News

Chapter 1 of The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-regions Cannot be Self-governing , by Andrew Sancton

Andrew Sancton is Professor of Political Science and director of the Local Government Program at the University of Western Ontario.

There can be no doubt that sovereign states have for a long time been the main institutions of our political life. There can also be no doubt that cities existed long before sovereign states were ever contemplated and that, in some cases, the governments of many cities predate the sovereign states in which they now find themselves. Although arguments are occasionally advanced that, in theory, the historical rights of such cities trump the constitutions of sovereign states, the courts established by such states have, not surprisingly, been unwilling to accept them. In short, city governments are legally subordinated, one way or another, to the apparatus of the sovereign state.

In this chapter, I examine the work of writers who, in quite different ways and for quite different reasons, challenge us to shift our analytical focus from sovereign states to cities. My conclusion is that their work is ultimately unconvincing, primarily because in each case it fails to take account of the intractable problems created by the need to draw boundaries. The first such writer is the well-known urbanist Jane Jacobs. She is not especially concerned about sovereignty, but she does argue that each city-region needs its own currency in order to prosper economically, thus clearly implying that the dismantling of sovereign states as we know them would be economically desirable. Writing as political and legal theorists respectively, Warren Magnusson and Gerald Frug are more concerned with the ability of communities of people to control their collective lives democratically. They both see sovereign states (or American state governments in Frug's case) as part of the problem and new mechanisms for empowered city governments as part of the solution. Finally, there is the literature on “global cities,” written primarily by geographers and sociologists, notably Saskia Sassen. This literature is often cited by those who believe that city governments are becoming more important, but in fact it has virtually nothing to say about city government, either in practice or in theory.

Jane Jacobs and Her Toronto Followers

Despite her profound impact on the way in which we understand how cities work, Jane Jacobs had remarkably little to say about municipal government. She was, however, as a resident of Toronto, a vocal opponent of the Ontario government's policy in 1997 of amalgamating the six constituent municipalities within Toronto's upper-tier metropolitan government. Her position was that big municipal governments were likely to do worse than smaller ones and that, in any event, amalgamation would certainly not save money, which was apparently the provincial government's main objective.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), Jacobs is primarily concerned with how cities grow economically. But she is quite explicit that the territorial entities she refers to as “city regions” require much more ability to make decisions for themselves if they are to serve their economic purposes. For Jacobs, cities that are economically successful create their own city-regions. City-regions comprise the central city, its suburbs and an area “beginning just beyond ... [the] suburbs [where] rural, industrial and commercial workplaces are all mixed up together.” As one would expect, she states that city-regions “are not defined by natural boundaries, because they are wholly the artefacts of the cities at their nuclei; the boundaries move outward – or halt – only as city economic energy dictates.” For cities to generate city-regions, they must be capable of replacing wide ranges of their imports “exuberantly and repeatedly.” Anyone familiar with Jacobs's The Economy of Cities (1969) knows that for her the key to the economic dynamism of a city is its ability to start replacing items that it previously imported from some other city with items that it creates on its own.

Jacobs is confident in listing examples of cities that have city-regions (Tokyo, Toronto, Boston, Milan, Paris, London, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Wuhan, and Shanghai) and cities that do not (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Marseilles, Naples, Rome, Dublin, Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool, Lisbon, Madrid, Zagreb, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Havana, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan, Sapporo, Atlanta, Seattle, Manila, and Canton). But she tells the reader nothing about how she arrives at her conclusions. Consequently, it is quite impossible to know how she would draw the boundaries of her city-regions. For Toronto's, we learn only that “it simply peters out and halts on gently rolling land presenting no change in natural landscape” and that it includes the nearby cities of Hamilton, Kitchener, and Waterloo.

If the existence of city-regions had no policy implications for Jacobs, then the absence of any discussion of boundaries would not be a problem. But in her chapter on “Faulty Feedback to Cities,” she makes a convincing case that cities would be better off economically if they each had their own currency whose value was determined by a “free float” in relation to the currencies of other cities. If we accept her basic argument that cities are the generators of economic growth, then it follows that each city will be in different economic circumstances at any given time. A city that is in a downturn in its business cycle (Jacobs explains how business cycles in a country are simply the sum total of all the business cycles of cities within its borders) will benefit from a currency that is falling in value because its exports will become cheaper for potential customers and its imports will become more expensive. Similarly, a city at a high point in its business cycle will have a strong currency that enables residents to buy imports more cheaply. Anyone familiar with arguments about now national currencies work will be familiar with such reasoning. The originality of Jacobs's thinking is her argument that city economies are real, while national ones are mere statistical artefacts.

