Metropolitan Fragmentation as an Evolutionary Process.

Proponents of metropolitan fragmentation argue that greater inter-city competition compels local governments to better match the services they provide to the needs of their residents, and to supply those services more efficiently. On the other hand, a number of authors have argued that metropolitan fragmentation leads to a socio-economic "sorting," in which some cities, often outlying suburban municipalities, became middle- and upper-class enclaves, while other cities, often the older ones that form the central core of a metropolitan region, become repositories of the lower class. Both sides of this debate treat metropolitan fragmentation in temporally static terms of the equity or efficiency of local service delivery. Building on research from the New York metropolitan region, my paper instead makes use of historical institutionalist models to understand metropolitan fragmentation as an intermediary process in which urban services are not merely conceived of as things that might be provided efficiently or inefficiently in an equitable or inequitable manner, but also as evolutionary processes that transform the context in which they were formulated. Understanding metropolitan fragmentation as an evolutionary process is an extension of the classic urban ecological model while it also provides a new vantage point for viewing institutional constraints to the local policy process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]