Governing the Mega Urban Agglomerations of the BRICS: Failures, Success and Lessons.

Abstract

Far-reaching political and economic transitions since the 1980s have induced composite changes within the urban agglomerations of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and other countries within the ‘emerging economy’ category. These agglomerations have become larger, more complex, more spatially diffuse, and more varied. The changes are the product of an entangled relationship between politics, economic process, regulatory regime, the material production of the built environment, and more, across intersected scales. The paper explores, through a comparative lens, the dual process of material expansion and reconfiguration, and of governance formation. The paper shows, first, how limited our current analytical constructs (e.g. ‘metropolitan regions’, ‘city regions’, ‘mega regions’, ‘agglomerations’) are against the scale, diversity, layering and interconnectedness of recent territorial formation. It argues, secondly, that there are in fact governance responses in all countries of the BRICS to the enhanced complexity of the urban composite. There is an ongoing tension between the processes of material change which are stretching the urban, and diffusing boundaries, and the requisites of governance, which require some level of bounding but, there are, nevertheless, intriguing pointers from the BRICS to governance practices that may accommodate or mitigate this tension. This paper draws insights from the failures and successes of city region governance across the BRICS for other contexts of complex and expanded urban spatial formation, including along the west coast of Africa.