Jacobs points out that most old European cities once had their own currencies, long before the emergence of currencies of sovereign states and even longer before the creation of the Euro, which has happened since Jacobs wrote Cities and the Wealth of Nations . Just as Jacobs no doubt deplores the Euro, she applauds the one recent case where a city managed to obtain its own currency. This occurred with the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965. Jacobs writes: “Singapore has to earn its own imports or it won't have them, and generate its own exports or it won't have them, but appropriate feedback helps it do both and replace imports as well. Singapore is a nice well-made piece of equipment with a mechanism to carry information and trigger responses (its currency), and a responding mechanism (its capacity to produce), forming a sensitively self-correcting economic unit.”

Significantly, Singapore is an island (or, more accurately, an archipelago, dominated by one large island). Drawing its boundaries could never have been difficult. As I have already indicated, Jacobs considers Singapore to have generated a city-region. What she does not state is that Singapore's city-region includes the Malaysian city of Johor Bahru (JB, metropolitan population over 500,000), a twenty-minute drive to the north across the causeway. In fact, JB's shops attract shoppers from Singapore, whose strong dollar (relative to Malaysia's currency) makes goods in JB seem relatively cheap. This area of Malaysia is also the sole source of Singapore's water supply. Similarly, but to the south, a forty-five-minute ferry ride takes tourists and Singaporean businesspeople to a recently developed beach resort on the Indonesian island of Bintan. Singapore has clearly outgrown its boundaries and has expanded economically into two other sovereign states. So much for the “well-made piece of equipment” that is the Singapore city-region.

Jacobs logically suggests that, for countries with their own floating currencies whose main exports are city-produced goods and services (as opposed to natural resources and/or agricultural products), there will likely be one economically dominant city within the country because as soon as one city becomes more productive than the others, the feedback mechanisms provided by the currency will benefit the dominant city more than the others. Once this process has begun, it is self-perpetuating. She argues that a non-dominant city can best prosper by extracting itself from the currency being used by the dominant city.

Small countries that are not city-states are in many ways quite similar to Singapore. In her discussion of Denmark and the Netherlands, Jacobs acknowledges this point. Copenhagen dominates Denmark, even though it is on the extreme eastern edge of the country. In fact, since Jacobs wrote Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Copenhagen has been connected by bridge and tunnel to Malmo, Sweden, to the east, and the eastern terminus of the Copenhagen commuter rail system is now in Malmo. By any reasonable standards, the Copenhagen city-region now extends into Sweden. Because both these countries still have their own currencies, the Copenhagen city-region is similar to that of Singapore in that it now transcends more than one sovereign state.

With respect to the Netherlands, Jacobs points out that the urban areas of the southern part of the country (including Amsterdam and Rotterdam) actually form a planned and integrated “Ring City” that “encircles the ‘hole' formed by agricultural land and the inland sea,” for which, she implies, a single Dutch currency is quite appropriate. Now that the Dutch currency no longer exists and because the ring city is clearly not the dominant city within “Euroland,” Jacobs's hypothesis would lead us to believe that the Dutch ring city will suffer economically having lost its most important feedback mechanism, its own currency linking it directly to the world economy.

As with all of Jacobs's thinking about cities, her world view consists almost entirely of small entrepreneurs and independent consumers rather than of chain stores and large corporations. A separate currency for Winnipeg might do wonders for a small cabinet-making business, but it is unlikely to be popular among the shareholders of Winnipeg-based Great West Life or CanWest Global Communications, companies that do business across Canada and beyond.

The purpose of this discussion is not to assess Jacobs's overall argument about cities and currencies. It is to point out that if we have no idea about how to draw the boundaries of her city-regions, we cannot consider her city-regions as the territorial bases of a new way for promoting global economic prosperity.

