ancient cities

most significant example of an agglomeration is
Greater New York, which was forged out of five
boroughs (counties) in 1898.
Through consolidation, agglomeration, and the
unilateral annexation of suburban municipalities
and unincorporated areas, reformers proposed to
give central cities administrative control over their
urban region. They believed that such unitary
administration would assure orderly and efficient
land and infrastructure development, greater
accountability, and increased economic competitiveness.
But by the 1920s, affluent suburban
municipalities had gained enough political influence
with their state legislatures to reduce or
eliminate unilateral absorption by their central cities.
Consequently, reformers shifted their strategy
to emphasize the coordination of local governments
and the development of voluntary comprehensive
regional plans. At the same time, reformers
opposed addressing regional challenges through
the creation of special districts and single-purpose
authorities, which they felt would aggravate metropolitan
jurisdictional fragmentation.
The regional agenda of the reformers, specifically,
the idea of coordination to overcome fragmentation,
was adopted by the Progressive
movement at the federal level beginning in the
1930s. But the aggressive implementation of this
reform commenced only in the late 1950s when
federal programs began attaching requirements for
regional coordination to the granting of funds for
a wide variety of programs. In addition to advocating
coordination to achieve greater efficiency,
coordination was employed to address the growing
social and fiscal inequities between declining
central cities and their increasingly affluent suburbs
and to deal with problems of environmental
pollution. Assuming coordinating responsibilities,
Associations or Councils of Governments (COGs)
and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs)
formed in virtually every region of the county. By
the end of the 1970s, there were 37 such federal
programs and additional state programs requiring
some form of regional coordination.
Federal policy promoting regionalism through
coordinating councils reversed sharply in the
early 1980s during the Reagan administration. In
place of polices requiring coordination, it was
argued that market competition could sort out
regional issues more effectively. Consequently,
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many coordination-based programs were eliminated
or funds were significantly reduced, especially
in those programs addressing social equity issues.
At the same time, the federal government advocated
devolution, leaving states and local governments to
determine how or whether to organize at the
regional scale.
Emergence and Characteristics
of a New Regionalism
Even though the old regionalism of the reform and
Progressive movements had lost much of its political
momentum by the mid-1980s, issues requiring
a regional response seemed even more challenging.
In the economic arena, regionalism had always
been advocated on grounds of enhancing economic
competitiveness. However, the challenge of competitiveness
was now reframed by globalization. In
this new order, polycentric regions rather than
regions with a single dominant central business
district were becoming the new units of economic
competition. In the environmental arena, preventing
pollution continued to be a concern, but the
more holistic challenge of achieving sustainable
environmental development had subsumed it. In
the arena of social equity, concentrated poverty in
central cities was still a challenge, but increasingly,
this was seen as an issue for older inner-ring suburbs
as well. Social equity concerns were also
broadened to include workforce housing, transit,
job creation, and education, all at a regional scale.
The scope, scale, and complexity of the new
regional challenges were well beyond those addressed
under the old regionalism. In addition, the difficulties
of overcoming the growing political fragmentation
of metropolitan areas seemed even more
daunting. By the early 1990s, political scientists and
policy analysts recognized the emergence of new
approaches to regional challenges. Unlike the
reformers, the practitioners of the new regionalism
were not part of a single movement. Rather, they
worked on a region-by-region basis tackling specific
challenges. Nevertheless, several characteristics
define the new approach in contrast with the old.
Regional Versus Metropolitan. Earlier reformers
analyzed regions from the perspective of the central
cities. Regions were to be designed to support the
vitality of the central business district where