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Abstract
Over the past century, metropolitan regions have become the dominant economic units in global society. The multiple networks of organizations that govern growth in metropolises extend far beyond the geographic bounds of any particular region, and involve multiple levels of government. Large institutional networks are the emerging form of these multi-scalar interactions. That metropolitan region planning institutions are comprised of this new composite, termed multi-scalar large institutional networks (MSLIN), has implications for theory, practice, and research, because they evolve, learn, and act on emergent phenomena and via emergent processes in extraordinarily complex and dynamic settings in ways radically distinct from individual organizations and institutions. This article assesses institutional theory in this framework by examining metropolitan infrastructure planning in Madrid, Barcelona, and San Diego.
Notes
1. Technology is used in the sense ascribed by Thomas Hughes, Michel Foucault, and other historians of technology. Institutional technologies include laws, rules, regulations, codified procedures, budgets, plans, programs, enforcement, monitoring, etc.
2. Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space is salient in the realm of city building and planning (Lefebvre, Citation1991). This issue is partly philosaphical. How things “present themselves” and how context informs meaning is understood in a phenomenological sense by Philosophers such as Heidegger, as explicated in this essay “The Questions Concerning Technology” (Heidegger, Citation1977). A full exposition would warrant a separate essay.
3. An accurate and up-to-date metropolitan government census that indicates the number of metropolitan areas around the world, and the nature and number of their government institutions, is a worthy project.
4. This being said, multivariate performance criteria that assess dynamic conditions using simultaneous equations are being developed in regional planning. See Reilly, Citation1997; Center for Urban Policy Research, Citation2000; Landis, Citation2001.
5. The types of multi-scalar governance network changes addressed in this paper have been called “trans-scalar” (Governa & Salone, Citation2004, p. 796). In other disciplines, “free scale” networks (Andersson et al., Citation2003; Barabási & Albert, Citation1999) and “complex networks” (Andersson et al., Citation2006) have been identified.
6. Internet Architecture Board, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and Internet Engineering Task Force; operating under the umbrella of the International Telecommunications Union, and delegating tasks to the Root Services Oversight Board.
7. Digital terrain modelling as both a visualization and analytical technique is advanced in many disciplines, including video animation, genetics, mathematics (topology), landscape ecology, biological ecology, astrophysics, and meteorology.
8. Interview by the author with Ignacio Solana, 20 September 1994.
9. The Barcelona model is a result of a two decade long marathon of planning-led civic improvements focusing on high quality public space from the mid 1980s to the present. The model has been exported to other Spanish, European, and Latin-American cities. Less cited is the use of urban design as basis of all urban planning, and the fact that all urban planners are architects by training. Urban planning in the Barcelona model entails the integration of urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture with infrastructure planning. Other aspects of the Barcelona model involve the explicit and active engagement of city hall in planning (the city planning department's 2004 budget exceeded $52 million, plus over $10 million more that district offices spend on planning) and multi-sectoral citizen and interest group cooperation and collaboration in planning, which reaches high levels of involvement. The prestige of architecture and urban planning as a profession rivals if not exceeds that of law, medicine, and even university professors.
10. It was created by national decree in the last year of the dictatorship.
11. Research in Barcelona and Madrid was conducted while the author was resident for almost four years in situ spanning 1992 to 2005, conducting hundreds of in-depth interviews with protagonists and stakeholders, analysing hundreds of original, archival, and secondary documents, attending scores of meetings, joining several citizen-based organizations as participant-observer, and canvassing the cities on nearly every mode of transport: foot, rollerblade, bicycle, car, metro, bus, funicular, plane, surfboard, and sailboat.
12. The ballot box system is a Voter referendum popular in California in which urban planning proposals, including plans, regulations, and zoning, are submitted to popular referenda. Thus plans are subject to binding voter approval, during periodic public elections.
13. This hypothesis is based on a scan of metropolitan planning in Europe and North America (Katz, Citation2000; Albrechts, Healey, & Kunzmann, Citation2003).
14. While this article has focused on practice, a new mode of prospective institutional research with rigorous research designs and more exacting analytical methods stands to become the norm if our understanding is to go beyond descriptive explanation (Adyer et al., Citation2003) to tackle the complexity of MSLINs and practices within them. This sort of knowledge will surely be multidimensional and multidisciplinary in its shape and scope.