The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-Regions Cannot be Self-Governing.

Lightbody, James

The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-Regions Cannot be Self-Governing

By ANDREW SANCTON. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 173, bibliographical references, index.

Let us get a few small things out of the way. For a few centuries now it has been cities that have generated the wealth of more developed nations. Stand-alone cottage craft entrepreneurialism has yielded to an era of integrated multinational economic, intellectual and political activity. Global urbanization is inexorable; the populace of prosperous city-regions has spilled across historically fixed boundary lines but commerce and people have continued to expect the sort of public services traditionally associated with municipal administration. Concurrently, the art of municipal governing, always inherently messy in its institutional expression, has become somewhat more complex in response.

If in this concise volume Professor Sancton had simply assumed that all this is pretty much understood, then he might have moved directly to explore, more clearly and with just a little bit of fresh research, the economic, population, jurisprudential and spatial basis for local self-governing in the twenty-first (or twentieth) century and not in the nineteenth (or ninth). Instead, he appears genuinely perplexed by the continuing capacity of leadership in the urban regimes of the world's advanced city-regions (he includes Toronto) to manage institutional adaptation to their changed circumstances. He does, however, agree with the proposition that "city-states are the wave of the future" (p. 35).

The Sancton hypothesis is simple enough: "[C]ities in Western liberal democracies will not and cannot be self-governing. Self-government requires that there be a territory delimited by official boundaries [and city] boundaries will never be static" (p. 3). As an exception, Singapore and its static boundaries are frequently cited throughout despite a somewhat cautious embrace of Western liberal democratic principles. In the beginning, Sancton creates his canon that "the exceptions will help us understand the general rule" (p. 6), and his principal exceptions, apart from Singapore, are Brussels, Madrid, Copenhagen and Berlin, which are all national capitals. Disappointingly, this triggers neither curiosity about that pattern nor any interest in Washington (D.C.), Canberra or Brasilia.

The problem for Sancton is essentially sustained confusion that is grounded in his flexibly imprecise definition of "self-government" and its synonyms. It warbles from absolute sovereignty (pp. 23, 67,100) to a kind of taxonomy (pp. 32, 38,108,133) as his argument and secondary sources dictate. Why not concede that whenever a city derives its legitimacy from an exogenous authority it cannot, by definition, be sovereign, accept that boundaries do not drive sovereignty, and let Charlemagne rest in peace (pp. 37, 134)? The research question could then be productively re-phrased so as to explore the bare requisites of relative autonomy for communities in an integrated age.

The Sancton method is familiar. The brand is a kind of academic strip-mining in which the author proceeds seriatim from a narrow range of selected works, cherry-picks the observations congenial to his investigation, and draws his own "bold" conclusion. For instance, in Chapter two, we learn that "[c]reating new boundaries for national entities is a politically perilous undertaking, and most politicians avoid it" (p. 55). Or, in Chapter four, the lesson is that "[a]dvocates of the secession of cities from existing jurisdictions receive little support from political philosophers" (p. 101, emphasis added). Sources cited in the latter chapter, apart from Warren Magnusson and Robert Young, include Jim Faught, Mel Lastman and Wikipedia but none of the persons more conventionally thought of as philosophers in the western liberal democratic tradition. Where Sancton's sources are silent on the detail of the subject matter, the author himself is either mute or retreats into the western hemisphere (north of the Rio Grande) and cites himself (p. 105ff).

From previous work, Sancton continues with his Man of La Mancha quest to rout unnamed but apparently still persistent "consolidationist" antagonists (pp. 21, 63, 89). He flogs other dead horses throughout, but especially the Public Choice staple that a government may provide service without producing it (pp. 110-111). Sancton's preferred governing solution for world cities is exactly what he has favoured in Canada, as presented in his 1994 monograph, Governing Canada's City-Regions. For him, city-regional governing is best accomplished via multiple special purpose districts with functionally specific boundaries (p. 108). Sancton has, however, progressed to conceding that the time for two-tier metropolitan federations has probably passed (p. 5), and he notes, "I have ... expressed my belief that central governments are the authorities best placed to make strategic decisions about future public infrastructure in their major city-regions" (p. 111). Because this reviewer made precisely these points in this Journal in 1997, amour-propre impels him to observe that he does not receive the scholarly courtesy of an attribution.

Be that as it may, the extent of Professor Sancton's twenty-first century Pauline conversion is recorded in his book's brief chapter on the Toronto-centred region, which is clearly influenced by Alan Broadbent's recent Urban Nation (HarperCollins Canada, 2008). After flirting with Broadbent's notion of a new "Province of Toronto," Sancton doubtless gives comfort to senior provincial officials (and to academics who abhor constitutional change) when he acknowledges that such an innovation flies in the face of a setting in which the Ontario Government acts as planner-in-chief for the "Greater Golden Horseshoe." Wave of the future though they may be, city-regions can indeed not be self-governing.

James Lightbody is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta.