Seeing like a region
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Richard C. Schragger
Abstract
Observers of metropolitan dysfunction have long advocated for a regional tier of government that could (among other things) equalize spending across local jurisdictions, pursue cooperative economic development policies, provide for fair share housing, rationalize land use, and coordinate transportation planning. For many good government reformers, right-scaling our fragmented metropolitan areas appears to be an obvious solution to interjurisdictional spillovers and competitive races-to-the-bottom.
This article counsels caution. “Region hope”—the idea that the substantive problems of metropolitan governance can be solved regionally by redrawing territorial boundaries to encompass ever-larger areas—is perennial. But territorial manipulation in aid of state centralization has significant drawbacks. The regional impulse exhibits some key features of failed social engineering efforts; seen through the lens of the state, these efforts privilege technocratic over democratic governance, bureaucratic over local knowledge, and mobile over immobile capital. That does not mean that regionalism should be resisted in all cases, but only that the costs of territorial manipulation should be weighed against its asserted benefits.
© 2023 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
