To grasp the depth of the challenges facing many American metropolitan areas (“metros”) today, it is necessary to consider these metros in the context of the laws and policies that have helped to form them. After all, although agglomerations of human population have existed in a more or less organic form for thousands of years, the modern American city is, in many ways, a deliberately planned and constructed political entity. As the apex of the built human environment, urban landscapes encompass and reflect our needs, our desires, our aspirations, and our struggles. These motivating forces shape policy, policy shapes our cities, and the cities we live in contribute considerably to shaping our lives.
Although the city is a place where many different things exist in close physical proximity, it can also be a place of stark division. Nowhere are human contrasts more clearly displayed. While this diversity of perspective, culture, and experience can be a great asset, it has also proven itself a significant obstacle to constructive policymaking. Cities are places of tremendously concentrated wealth and power, on one hand, and nearly unimaginable poverty and destitution on the other. As urban areas have grown spatially, the division between these classes has grown as well. By the end of the 20th Century, many American metros consisted of a blighted and crumbling urban core surrounded by much more modern and affluent suburbs. This pattern, in some ways, reflects the aggregated effects of a multitude of individual choices. However, it is also the result of some controversial planning and policy decisions, many of which have had consequences that were neither predicted nor desired.
The unchecked proliferation of individual municipalities within many metros has proven to be a persistent obstacle to successful regional integration; as local government structure exists today, these municipalities are often incentivized to compete with each other for investment, business, and tax revenue. Such local interests often conflict, particularly in the short term, with broader regional goals. A more holistic view increasingly embraced by urban theorists takes better account of the potential value of inter-municipal cooperation. Metropolitan inter-municipal revenue sharing is a particularly promising example of this type of regional cooperation.