural transformations that have left their imprint in virtually all Western Eu- pean countries. For example, discussing phenomena such as the crisis of ‘Fordism’ and ‘national Keynesianism’ or the rise of economic globalization, urban scholars have come to ask what these shifts might imply for the political role of cities. Some have claimed that cities are likely to strengthen their role as politically relevant - tors at the expense of national governments today, while others have diagnosed an overall decline of state regulation, ‘the political’, or even a general dissolution of ‘spaces of place’ in the information age (for overviews see Amin 1994; Blanke and Benzler 1991; Castells 2000).

• Neo-Weberianism
• Neostructuralism
• Nordic Cities
• Reform
• Region
• urban Europe
• urban politics

Dr. Nico Giersig promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Hartmut Häußermann am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Er ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl „Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt“ an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

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