Metropolitan governance and strategic planning: a review of experience in Manchester, Melbourne and Toronto

This monograph examines the challenges facing major city regions in coping with dynamic processes of societal change. Particular attention is paid to the structure of metropolitan governance and the contribution of strategic spatial planning frameworks in managing urban development processes, focusing on recent experiences in Greater Manchester, Metropolitan Melbourne and the Greater Toronto Area. The study exemplifies the processes and inherent tensions involved, focusing on issues of economic competitiveness, social equity and cohesion, and the promotion of sustainably compact urban form. Institutional capacity-building measures are set firmly, however, within overarching neo-liberal perspectives, generating considerable tensions that clearly demonstrate the difficulties of translating metropolitan-wide visions into local implementation realities. The study concludes that the growing complexity of multi-nodal metropolitan structures and the increasing significance of interactional networks, linkages and flows within and beyond metropolitan boundaries, makes the task of metropolitan governance problematic.