ancient cities

poor, port wardens, and other services—for the
most part, urban households acted independently
or through private businesses or voluntary organizations
to obtain needed metropolitan services,
from police and fire protection to public welfare
and recreation. Merchants, factory owners and,
later, larger industrialists often laid out and built
their own roads, in many instances after unsuccessful
attempts to compel town and county governments
to take the lead. The same was true for many
railroad and canal companies, which received legal
permission and modest subsidies from state and
local governments to build but rarely garnered the
significant public investment more recently associated
with large-scale infrastructure improvements.
Forces of urbanization, industrialization, and
immigration through the last half of the 1800s
brought greater size, diversity, and complexity to
the metropolis. In response to urban changes, local
governments increased their size and more aggressively
assumed control over the public safety, public
health, infrastructure development, and urban
service delivery functions that had previously been
left to private or nonprofit actors. The home rule
movement reinforced local governments as the
primary locus of power in metropolitan areas.
From the 1870s through early 1900s, anti-urban,
rural-controlled state legislatures greatly restricted
municipal annexation powers while simultaneously
enacting permissive laws for municipal
incorporation. Hundreds of small towns adjacent
to or near cities incorporated to defend against
unwanted annexation and to gain autonomy over
local affairs.
Organizing and acting at the regional scale
meant securing interlocal cooperation among
autonomous local government units. One common
response was for local governments to lobby state
legislatures for the formation of regional special
districts to which the localities ceded authority.
Among the regional districts formed during
this era were the Chicago Sanitary District,
the Metropolitan (Boston) Transit District, Cleveland
Metropolitan Parks District, the Baltimore County
Metropolitan District, and the East Bay Municipal
Utility District, serving more than 1.2 million people
in the San Francisco Bay region.
Escalating industrialization and urbanization,
coupled with major advances in transportation
and communication from the late 1800s through
Regional Governance
647
the 1920s, accelerated the decentralization of
urban activity. As the metropolis spread across
political border lines, so did the need for region
wide attention to service delivery, employment,
housing markets, transportation systems, and social
relations. Emerging from these conditions were
dozens of Progressive era campaigns—in St. Louis,
Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, for example—to centralize
metropolitan governance through city–
county consolidations or metropolitan federations.
Driven by a coalition of downtown business
interests, civic “good government” groups and academic
research bureaus, the reform view of metropolitan
governance held that the best way to
respond to the economic, demographic, and service
challenges of the metropolis was through a regional
government. Centralized regional governance,
advocates argued, would coordinate and standardize
service delivery, achieve economies of scale,
improve political accountability, attract economic
growth, and avoid the pathologies of a politically
fragmented governance system. Coalition members
were also driven by hope that a metropolitan
government would weaken powerful urban bosses
and their ethnic bases; facilitate administrative
reforms, such as civil service rules and city manager
systems; and, particularly for downtown
elites who lived in the suburbs but worked and
held property in the city, protect their economic
interests.
Most regional reform efforts of the Progressive
Era failed at the polls. The achievement of regional
governance required cooperation across independent
local governments or action by special-
purpose governments formed specifically to
regionalize service delivery.
The Great Depression of the 1930s altered this
landscape as local governments lost financial
means and found themselves unable to deliver services.
The federal government bailed out local
government by taking on infrastructure projects
and assuming control over major regional policy
areas including housing and transportation. By
stipulating that federal aid would go only to
county- or region-level agencies or independent
public authorities, the federal government motivated
regional governance structures and processes.
Through the middle of the century and
continuing to the present, many state governments
and courts likewise used financial or legal levers to