Administrative, morphological and functional urban regions AndMetropolitan governance

Christian Vandermotten

Urbact, Lille, 12th February 2010

Institut de Gestion de l’Environnement et d’Aménagement du Territoire

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Faculté des Sciences

MUA (morphological urban area) and FUA (functional urban area) vs. Administrative limits

• MUA : contiguous municipalities with more than 650 inhab./sq. km

• FUA : employment basin (> 10 % of the occupied active residents commuting towards the employment center)

Stuttgart

Population (thousands, 2001)

• Stadtkreis : 585

• MUA : 1 703

• FUA : 2 878

Torino

Population (thousands, 2001)

• Municipality : 857

• MUA : 1 308

• FUA : 2 059

A more complex pattern is occuring when big FUAs are joining or overlapping, mainly in badly structured urban

systems, without strong historical core (e.a. : former coal-mining conurbations), or in trans-border FUAs

The Belgian central metropolitan area

Population (thousands, 2001)

• (City of Brussels : 137)

• Brussels-Capital Region : 978

• Brussels MUA : 1 498

• Brussels FUA (including the secundary MUAs of Leuven and Aalst) : 2 933

• All the FUAs of the central metropolitan area : 5 000

Lille transborder metropolitan area

Population (thousands, 2001)

• (City of Lille : 185)

• Communauté urbaine (Urban Community) : 1090

• Lille MUA : 925

• Lille FUA : 1 274

• All the FUAs of the Lille and former coal-mining basin, including the Belgian side :

3 103

Ostrava basin

Population (thousands, 2001)

• City of Ostrava : 317

• Ostrava MUA : 365

• Ostrava FUA : 605

• All the FUAs of the basin :

1 035

The basis of the problem of the territoriality of the metropolitan governance :

1. The consequences of the social inequalities inside the metropolitan area

2. The territorial frames of the legitimacy of the democratic representation

The income evolution : growing disparities between the Region and its periurban fringe

(Evolution of the average income/ inhab. - belgium = 100)

Some questions imposing a coherent frame at the scale of the metropolitan FUAs to solve the

contradictions

• Mobility

• Environmental matters

• Economical matters

• Social cohesion

Mobility : more commuters, from further, towards Brussels-Capital Region

32 % 60 % 57 % 314 000 1991

28 %49 %51 %283 0001981

25 %34 %38 %246 0001970

13 %10 %25 %137 0001947

13 %……27 0001910

4 %……9 0001896

% commuting from > 50 km

% using private transports

% of the regional employment

Commuters

Mobility

• Highways piercing the urban fabric and motormays politics vs. Urban life quality and keeping the inhabitants inside the city

• The logics of the Regional railways express systems : urban, periurban or national ?

• The question of the urban tolls

The environmental matters

• Managing the water by basin

• Managing the periurban green areas : metropolitan and central urban area logics vs. Periurban municipalities logics

The economical matters

• The problem of the manufacturing delocalisations is out-dated

• The shopping competitions

• The competitions for the location of offices (which is also a mobility matter)

The social cohesion

• Between the central city and its periphery, but also between the central city various municipalities : how managing the question of the deprived populations ; bottom-up or top-down social mixity ?

To summarize, the challenges of the success of the dense city

• An addition of municipalities

• An addition of municipalities, more or less cooperating together

• Specific cooperations for specific objectives

• Metropolitan bodies with a two-steps representation

• Metropolitan bodies with a direct representation

• Successive mergings

• National bodies

And how managing the citizens' participation when the local power is further away ?

The challenges of the urban democracy :

– Which is (are) the scale (s) of the democratic legitimacy ?

– Which legitimacy for the citizens' associations and the local associations ?

– Which scale(s) for consultative or deliberative bodies ?

– The risks of the two-steps representation– At which scale deciding the tax-levels ?– Which representation for the foreigners at the

local level ?