appeared to move out and housing became increasingly pressing issue. Cycles of suband reurbanisation (van den Berg et al., 1982) combined with the attempts of regeneration and gentrification kick-in a high rate between the city and its surrounding area. Many aspects of the nature of this continuous change have been analysed in numerous academic sources in the last decades: Hall wrote about Stockholm’s General plan, the Schéma-Directour in Paris, the Fingerplan in Copenhagen, about the different ways of the Germany’s Landschaftsverbaude and Austria’s Umlands as advisory planning associations (2014). Van den Berg, van Klink and van der Meer reported on governance and planning Antwerp, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Lille, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Strasbourg, Valencia (1993); in Healy et al. (1997) looked at the Oresund Region, Lyon, Madrid, Lisbon, Zurich, Hordaland and Bergen, Friesland, Lancashire; Healy analysed the practice of Amsterdam and the Randstad, the La Grande Milano concept in Milan and the Cambridge Sub-Region (2007). The academic literature is much more extensive the EU efforts could also be mentioned to understand the metropolitan governance and territorial developments here starting with the ESDP (CEC, 1999) up to forming of research centres such as the ESPON European Spatial Planning Observatory Network –or the METREX, the Network of European Metropolitan Regions and Areas and their publications. 4.4.
Comparing planning in different city-regions
The selection of the case studies are based on the recently published Metro in Progress report (Roundtable Brussels, 2013) and the URBACT initiative’s Metrogov research (Tosics et al., 2007) each studying 8 metropolitan areas respectively. To get a comparable status I narrowed the selection by choosing metropolitan areas with population level closer to the for a potential city-region level based on the functional urban area as suggested by Tosics (2008). Another filter applied was to show governance structures and planning agents on different levels while acknowledging their individual circumstances. The finally selected of 4 metropolitan areas are: Stuttgart, Greater Manchester, Copenhagen and Malmo, Bucharest (Table 4). The research showed that metropolises – city-regions often form without formal instruments and competences to respond to social challenges at a metropolitan scale. Different governance structures were applied with different planning power delegation and representation in the individual cases. Private sector is increasingly becoming a 38