GOLD Report I - UCLG

259work of built-up urban areas – has increasinglyfailed to capture the fluid and ambiguous natureof peri-urban regions. It has given way tomeasures of commuting intensity or patternsof migration toward a central city. Significantly,geographers and urban planners haveeven invented special terms to describe thenew entities that are taking shape aroundlarge cities: City-archipelago, emerging town,megalopolis, metapolis and metropolitan areaare a few examples of recent additions to theurban-studies lexicon (Ascher 1996; Gottman1961; Mongin 1998; Veltz 1995).Growing social diversity in many urban regionshas contributed to the increase inground-level territorial diversity. The largesturban regions in developed countries generallyfeature higher levels of social and economicsegregation by residence. In Europeand North America, many such regions havealso absorbed the largest proportions of newimmigrants, including those from developingcountries. Growing economic and socialdiversity has often compounded metropolitansegregation. Although middle class areaspredominate in the largest metropolitanregions of the developed world, it is usuallypossible to find both exclusive affluent localitiesor neighborhoods and concentrations ofpoverty and social disadvantage. Overalllevels of territorial segregation vary widelyamong metropolitan regions, but range higherin the United States than in most ofWestern Europe or Japan.In most southern cities, the incidence ofpoverty is determined primarily by the locallabor market. The income, security, andbenefits linked to employment remain theprimary means by which households canavoid impoverishment. Industrial firms arethe major employers in the urban centers ofthe South, though in some places the servicesector has been replacing them. Street tradingand the informal job sector have becomea major source of employment forthose not in the formal sector. The proportionof jobs in this sector varies betweencities but often accounts for upwards of 20%of those in employment.III.2. Governmental fragmentationAnother challenge for governance stemsfrom the organizational fragmentation of localgovernments in extended metropolitanregions. Much of this fragmentation is geopolitical.As more people move into anincreasing number of communities surroundingcentral cities, more local governmentsare drawn into problems that beset the entiremetropolitan region.Data from the 476 metropolitan regions inthe International Metropolitan Observatory(Hoffmann-Martinot and Sellers 2005) offerthe most systematic current overview ofgovernmental fragmentation in OECD countries;data for several additional cases areprovided as well. Measured by the proportionof the central city population in areas ofmore than 200,000 inhabitants, Israel is oneof the most fragmented countries from ageopolitical point of view, along with Switzerland(30%), Germany (31%), the UnitedStates (34%) and France (36%). In the Netherlands,about half the population lives incentral city neighborhoods, but in the othercountries studied, the bulk of the populationcontinues to reside in central towns ratherthan traditional suburbs.The number of communities with approximately100,000 inhabitants is a secondwidely accepted measure of this kind of political-institutionalfragmentation (e.g., Brunnand Ziegler 1980) in metropolitan areas. Thehigher this indicator is for a metropolitanarea, the greater the fragmentation. In amajority of the countries in the InternationalMetropolitan Observatory (IMO) project, thismeasure of institutional fragmentation is low,having a value lower than five. Such a lowscore invariably indicates that municipalitiesin the region have been merged, as theywere recently in Canada (1). Sweden andthe Netherlands (2), Poland and Israel (3),and Norway (4), also merged their metropolitanmunicipalities comparatively recently.In Spain, the exurban parts of metropolitanareas have only developed in recent years,accounting for that country’s low level of ins-The largesturban regions indevelopedcountries generallyfeature higherlevels of social andeconomicsegregation byresidence