Governance and Metropolitan Inequality: A Global Analysis

When: 01.30.2009 - 01.31.2009
Location: Davidson Conference Center, USC
Abstract:

In the twenty-first century, extended metropolitan regions have emerged as the dominant form of human settlement worldwide. From economic to social policy to climate change policy, formal and informal governance within these settings is crucial to addressing the greatest collective challenges of our time. Increasingly, in the developing world as well as in developed countries, social and spatial inequalities have become a fact of life in metropolitan regions. This project undertakes the first global inquiry into the ways that public policies and institutions contribute to or mitigate these metropolitan inequalities. This will be one of the first systematic comparative analyses of metropolitan inequality and governance across the developed world, and the first ever study of parallel problems in the rapidly growing metropolitan regions of developing countries.

The project comprises the third phase of a collaborative research program under way since 2003, the International Metropolitan Observatory (IMO). Through two previous phases, IMO has become the largest systematic study of local governance in metropolitan regions worldwide. The project utilizes a standardized research protocol and datasets of social, economic and political data that have already been assembled on metropolitan regions in developed countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) as well as in several representative developing or transitional countries (Brazil, the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Poland, and South Africa).

There are two main objectives of this workshop. First, project participants will analyze metropolitan inequalities and how government services and other policies at the national, regional and local levels have either mitigated or aggravated these. The resulting papers will be prepared for publication, in book form and where possible as additional articles. Second, the workshop will develop an agenda for a major grant proposal to extend the inquiry into the relation between metropolitan governance, economic growth and inequality.

Participant Information