Year
2020
Authors
DEQUEKER Edouard, STORPER Michael
Abstract
Doctoral thesis Sociology Paris, Institute of Political Studies 2020, under the supervision of Michael Storper: In the actual context of unprecedented mass-urbanization, understanding the set of forces shaping the unequal growth and decline of cities has structured different academic streams, each of which providing additional pieces to the puzzle. While New Economic Geography (NEG) and Regional Science and Urban Economics (RSUE) convincingly highlighted the role of technological and economic forces in the agglomeration of activities, the literature on urban governance has so far not significantly contributed to explaining the differentiated growth of cities. By focusing on Paris and London under the Third Industrial Revolution (1990-2017), two superstar cities and the only West-European megacities, this thesis aims at exploring the link between their comparative metropolitan dynamics and their respective governance systems. It first establishes a comprehensive quantitative spatial, demographic and socioeconomic diagnosis for their trajectories, highlighting commonalities and key differences. These differences are the effective dependent variable of the thesis, which then establishes the key ways that governance explains these observed variations. Through an analysis of the governance of planning and a comparative case study of institutional actors and business associations, it then investigates the way in which each system of interrelations and notably of public-private interactions contributes to producing and reproducing the different developmental trajectories of the two regions. Not based on a parsimonious econometric proof but on a sensitive historical and qualitative analysis backed by statistics, this work supports the hypothesis that the “economic governance” of cities, defined as forms of soft-institutionalizations of public-private relations, in a faithful filiation with neo-institutional economics, plays a complementary and catalyst role in metropolitan dynamics.
DEQUEKER, E. (2020). Paris and London: metropolitan dynamics and economic governances (1990-2017), Thèse de doctorat réalisée sous la Direction de Michael Storper et soutenue le 4 septembre 2020 à l’Ecole Doctorale de Sciences Po Paris, Paris: France.