Dr. Nico Giersig promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Hartmut Häußermann am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Er ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl "Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt" an der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Urban scholars have come up with very different answers to the question of what the main defining characteristics of urban Europe are and whether they can be described in a distinct ideal-typical model, the 'European City'. In order to fully understand the prevailing political arrangements and ongoing transformations in urban Europe, they have increasingly turned towards 'multilevel governance approaches' to conduct more comprehensive and comparative analyses of urban politics and policies. Nico Giersig reflects on these debates and exemplifies the specificities of Nordic cities within Europe as a whole. He accomplishes this by means of a systematic comparison of governance arrangements and their dynamics in two Nordic capital regions.

Multilevel Urban Governance: Origin, Core Issues, Current Debates.- Theories of Urban Politics and Policies in a Changing Context.- From Urban Government to Multilevel Urban Governance.- Integrated Multilevel Urban Governance Analysis: Comparing Neostructuralist and Neo-Weberian Approaches.- Metropolitan Governance Reforms in Stockholm and Helsinki: An Indicator for Governance Transformations in Sweden and Finland.- Explaining the rationale of the research focus.- The Nordic Countries: A Comprehensive Political and Societal Model.- The Helsinki and Stockholm Regions in Context: Structural Characteristics, Recent Trends and New Challenges.- Metropolitan Cooperation, Integration and Conflict: Comparing Modes of Governance in the Finnish and Swedish Capital Regions.- Concluding Assessments.

"The question is no longer simply what autonomy actually is for local authorities within the state, but rather what capacity territories have to become collective actors of European governance. " (Le Galès 2002: 235) This book is designed to be an empirical and theoretical contribution to debates on currently changing forms of urban policies and politics in Western Europe. To put it differently, the issue of multilevel urban governance analysis can be found at the heart of this work. Undoubtedly, political decision making in and for cities as well as the academic reflection upon it have been in flux throughout recent decades - and in most instances, these changes have been associated with all-encompassing mac- structural transformations that have left their imprint in virtually all Western Eu- pean countries. For example, discussing phenomena such as the crisis of 'Fordism' and 'national Keynesianism' or the rise of economic globalization, urban scholars have come to ask what these shifts might imply for the political role of cities. Some have claimed that cities are likely to strengthen their role as politically relevant - tors at the expense of national governments today, while others have diagnosed an overall decline of state regulation, 'the political', or even a general dissolution of 'spaces of place' in the information age (for overviews see Amin 1994; Blanke and Benzler 1991; Castells 2000).