From Urban Government to Multilevel Urban Governance

Abstract

At present, the quest for developing more systematic analyses of urban politics and policies mainly takes place within the bounds of what we can refer to as debates on multilevel urban governance. The preceding chapter already addressed one crucial component of these debates, namely the requirement to conduct research which is multilevel in character: Given the profound socioeconomic upheavals and the restructuring of state power throughout the Western world, we have to explore the changing role of cities as politically relevant actors within a dynamic and multilayered context in a non-deterministic way. In other words, one paramount challenge for contemporary urban political studies lies in understanding the connectivity between different levels of power (Salet et al. 2003: 389; Herrschel and Newman 2002: 25).