Fostering Regionalism: Comment on the Promise and Perils of 'New Regionalist' Approaches to Sustainable Communities

Abstract

This essay responds to Professor Lisa Alexander’s article The Promise and Perils of "New Regionalist" Approaches to Sustainable Communities. Professor Alexander provides a compelling argument that failures of demographic representation, opportunism, and acquiescence challenge the fundamentally collaborative premise of new governance represented by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program. Professor Alexander's analysis, however, points to a larger conceptual point about the distinctive role that the federal government can play in incentivizing new regionalism. When the federal government approaches regionalism, however, it is functionally less beholden to a local institutional framework that can impede regionalism and although the ability to approach regionalism from a national perspective does not ensure that local power dynamics will not be replicated, the distance and independence that the federal perspective provides may be a cause for optimism, particularly for those traditionally marginalized at the local level.