The improbable metropolis: decentralization, local democracy and metropolitan areas in the Western world

Abstract

Metropolitan areas have become the new spatial fix of globalised capitalism. However, their economic strength is not matched by their political strength because metropolitan areas remain politically weak. This article reflects upon the process of building metropolitan areas as political spaces. Considering this process as a conflicting one because it challenges the power of existing players, it seeks to expose the general failure of metropolitan institution building — including most of the South European urban areas — focusing on two elements: on one hand, decentralisation as a process favouring other territorial scales than the metropolitan one, notably the regional and municipal levels; on the other hand, local democracy favouring the municipal and neighbourhood levels but forgetting the metropolitan scale.