Metropolitan co-operation in Europe: Theoretical issues and perspectives for urban networking

In recent years urban entrepreneurialism has become a metropolitan strategy to cope with the challenges of an increasingly flexible global economy. Building on a debate about the problematic nature of this strategy we argue that co-operation of cities, or metropolitan co-operation, constitutes a new policy option for local actors which has the potential to overcome the negative effects of urban competition. In order to explore this potential we analyse the fundamental changes of the local state and existing co-operative efforts. This analysis shows that so far metropolitan co-operation is mainly experimental in character and a policy option that moves forward by trial and error and by learning from success and failure. We see this as partly due to a lack of an adequate theoretical framework dealing with the economics of urban systems. By way of synthesising different academic discourses we suggest a conceptualisation of metropolitan co-operation which takes into account the potential economic benefits and institutional requirements of co-operative behaviour of urban actors. Based on these considerations we establish criteria for suitable thematic fields of metropolitan co-operation and suggest forms of institutionalisation.