Evaluation and Introducing Effective Models of Regionalism for Integrated Governing of Iran's Metropolitan Regions

The recognition of metropolitan regions as well as the question of appropriate and effective institutions and structures for the governance of them has been a serious intellectual concern for nearly a century. These pioneering metropolitan scholars argued that the management of contemporary metropolitan areas based on the ideas, methods, structures, and institutions of traditional urban management were no longer effective. A great deal of governmental reorganizations should take place in these areas to address the managerial inefficiencies of these new space realms. The argument for governmental reorganizations and establishing large-scale metropolitan governments was based on the belief that the process of physical growth and development of twentieth century cities has transcended the boundaries of traditional political divisions in such a way that the city and the political boundaries of the historic municipality no longer correspond even to the territory of the built-up urban area. In other words, the city and the built-up urban areas with its horizontal expansion covers a much wider range of traditional political divisions of the municipality and even larger political territories such as county and districts, and this means that there is no correspondence between the built-up territory of the city and its political and governmental organization. This non-compliance poses the greatest managerial challenge for this type of large urban regions, known as political or governmental fragmentation. On the other hand, metropolitan regionalism generally refers to a set of strategies aimed at overcoming the challenge of political and governmental fragmentation. As the metropolitan scholars emphasize, all kinds of strategies and models of metropolitan regionalism are in fact a response to the growth of urban areas beyond the usual administrative-political boundaries, during which the metropolitan areas or regions transcends political boundaries of tens or hundreds of cities, counties and districts. Hence, the discussion of governance organization in metropolitan areas in the form of various models and strategies of regionalism has been a topic that has been raised at the same time with the beginning of the first dispersal of cities and sprawl beyond conventional legal-political boundaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All strategies of metropolitan regionalism seek to create a variety of structures or processes to create coordination, cooperation and collaboration between the various territorial and institutional actors in the region in order to mitigate the adverse economic, social, political and environmental effects of political fragmentation. In the last two decades, from when the issue of metropolitan regionalism in Iran was discussed with the approval of the bill "Planning and management of the Majmooe-a-shahri of Tehran (Tehran metropolitan regions) and other major cities" in 1995, governments and academics have developed various models and strategies to overcome the challenge of political fragmentation in metropolitan areas, although almost none have been implemented. Reviews show that in a significant part of the proposed models for reorganizing the government of these areas, the specific spatial and political context of metropolitan areas in Iran have been less considered and therefore, in terms of theoretical and practical criteria for action in any governmental reorganization, the proposals presented suffer from methodological errors. For example, for the integrated management of the country's metropolitan areas, a two-tier (federal) metropolitan government model has been proposed, which has been used in the world to overcome political fragmentation in the built-up urban or metropolitan area, not huge functional urban regions that are very different from the former in terms of geographical definition and functional requirements. This methodological error is mostly due to the lack of sufficient consideration for the nature of different types of city-based regions on the one hand and not so deep knowledge of regionalism models and political and functional requirements of their implementations on the other hand. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to find those models of metropolitan regionalism that are in relative proportion with the geographical definition of metropolitan regions (majmoo-e-shahri) as well as the characteristics of local and regional territorial management of the country.

For achieving our purpose, various models of metropolitan regionalism are examined in order to show the scope of their application - in terms of spatial-territorial, political and functional requirements of each. So, after a concise discussion of the reasons for dealing with metropolitan regionalism, discusses the various well-known typologies of metropolitan regionalism and provides a detailed list of main models of metropolitan regionalism. In the following, the appropriateness and effectiveness of each of the models of metropolitan regionalism in terms of two major definitions of "city", one in the sense of urban or metropolitan built-up area and the other in the sense of urban or metropolitan functional region are examined. 

The research findings show that among the different models discussed in this paper three models, namely annexation, local and regional special districts and formal inter-municipal cooperation have been used in Iran before. However, the important point is that, apart from local and regional special districts, the other two models are used to consolidate territorial governance in urban or metropolitan built-up area rather than whole of a large metropolitan region. Other three models, two-tiered metropolitan government, comprehensive urban county, and city-county consolidation are also used to consolidate territorial governance in urban or metropolitan built-up areas or small urban regions within a county borders. The two models of regional councils as well as regional government are the only models and structures that by definition can cover the whole of a large metropolitan region frequencies.

The intellectual contribution of this paper is to show which model will have the most effectiveness to establish unity in the governance of large metropolitan regions. Here, by examining the spatial extent and functional spectrum of different models of regionalism, it is clear that two models of regional councils as well as regional government are the only models and structures that by definition can cover the whole of a large metropolitan region.