New forms of territorial governance in metropolitan regions? A Polish–German comparison

The governance of metropolitan affairs emerges as one of the crucial issues in many countries. The academic debate shows a bias towards categories and descriptions based on North American and, to a lesser degree, West European experiences. Based on the results of comparative research on metropolitan regions in Germany and in Poland, we can say that there is much more diversity than convergence in the practice of regional reform in the studied cases. Moreover, the normative and analytical framework of the new regionalism is not as appropriate to describe the Polish and – to a lesser extent – the German metropolitan reality as it is widely assumed. Recently emerging metropolitan arrangements bear the features of novelty, but at the same time most of them still lean strongly on governmental premises. Surprisingly, despite obvious differences between the two countries, some cross-national similarities are noticeable between the metropolises, which share some characteristics such as the position of a front-runner in the national economy or the national exponent in the global city hierarchy. The main difference can be identified in the economic focus of the metropolitan governance arrangements. Whereas this is a dominant approach in German city-regions, in Poland it still remains low on the agenda, at least in practice. Moreover the involvement of non-governmental actors in metropolitan initiatives is much lower in Poland.