Giersig Multilevel Urban Governance and the 'European City'

Discussing Metropolitan Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-3-531-90999-8
Verlag: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 227 Seiten, eBook

Nico Giersig exemplifies the specificities of Nordic cities within Europe as a whole by means of a systematic comparison of governance arrangements and their dynamics in two Nordic capital regions.

Dr. Nico Giersig promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Hartmut Häußermann am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Er ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl 'Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt' an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Giersig, Nico

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;0. Introduction;13
2;Contents;6
3;Maps, Figures and Boxes;9
4;Acknowledgements;11
5;I) Multilevel Urban Governance: Origin, Core Issues, Current Debates;28
5.1;1. Theories of Urban Politics and Policies in a Changing Context;28
5.2;2. From Urban Government to Multilevel Urban Governance;51
5.3;3. Integrated Multilevel Urban Governance Analysis: Comparing Neostructuralist and Neo- Weberian Approaches;69
6;II) Metropolitan Governance Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki: An Indicator for Governance Transformations in Sweden and Finland;109
6.1;4. Explaining the Rationale of the Research Focus;109
6.2;5. The Nordic Countries: A Comprehensive Political and Societal Model;115
6.3;6. The Helsinki and Stockholm Regions in Context: Structural Characteristics, Recent Trends and New Challenges;148
6.4;7. Metropolitan Cooperation, Integration and Conflict: Comparing Modes of Governance in the Finnish and Swedish Capital Regions;170
6.5;8. Concluding Assessments;208
7;List of References;229

Multilevel Urban Governance: Origin, Core Issues, Current Debates.- Theories of Urban Politics and Policies in a Changing Context.- From Urban Government to Multilevel Urban Governance.- Integrated Multilevel Urban Governance Analysis: Comparing Neostructuralist and Neo-Weberian Approaches.- Metropolitan Governance Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki: An Indicator for Governance Transformations in Sweden and Finland.- Explaining the rationale of the research focus.- The Nordic Countries: A Comprehensive Political and Societal Model.- The Helsinki and Stockholm Regions in Context: Structural Characteristics, Recent Trends and New Challenges.- Metropolitan Cooperation, Integration and Conflict: Comparing Modes of Governance in the Finnish and Swedish Capital Regions.- Concluding Assessments.

Leseproben

II) Metropolitan Governance Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki: An Indicator for Governance Transformations in Sweden and Finland (S. 111-112)

4. Explaining the Rationale of the Research Focus

In the second main part of this work, I will apply the theoretical insights and synthesis outlined in part one to an empirical study of urban governance transformations in two Nordic capitals, Helsinki (Finland) and Stockholm (Sweden). It is designed to be a multilevel comparison which highlights the embeddedness of these cities in a broader Scandinavian (or ‘Nordic’), national and regional context. As far as the main research focus is concerned, I will concentrate on the currently ongoing debates on metropolitan reforms and intermunicipal cooperation in both capital regions and search for the most important policy fields and goals as well as for the actor coalitions and conflicts that play a significant part in shaping these debates.

I will examine currently prevailing modes of governance and thereby demonstrate that these contemporary governance struggles and transformations in Helsinki and Stockholm also mirror broader societal and political transformations in both countries. Finally, I will assess the extent to which neostructural and neo-Weberian hypotheses (chapter 3) can claim validity as far as the two cases of Helsinki and Stockholm are concerned. In this introductory part, however, it is first necessary to explain the rationale of my empirical comparison: Why is it that I have decided to compare the cities of Stockholm and Helsinki – and why do I consider the concentration on currently ongoing metropolitan reforms a particularly informative and illuminating research focus?

Why Compare Helsinki and Stockholm? While I immersed myself in numerous theoretical writings on (multilevel) urban governance and the ‘European City’ at the beginning of my dissertation project, it was the somewhat spongy character of the ‘European City’ concept (especially its unclear geographical scope of applicability and its questionable usefulness as a heuristic analytical tool) that increasingly began to puzzle me.

I became more and more aware that cities of Europe are still enframed by strikingly different national con texts (political systems, economic situation, welfare regimes, social structure etc.) and that this situation also makes for a remarkable heterogeneity in urban Europe which, in turn severely complicates a systematic comparison of European cities. In search of possible ways out of this dilemma, it occurred to me that it might be sensible and productive to subdivide Europe into several geopolitical entities, each of which would represent a more homogeneous context to the cities in its territory than the diffuse ‘European’ context.

On this basis, I hoped, the formulation of a more refined typology of cities within the confines of the rather fuzzy and broad concept of the ‘European City’ would finally emerge. In order to become clearer about the similarities and differences of sociopolitical arrangements throughout Western Europe and their geographical patterns, I started to focus on recent writings that have dealt with the most salient traits of European societies and have compared different ‘worlds’ of welfare capitalism within Europe (most notably Esping-Andersen 1991 and 1999, but also Kaufmann 2003, Kautto 2001 and Therborn 2000). However, I soon learned that in many cases it is has turned out to be hard to assign a group of nation states to a cluster of ‘welfare capitalism’ in a convincing way. In particular the attempts to unite several Western European countries under the label ‘conservative’ or ‘corporatist’ welfare regimes have repeatedly provoked serious opposition.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr. Nico Giersig promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Hartmut Häußermann am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Er ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl „Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt“ an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.