Cities in Transition: Growth, Change and Governance in Six Metropolitan Areas.

Sancton, Andrew

Cities in Transition: Growth, Change and Governance in Six Metropolitan Areas By NIRMALA RAO. London and New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. xi, 193, bibliographical references, index.

Cities in Transition is a fine book by an urban scholar who has written extensively about urban government in England, especially London. In her latest book, Nirmala Rao single-handedly takes on six quite distinct city-regions: London, Tokyo, Toronto, Berlin, Hyderabad, and Atlanta. Her prose is clear and readily accessible to academic and practitioner alike.

In some ways, Rao's book reminds me of H.V. Savitch and Paul Kantor's Cities in the International Marketplace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Savitch and Kantor focused their attention on ten different cities in five countries. Interestingly for Canadians, Toronto is the only case common to both books. Both books share a common problem, which I will outline below. Unlike Savitch and Kantor, Rao produces no confusing three-dimensional figures in which cities are slotted into various cubes. Rao's readers must rely on the narrative and appreciate her ability to describe and analyse relatively subtle distinctions between one city and another.

Both books are concerned with linking government and politics at the local level to wider issues about the role of global cities in a global economy. In my view, neither is completely successful in establishing this link, but I will focus on Rao's for the simple reason that hers is the subject of this review.

On the first page, Rao states that "[t]his book is about how six cities are coping with ... pressures of growth and change, adapting their structures and processes and endeavouring to position themselves in the league tables of world cities." These "league tables" clearly derive from the literature on global cities, because immediately after this statement Rao uses three pages to describe the literature on the subject, complete with the expected references to concentrations of corporate headquarters and high-level financial services and to "polarising changes in labour markets." These are all very real phenomena.

The question is the extent to which they are determined by local government and politics. Rao must assume that they are, because that is what she writes about in each of her case studies. But we really learn very little, if anything at all, about what governments at any level have done, say, to maintain and enhance London's position as a centre for world banking, or to promote Toronto's position in North American banking. Nor do we learn much about the labour and immigration legislation--or its enforcement--which must surely be connected to how labour markets work.

The reason we don't read about such things is because this book is really about the traditional concerns of local government: infrastructure and land-use planning and the creation of institutions to make policy for these matters over the wider territory of the city-region. Of course, financial institutions need locations for their office buildings, and their employees need to have affordable housing in a clean environment and to be able to get to and from work efficiently. But such concerns were the focus of local government long before anyone was concerned with global cities.

Cities in Transition is for the connoisseur of the fine points of city governance, not for the student of global cities. As someone who aspires to be one of the former, I learned a great deal from this book. The discussion of Hyderabad was especially valuable because it was my first exposure to the politics and government of a major city in India.

I must admit, however, to paying special attention to the chapter on Toronto. I really wanted to know what a cosmopolitan Londoner had to say about the city that occupies the attention of so many Canadians. Rao has clearly done her homework and spoken to the right people. There are nonetheless a few comments that are cause for concern. The first comes during the introductory overview in the first chapter, when she claims without any reference that "[i]n terms of engagement with the global economy ... Toronto remains at a competitive disadvantage relative to the US border cities of Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago" (p. 10). Ouch! Cleveland? Detroit? What did Toronto do to deserve this company? Why is her assessment so different from that of Savitch and Kantor? Detroit is one of their cases, and Toronto beats it handily.

In the Toronto chapter itself, Rao suggests wrongly that some Canadian cities have city charters that enable them to "enjoy some powers in their own right" that are somehow legally distinct from other provincial powers delegated to municipalities. She writes that the provincially designated Greater Golden Horseshoe goes as far north as Sudbury, when it fact it stops just north of Barrie and does not include the districts of Muskoka and Parry Sound, let alone Sudbury. In her discussion of recent efforts to attain more taxation authority for Toronto, she states that the province was "willing to devolve taxing powers to the city as part of a new deal and handover to Toronto a share of the provincial revenue that reflected the buoyancy of the economy--income or sales tax" (p. 91). Of course, in the end, these were precisely the taxes that the province was not willing to devolve.

Rao makes note of a "civic engagement initiative" launched in 1999 when Mel Lastman was still mayor. Outsiders reading Rao's chapter are left with the impression that this initiative had some kind of lasting impact. In reality, it is doubtful now that anyone other than its authors would be aware of its existence. There are many pages on the old two-tier metro system and on the creation and operation of the megacity. Surprisingly, for a chapter that contains a section on "Toronto as a global city," there is no mention of successful efforts to renew Toronto's cultural facilities or of the largely unsuccessful ones to revitalize the waterfront. Could this be because the main institutions of municipal government are not the main players on these issues?

In writing about six quite different cities, Rao obviously had to make hundreds of important decisions about what to include and what to omit. It is not entirely clear how she made these decisions, apart from being guided by published accounts and talking with informed local observers. The Toronto chapter certainly suggests that she has read just about everything written recently about local politics in Toronto. It seems, therefore, that her decisions were based largely on the availability of local material, supplemented of course by her own detailed knowledge of at least some of the six cities. The end result is an informed, readable book that is somewhat lacking in systematic comparative analysis.

Savitch and Kantor were much more disciplined in asking common questions for each city and painstakingly presenting their answers in a way that facilitated systematic comparisons by way of such devices as their three-dimensional figures and complicated flow charts. For those who prefer that kind of approach, Rao's book could well be a minor disappointment. But for people who want a sophisticated introduction by a remarkable guide to local politics and government in six diverse cities, Cities in Transition is the book to read.

Andrew Sancton is a professor of political science, University of Western Ontario, and director of its Local Government Program.