Influential as Jacobs's ideas have been, her 1985 writings about city-regions might not merit so much attention from students of city government were it not for the fact that her work has inspired a group of her followers in Toronto to promote her ideas as best they can within the real world of politics in Canada, Ontario, and Toronto. In 1997 this group organized a conference honouring Jacobs's work. She reportedly remarked at the end of the conference “that perhaps it was time for Toronto to separate from Ontario.” The group then went on to convene various discussions about the place of cities in Canada. In separate forums, the discussions have involved the mayors of five of Canada's largest cities (the “C5”), other representatives of civil society from the same cities (“C5 Civil”), and various intellectual and community leaders who have focused on issues relating to Toronto. It has been within this Toronto-based forum that more detailed proposals for a new political status for the city have emerged.

In 2001 the Toronto group adopted “The Greater Toronto Charter,” whose first article stated: “That the Toronto Region form an order of government that is a full partner of the Federal and Provincial Governments of Canada, entitled to participate in discussions of an inter-governmental nature and in Canada's system of inter-regional transfer payments.” The remaining four articles very briefly outlined the functional, financial, and democratic responsibilities of the region. The boundaries of the region were not defined in the charter itself, apparently because David Crombie, a former Toronto mayor, warned the group that “people would waste all their time and energy arguing boundaries, and have nothing left for principles and policy.”

Writing in 2003, Alan Broadbent, the Toronto businessman who donated the funds for the group, provides remarkable detail about how he would restructure the Canadian federation. Each of his various options involves breaking up Ontario by creating a new “city-state of Toronto” whose boundaries would attempt to capture the area generally known as the “Golden Horseshoe,” the shape of which is formed by the western tip of Lake Ontario. As we shall see in chapter 6, in 2006 the government of Ontario officially defined a similar territory as the “Greater Golden Horseshoe.” For Broadbent, the area stretches inland to Kitchener-Waterloo in the west and to the Alliston-Shelburne area to the north. He goes on:

Some thought has been given, by Jane Jacobs and others, to the creation of a new province of Southern Ontario, which would draw a line [sic] between Oshawa and Midland, and treat all of the Golden Horseshoe and south-western Ontario as a new province. This would have the advantage of including almost all of industrialized Ontario, including London, Windsor, and Sarnia, but would also include a lot of rural Ontario, particularly its prime farm land. However, on the principle of including similar areas within boundaries, this proposal does not work as well as a Golden Horseshoe based city state.

By 2005, Broadbent's position appears to be moderating. He now asks only that “an expanded Toronto Region should have essentially the powers of a province” and that, although its “geography is arguable it likely includes the Golden Horseshoe around the western end of Lake Ontario. In the same publication in which Broadbent makes this statement, another participant, Don Stevenson, a former Ontario deputy minister, writes: “An argument can be made that almost any proportion of Southern Ontario is Toronto's economic region but it is difficult to imagine any local accountability to a body beyond the limits of the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] – an area considerably smaller than Broadbent's Golden Horseshoe. Confusion reigns. Broadbent is referring to an entity that is to be like a province and Stevenson – and others in the group – is still conceiving the Toronto region as some form of metropolitan or regional government within the general paradigm of local government.

There can be no doubt that Broadbent's radical proposals relate directly to his basic agreement with Jacobs's thought and the close personal connection between the two. In this context, however, it seems ironic that Broadbent has written nothing about the desirability of the Toronto region (however defined geographically or politically) having its own currency. For Jacobs, city-regions are to be autonomous precisely so that they can reap the economic feedback benefits of having their own currencies. There might be many benefits from splitting the largest Canadian province into two or more parts, but they are not readily apparent to the reader of Cities and the Wealth of Nations .

Warren Magnusson and Gerald Frug

Most of the political debate about the governance of city-regions has been dominated by “consolidationists,” who want bigger local governments in one form or another, and the advocates of “public choice,” who point to the economic benefits of smallness and competition. There is very little theory about city-region governance that does not fall within one or the other of these approaches, both of which are more concerned with the effectiveness and efficiency of local government than with fundamental issues at the heart of political and legal theory. Warren Magnusson, a Canadian political theorist at the University of Victoria, and Gerald Frug, a municipal-law specialist at Harvard University, are exceptions, and that is why their work deserves attention. They have both written important and theoretically sophisticated books on the subject of urban governance: The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience (1996) by Magnusson and City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (1999) by Frug.

Magnusson and Frug both require their readers to jettison state-centred conceptions of political life. They argue that the cities in which people live are the locations that are most politically meaningful and that the larger governmental units that contain them are artificial constructs whose actions limit the ability of city residents to manage their collective futures democratically. They understand that municipal governments that are subordinated to, and managed by, larger governments cannot come close to providing the kind of active, engaged city government that both think is necessary.

To understand what such a city government would look like, consider Frug's list of six activities that “[c]ities committed to community-building” might undertake:

operating banks and other financial institutions in the interests of promoting the regional economy;

running a cable television system to enhance democratic communication;

building or acquiring residential housing to prevent speculative profit-taking;

sponsoring cooperative grocery stores to promote democratic organization and to help areas not well served by privately owned grocery stores;

owning a major sports team so as to connect “the enthusiasm for local teams … with community-building efforts”; and, finally,

supporting “community organizations devoted to easing the burdens of family life.”

The significance of this list does not lie in the pros and cons of each suggestion but rather in the fact together they illustrates quite different ways of conceptualizing the role of city governments, viewpoints that are outside our normal frame of reference when we think about city governments in North America.

Frug attempts a thoroughgoing critique of mainstream judicial interpretations of American local-government law. His main objective is to decentre local-government law by insisting that judges and legislators should not centre on the rights and obligations of each particular municipality, be it central city or suburb, but rather “situate” the law within its wider social and economic context. He therefore turns to city-regions as the main (but not only) centre in which local governments should be situated. He wants to establish “regional legislatures” to replace state legislatures as the source of authority for the municipal governments within city-regions. He writes: “The purpose of establishing a regional legislature would not be to enable it to act as a regional government … [T]he task of the regional legislature would be to perform one specific function of the state legislature and the state courts: defining the power – specifying what lawyers call the legal entitlements – of local governments.”

Frug insists that the regional legislature would not act directly on regional residents. It would only make rules (legal entitlements) for local governments within its territory, rules, for example, about land-use policies, sharing of school taxes, locating waste facilities, offering tax incentives to businesses, and controlling guns. He acknowledges that the distinction between “the entitlement allocation function of a regional legislature” and that of a regional government is difficult, because the entitlements could be structured in such a way that local governments have no choice but to follow particular paths predetermined by the nature of the entitlements. Frug suggests that this problem can be overcome through the organization of the regional legislature: “The regional legislature, rather than the individual cities, must have the power to determine which questions it can decide. However, it should be structured to encourage its members not to exercise power themselves but to turn the legislature into a forum for interlocal negotiations about how to decentralize power. The best chance of doing so, in my view, lies in electing representatives from the geographical areas to which the people feel most attached – central-city and suburban neighbourhoods.” In other words, Frug wants the electoral arrangements for the regional legislature to re-enforce local identities, not to dissolve them in one common regional identity.

Frug's proposals for institutional change are at least as radical as those of Jane Jacobs and her followers. His approach leaves little room for state governments: “Regions are as diverse as states, and they therefore can serve the purpose of protection against parochialism usually advanced for state power. In fact they can serve it better. Because many metropolitan regions in America cross state boundaries, state decision-making often increases the fragmentation of metropolitan regions rather than reducing it.” Like Jacobs, Frug pays remarkably little attention to the boundaries of the regions with which he is so much concerned. In much of his book, he focuses on how to overcome the effects of boundaries within municipalities (particularly central cities and suburbs) that are excessively centred, but he does not even mention the boundaries of the regions themselves until the very last page, and then in the most cursory fashion. He suggests that the federal government has a special role to play in defining “metropolitan regions”: “If it undertakes this responsibility, however, it must prevent regional boundaries from reproducing on a larger scale the current effects of city boundaries. The difficulty of drawing boundaries in many parts of the country should be treated as a virtue: from the neighbourhood level to the national level, the objective should be to reduce the impact that geographic boundaries have on people's lives.” In an endnote for this passage, Frug states that the “census defines regional areas and is therefore a place to begin.” Indeed it is – and the way the Canadian and American censuses approach this task will be discussed in a later chapter. But, for someone who is so sensitive to the issue of boundaries within city-regions, Frug is remarkably insensitive to the obvious fact that the process of drawing of regional boundaries within his framework would inevitably raise huge difficulties of precisely the kind that he addresses throughout the rest of his book.

Warren Magnusson's work is in many ways remarkably similar to that of Gerald Frug. Magnusson's book The Search for Political Space appeared three years before Frug's City Building , but Frug makes no reference to Magnusson. In any event, Magnusson is just as concerned with “decentring the state” as Frug is, probably more so. The main difference is that Magnusson is not so centred on regions. He privileges no particular territorial configuration, analysing all of them, from villages and urban neighbourhoods to global institutions and social movements, in different political contexts. In so doing, he outlines what democratic politics might look like in the absence of state sovereignty.

