The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-Regions Cannot Be Self-Governing (review)

Andrew Sancton has long been concerned with urban government, and this book represents a distillation of that concern. His mastery of the subject allows him to guide us through many examples and ideas, using crisp and clear language, and a minimum of jargon. Though Professor Sancton is a political scientist (at Western Ontario), he acknowledges contributions to the topic from geographers, historians, economists, and sociologists, and he thoroughly appraises all academic arguments and theories against “real issues and problems in real cities” (p. xii).

The book is intended for a broad audience of “informed citizens,” urbanists, politicians, and administrators, and is concerned to devise effective structures for the governance of city-regions. Sancton’s thesis is that metropolitan areas in our modern liberal democracies “will not and cannot be self-governing” (p. 3). Their territorial boundaries change constantly and are always contested, severely limiting their capacity for effective self-government. Of course, the term self-government can be defined in different ways in relation to sovereign states, federal states, or full-functional municipal governments, and Sancton explores each of these variants. The plan of the book is not entirely satisfactory, however, in that the focus see-saws between these three levels, and the key concern of boundary delimitation is treated in a fragmentary and somewhat repetitive fashion. The bulk of the book concerns municipal forms of metropolitan government, with Toronto given pride-of-place as an extended case study of the issues.

Chapter 1 examines the ideas of certain influential urbanist writers concerning city-regions. Arguments for the city-region as a natural or at least a rational unit of self-government have been advanced by various writers, and the works of Jane Jacobs, Alan Broadbent, Warren Magnusson, and Gerald Frug are given particular attention. Jacobs argued for city-regions primarily on economic grounds, and felt that they should be sufficiently autonomous to support their own currencies. This requirement alone makes her ideas highly unrealistic, but she has been influential nevertheless: the Greater Toronto Charter of 2001 owes much to her thinking, as does Alan Broadbent’s advocacy of provincial status for Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Highly autonomous city-regions, such as sovereign city-states or subnational federal units, are created only in unusual circumstances, as Chapters 2 and 4 make clear. Secession from nation-states occurs infrequently, and then typically through war and on the basis of ethnic solidarity. Singapore as a city-state appears to be an exception, but its secession from Malaysia was caused primarily by ethnic tensions and rendered possible by its island location. Secession of city-regions from the constituent units of federal states is also very rare, since federal constitutions either disallow it or place great obstacles in the way of approval. Since the Second World War, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain have all allowed division, amalgamation, or secession of their federal units, but only the special cases of Brussels and Madrid can be viewed as city-regions.

In considering Canada (and with Toronto most in mind), Sancton notes three great difficulties to the realization of city-regions with the status and stature of provinces (Chap. 4). The first is what he terms “the remnant problem,” though the analogy of the hole in the donut also comes to mind. A metropolis such as Toronto is the focal point for an extensive and economically dynamic region, which acts as a functional and meaningful unit. Without the central metropolis, the rest of southern and central Ontario would be but a remnant, with no focus and no meaningful cohesion. Logically, this problem could be solved by creating further city-regions (e.g., for London and Ottawa), but there would be great imbalance, and besides, much of northern Ontario is beyond the orbit of any large city.

A second difficulty also relates to boundaries: they become outdated. Larger and more dynamic cities typically expand their spheres of influence at the expense of smaller neighbours...