Dear Colleagues,

Scholars and practitioners increasingly look to large metropolitan regions for project, policy, and political innovations associated with alleviating the global crisis of sustainable development. At the same time, metropolitan regions are often characterized by multiple, overlapping, competing, and poorly coordinated authority relationships. Sustaining metropolitan regions therefore involves new ways of coordinating policy, investment, and regulatory efforts across otherwise fragmented institutional and material landscapes—known variously in the scholarly literature as city-regionalism, new regionalism, or ‘smart’ city-regionalization. New metropolitan geographies of sustainable regional development are therefore constantly emerging, even as extant economic, social, and political geographies in specific places both shape and constrain the possibilities of sustainable regional development more generally.

This Special Issue calls for theoretically informed empirical papers that explore the recent reshaping of metropolitan regions in all world regions through major urban policy arenas like land use and urban spatial form, regional transit systems, smart infrastructure and systems, regional industrial complexes, and/or new housing and urban labor market changes.  In particular, we seek papers that move the global discussion of sustainability from individual cities to wider city-regional complexes, exploring different kinds of metropolitan geographies of sustainability in different cultural and environmental contexts. For example, what are the spatial effects of how specific actors within major metropolitan regions manage regional land use and urban form? Relatedly, what are we learning about the new geographies of benefits and costs from the rapid rollout of new regional transit systems? How well (or poorly) do new regional sustainably initiatives of various kinds deal with income inequality and spatial polarization across the metropolitan space-economy? Finally, how are urban-scale climate policies coordinated at the regional scale of implementation?

Prof. Yonn Dierwechter
Guest Editor

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• Geographies of sustainability;
• Sustainability and New Regionalism;
• Land use and metropolitan spatial form;
• Regional transit systems;
• Shifting urban labor markets, forms of work, and/or industrial clusters;
• Income inequality and metropolitan sustainably policies;
• Regionalizing smart technologies;
• City-regional climate action plans.