Magnusson claims that at least some of “the literature on public administration” constitutes “an explicit attack on the locality as an appropriate political community.” He goes on to address a set of issues that are so crucial to my concerns in this book that they merit a lengthy direct quotation:

In a curious inversion, the locality (rather than the state) is thus presented as an artificial community. Since everyday life lacks definite boundaries, to impose boundaries for the purposes of local administration – establish a political container and say, “This is the locality” – does indeed seem artificial. We use services from hither and yon, and there is no natural area within which all our intermediate needs can be met. Communal loyalties spread over the region and beyond, but they contract toward the neighbourhood and the block. There is no agreed order of priority among these loyalties. Thus the container chosen for local government and politics is apparently arbitrary or artificial, in terms of both objective and subjective measures of community identity. As we have noted, one might say the same of the state and the national community it is supposed to maintain. Only by strenuous effort can governments render communities natural and inevitable which would otherwise seem highly questionable.

For Magnusson, a vibrant democratic life is only possible if citizens are engaged in politics at all territorial levels – and if they understand, say, the connections between decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and air pollutants that might be emitted from a factory at the end of their street. Citizens are not engaged at all in real politics if their focus is solely on the apparent leaders of a sovereign state.

Unlike Jacobs and Frug, Magnusson has no particular brief for self-governing city-regions. He understands that there is no easy way to draw boundaries for city-regions, even though they constitute very important territorial communities for most people who live in cities. But Magnusson assumes that we can each simultaneously be part of a number of self-governing territorial communities, with the result that no particular boundary in itself is of crucial importance to the life chances of any particular individual. For Frug, however, someone is in charge of boundaries, whether regional legislatures for municipal boundaries or, incongruously, the federal census agency (as a starting point, at least) for the boundaries of the regions. For Magnusson, it appears that no one – or no institution – is in charge. The boundaries simply emerge from some undetermined process, the result being a deeply multi-level politics in which the concept of sovereignty is irrelevant.

In their own ways, Jacobs, Magnusson, and Frug want to eliminate the importance of governmental boundaries. This is quite explicit for Magnusson and Frug, less so for Jacobs. In Jacobs's ideal world, we would all be changing currencies as we travelled from one city-region to another, so it seems strange to claim that she too wants to eliminate the importance of boundaries. It must be remembered, however, that the sole purpose of having different currencies is to equalize opportunities for economic growth and innovation in the longer term on both sides of any given boundary.

My argument here is different. I contend that, unless or until there is a form of strong and centred world government, boundaries between states (and between federations of states, including the European Union) will be of crucial importance, not just for individuals, but for cities as well. Such an argument must seem weirdly out of step, not just with the work of Jacobs, Magnusson, and Frug, but with the much better-known literature about how global cities are displacing nation-states as the driving forces in the globalizing world economy.

Global Cities and City Governance

We need not be concerned here with which cities qualify as global and how best to construct the hierarchy of the importance of each in relation to the others. The key point is that there is ample evidence that the world's largest cities are becoming increasingly linked to each other and increasingly separated from many of the concerns and issues that are relevant to the small towns and rural areas in their respective countries. Global cities and their immediate hinterlands prosper, while more distant regions within their respective countries struggle to maintain existing levels of employment and standards of living. There is more and more evidence that “national economies” are exactly what Jane Jacobs has described them as: statistical artefacts. Most economic activity takes place in cities that are linked to one another in complex networks of trade, information flow, and shared cultural activity.

To the extent that sovereign states find it increasingly impossible or counterproductive to attempt to regulate such connections among the world's largest cities, we can correctly conclude that sovereign states are becoming less powerful and less important, at least in relation to controlling what comes and goes across their borders. Saskia Sassen is well known for having documented the emergence of global cities. For our purposes, the most important aspect of her work is what it omits: she has absolutely nothing to say about the government of the global cities she writes about. As Peter M. Ward has pointed out, such an omission is common in the literature on global cities. The omission in itself is not a problem, because Sassen and her colleagues are interested primarily in analysing the linkages among global cities and the forces that cause them to share many crucial characteristics.

