European dimension of metropolitan policies. Policy-learning and reframing of metropolitan Regions

摘要

'How is it possible to account for the transfer of spatial concepts, ideas and knowledge about metropolitan regions between contexts and scales in a multilevel European polity?' (78). This is the main question the book of Carola Fricke aims to address. The author aims to decipher the emergence of a 'European dimension' and variegated understanding of the metropolitan and related spatial concepts at both local, national and European scales. This is one of the main contributions of the book, which conceptualizes Europeanization of metropolitan policies as a circular process which cannot be resumed to the domestic impact of EU policies. In that regard processes of framing and learning from below deserve a closer analysis as it is developed in the book. The first three chapters are devoted to theoretical and methodological discussions. The author is particularly good at positioning the analysis at the crossroad of geography and policy-studies on policy-mobilities, with great analytical clarity that will be useful for a variety of courses in urban studies. The book is also remarkable because the author has devoted a specific section to epistemological discussion and its implications for research design and methods, by discussing notably the coding strategy followed for analyzing 'competing understanding of the metropolitan regions and related spatial concepts' drawn from a large variety of policy-documents and semi-structured interviews with experts. In that regard, the book provides a fine-grained and very well-documented analysis of both the institutional contexts and main collective actors of metropolitan policies and institutions in France and Germany in comparative perspective.