Since the beginning of the 1990s, capacity of area-wide governance in urban regions is seen to rely increasingly on issue-oriented networks that associate public authorities from various levels of government, and often also business actors and other non-governmental agencies. The purpose of this project is to assess this trend towards ‘new regionalism’, through an analysis of the ways in which the conditions, the structures and the democratic anchorage of area-wide governance have changed in seven Swiss metropolitan areas during the 20th century. The research is guided by three basic questions: How have socio-political cleavages changed in the metropolitan areas under scrutiny? How has governance of these areas changed? How have patterns of decision making regarding metropolitan policies changed? The project combines quantitative and qualitative methods. On the one hand, longitudinal quantitative demographic, socio-economic and electoral data at the communal level will be collected and analysed for each metropolitan area. On the other hand, comparative case studies will be conducted on the change of urban public transport policies in these areas.
