Steering the Metropolis - Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development

A distinctive feature of urbanization in the last 50 years is the expansion of urban populations and built development well beyond what was earlier conceived as the city limit, resulting in metropolitan areas. This is challenging the relevance of traditional municipal boundaries, and by extension, traditional governing structures and institutions. This event launches the book Steering the Metropolis: Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development, published in 2017 by the Inter-American Bank in collaboration with academia and other international development organizations. Contributing authors will present the key messages and reflect on the underlying premises for governing metropolitan areas, discuss sectoral adaptations of those premises, and share case study experiences from a wide variety of contexts. Participants will gain an understanding of: 1) the conceptual underpinnings of metropolitan governance, analyzing why political, technical, and administrative arrangements at this level of government are needed; 2) the relevance of the metropolitan scale for addressing the challenges of urban mobility, land use planning, environmental management, and economic production, as well as crosscutting topics of financing metropolitan governance and monitoring and evaluation; and 3) how those concepts and their sectoral adaptations play out against the practice, with cases from Asia, Europe, Africa and America