Abstract
The massive economic, demographic, social, and environmental transformations that characterize the twenty-first century have given rise to a plethora of metropolitan problems for which realistic solutions have remained difficult to formulate and implement. The inequitable impacts of various development and ecological pressures on vulnerable infrastructure systems, built environments, and agricultural lands in and around urban regions are prompting renewed calls for the adoption of regional governance frameworks that can effectively address urgent metropolitan issues. In the past, efforts at building regional governance institutions and powers have been inadequate. In the case of North America, inter-municipal competition and insufficient information sharing between localities, proliferating special-purpose bodies in charge of infrastructure provision and service delivery, and ad hoc policy responses to emerging problems sadly appear to be the hallmarks of metropolitan governance today.
What explains these frustrating limitations of regional urban governance in the United States and Canada? And what lies behind the wide variation in the degree of effectiveness and authority achieved by metropolitan governance institutions in these two countries? Shaping the Metropolis: Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada addresses these questions through a comparative historical analysis of the regional governance trajectories of four metropolitan regions. The author selected the Twin Cities and Portland, Oregon, in the United States and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada due to the success and good reputation of their regional governance institutions. Working from an institutionalist perspective, Taylor developed a systematic framework to discuss the different governance paths of these four metropolitan regions.
Taylor’s framework posits that effective metropolitan governance is programmatic, resolute, decisive, and multi-level in structure. Metropolitan governance is programmatic when it yields a coherent body of decisions characterized by their general applicability, rather than particularistic outcomes driven by private interest influence or political expediency. Governance is resolute when it remains committed to policy decisions over the long term. Governance is decisive when it has capacity for rapid policy development and adoption in response to major challenges and emerging needs. Finally, metropolitan governance is multi-level when it engages governments at the local, state/provincial, and federal levels.
Wary of a resurging interest in localism, Taylor is emphatic about the importance of multi-level governance. He reminds the reader that state/provincial governments continue to hold jurisdiction over issues of land use and local government organization, adding that without the intervention of higher orders of government, local authorities lack incentives to initiate potentially beneficial but costly changes and to take into account the impact their policies and programs may have beyond their own jurisdiction. Taylor maintains that provincial/state and federal governments can exert their powers to overcome local resistance to inter-municipal collaboration through the creation of supportive regulatory frameworks, by serving as arbiters between localities, and through the provision of resources required for effective regional decision-making and administration.
A crucial aspect of Taylor’s argument revolves around what he calls the institutional foundations of government, that is, the separated-powers system in the United States and the centralized Westminster system in Canada. Taylor argues that the United States’ decentralized governing institutions are genetically (his metaphor) inclined toward particularistic decision-making due to their openness to external interests in the legislative process, whereas Canada’s centralized governing institutions are inherently more capable of being programmatic and decisive as a result of the concentration of legislative power in the executive.
In the case of Canada, Taylor argues that resoluteness can easily be undermined in the Canadian system by the untrammeled ability of newly elected parties to radically change the legislative agenda. Similarly, the capacity for policy innovation can be compromised under changing normative contexts by the Westminster system’s hardwired ability to distance external interests from the policy-making process. Showing how the advantages and limitations of these two institutional systems have historically played out at the urban regional scale, Taylor provides a convincing explanation for the broad national differences in the way regional governance fails to be programmatic, resolute, decisive, and multi-level in the United States and Canada.
In the case of the United States, Taylor argues that the general pattern of failure is defined by “state inaction or incapacity [for action]” (301). The principle of home rule—for which reformers successfully advocated in the Progressive Era as a way of ending arbitrary or corrupt state influence in local affairs—presents an enormous hurdle for governors and state legislators who seek to act on critical regional scale matters over which they have legitimate authority (namely land use regulation and boundary formation) and has given disinterested state officials a powerful alibi for inaction. In the decades after World War II, the federal government’s New Deal–inspired conditional grant programs partly filled that gap by inducing local governments to link investments in regional infrastructure to local land use decisions. But the rollback of such programs in the 1980s exacerbated the state inaction problem. Mindful of this history, Taylor links much of the relative success of Portland and the Twin Cities to local elites in the postwar era who strove to make state government assume a larger role in promoting regional governance as a means of enabling locally driven positive change. These efforts were slow to bear fruit, however, and were heavily dependent on societal norms prevalent in that period—particularly technocratic optimism, deference to elites, and trust in government. Taylor shows how difficult it has been for these metros to hold on to their postwar limited achievements in the aftermath of a radical shift in normative context in the 1960s and 1970s and the intensification of divisive partisanship in recent decades.
The Canadian case shows a different pattern. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Canadian provincial governments were generally more engaged in local governance than most states in the United States, most notably around the key issues of land use regulation, local government formation, municipal boundary changes, and municipal borrowing and taxation powers. Provincial involvement at this early stage laid the foundation for a few widely influential innovations in regional policy making and administration during the post–World War II era, including the creation of provincial boards tasked with supervising municipal affairs, the establishment of agricultural land reserves, and the introduction of multipurpose regional districts. But as a taste for top-down governance approaches soured during the change in normative context over the last decades of the twentieth century, these innovative regional institutions were unable to consolidate their authority. Taylor shows how Toronto and Vancouver find themselves today at the mercy of provincial governments that control their access to fiscal resources and are much less consistent in their support of regional governance than in the past.
Taylor’s book is a masterful (if not very optimistic) exposition of the ways in which the internal structure of each nation’s governing institutions shapes metropolitan patterns of growth under changing historical circumstances. But I must admit that the word “shaping” in the book’s title had me anticipating an inquiry into North American urban morphology as a direct or indirect effect of policy decisions by metropolitan authorities of various kinds. Taylor certainly notes the sprawling outcomes of a proliferation of jurisdictions in the United States and contrasts this spatial pattern to the Canadian tendency for contiguous development in already serviced land, but other than these broad observations his book offers little detail with respect to built environment outcomes associated with the various regional governance developments he so carefully analyzes. Nonetheless, I was quickly won over to his institutionally oriented use of the word thanks to the exceptional breadth and depth of knowledge that permeates the text, the subtlety and persuasiveness of its arguments, and the remarkable clarity of the writing.
While this book may resonate more with a political science audience, it is clearly written with urban scholars of all disciplinary backgrounds in mind, especially those interested in the procedural dimensions of planning. The “planning-governance nexus” (Schmitt and Danielzyk 2018) has been a preoccupation among researchers and practitioners in the field over the past few decades, stemming from a concern with the perceived depoliticization of the planning process in the wake of pervasive neoliberalization and the desire to develop communicative and collaborative planning approaches to patch up the “institutional voids” (Schmitt and Danielzyk 2018, 17) emerging in this post-political era. Taylor capably speaks to these preoccupations; his training in planning is evident in his careful accounts of how land use policies and the institutional frameworks required for their implementation are forged through complex negotiations with a wide range of actors in specific normative and political contexts. In light of planning’s current emphasis on enhancing its practitioners’ adaptive capacities, the book will undoubtedly serve as a helpful tool in planning education thanks to its comparative case study approach and its focus on the historical development of best practices in the intractable, ever-changing domain of regional governance.