Kenichi Ohmae's best-known books are provocatively entitled The Borderless World and The End of the Nation State . They have been hugely influential in advancing the view that nation-states are declining in importance and that entities Ohmae calls “region states” are becoming more important. These region states are similar to Jacobs's city regions, although Ohmae tends to focus on regions that cross the boundaries of nation-states. Unlike Jacobs, however, he is not especially concerned with currencies. Indeed, he seems quite unconcerned with any public functions that these “states” may or may not perform, other than the functions of attracting foreign investment, encouraging economic innovation, and acting as a catalyst for the regions. Ohmae seems to favour loose federations of region states, but he provides very few details about how such federations might actually work. He says nothing about boundaries. But, more than any other single author, Ohmae has popularized the notion that profound changes are occurring in the way we govern ourselves and that cities (or region states) are taking over.

Unlike Sassen, Ohmae actually does refer to sub-national governments. He is especially concerned with restructuring the Japanese state such that the centre becomes less powerful and authority is devolved to eleven regions whose boundaries would relate primarily to patterns of existing economic linkages. Ohmae sees the American and Canadian federations as models from which the Japanese can learn a great deal. He makes no suggestion that state and provincial boundaries in the United States and Canada are in any way artificial. In fact, he is suggesting that the region states within these two countries are the existing states and provinces. From a North American perspective, Ohmae is not much of a radical, even though he is often cited as an important visionary who foresees drastic changes in the way we govern ourselves, changes that apparently have something to do with the increasing importance of cities and their regions.

Another important popularizer of the notion that cities are in the process of displacing nation-states as key actors on the world stage is Neal R. Peirce. In newspaper columns, consultants' reports, and an influential book, he urges that we think of cities and their surrounding regions as “citistates,” which he defines as “entities that perform as critical actors, more on their own in the world economy than anyone would have dreamed possible since the birth of the nation-state in the 16th and 17th centuries.” Peirce's citistate concept is notoriously vague, often amounting to little more than business partnerships that are established to promote regional growth and innovation and that transcend municipal borders. Unlike Alan Broadbent, he is not much interested in constitutional change: “No one is suggesting that American state government give way to citistates, constitutionally or any other way. But the essential interdependence of the states and citistates has emerged as an indispensable feature of governance in the latter years of the 20th century.”

Peirce addresses the territorial scope of a citistate with a series of questions:

Does the citistate encompass just the original core city and its immediate surrounding areas?

Or, in us terms, all of a census-defined metropolitan statistical area?

Or the viewing area of the city's television stations?

Or the radius of the longest commute, which some would define as the citistate's “commute-shed”?

Or virtually all the exurban, rural territory up to the orbit of another citistate?

He argues, as do I and many others, that it is precisely because of “the infinite variety of geographic configurations” of citistates that they are “the most dynamic form of human settlement today.”

Ohmae and Peirce are among the most sophisticated of the many consultants and popularizers of the idea that cities and their regions are somehow in the process of eclipsing nation-states. Vague as their conceptual apparatus might be, they at least avoid some of the fundamental logical errors found among the less sophisticated camp followers of the global-cities literature. The error I am most concerned with starts from the established facts that the analysts of global cities have documented. It then proceeds as follows with two assumptions:

– Cities are governed by municipalities.

– Because cities are growing in importance, municipalities are (or should be) growing in importance, just as sovereign states are (or should be) decreasing in importance.

The second assumption about municipalities leads to all kinds of fairly obvious policy recommendations, some of which will be explored later in this book. The problem with this reasoning is that cities are not governed by municipalities. It is true that municipalities are the level of government whose territories most often encompass urban areas, but municipal governments always share functional responsibility for such urban areas with other levels of government. Usually other governments are in charge of the functions that are of most importance to residents of the city: money and banking, immigration, criminal law, commercial law, public health care, unemployment insurance, and social assistance. Most advocates of increased municipal power would not dream of transferring such functions to municipalities. Even Jane Jacobs does not want these functions to be municipal. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations , she advocates that city-regions be constituted like sovereign states, not that municipalities within such city-regions take on functions that are usually the responsibility of sovereign states. Once we recognize that municipalities will always be only be part of a multi-level system of government for cities, we will realize that there is nothing inevitable about the future role of municipalities. It might well be the case that as cities become more important in relation to the functioning of our economy, municipalities will actually become of less relative importance.

From The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-regions Cannot be Self-governing by Andrew Sancton (McGill-Queen's University Press). Copyright Andrew Sancton. Reprinted by permission of the publisher