What Metropolitan Issues Contribute to Global Urban Policy. Comparing Discourses on Governance, Scales, and Spaces

The metropolitan dimension has become a relevant scale for both global urban policies and multilevel governance strategies. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how the metropolitan issue, as a category of regionalism, is constructed discursively and if and how this issue leads the nexus between global urban policy and multilevel governance. The chapter explores metropolitan space as a non-neutral outcome of the political process, specifically in New Urban Agenda discourses, with the assumption that the object of the analysis is not a unitary phenomenon and it does not represent an ontologically defined category. The focus on and the investigation of the vocabulary of the metropolitan scale aim at challenging the academic debate and the public action by facing the complexity of regional and local socio-spatial dynamics. The chapter takes a constructivist approach to metropolitan space by focusing on discourses and representations rather than only on institutional variables.