The new economic reality of heightened international competition, constant technological change, and cross border migration flows—referred to in shorthand as “globalization”—has upset traditional forms of governing capitalist economies. Nation-states were once considered the only appropriate scale to create socialist planned economies or establish the institutions that guide free-market exchange. Today, many political scientists and sociologists argue that the sovereignty of national governments is either greatly diminished (Jessop 1994; Ohmae 1995; Peck 1994) or drastically restructured by “networked” forms of social exchange that ignore political boundaries (Castells 1996). Economic geographers and regional economists argue that globalization has ushered in a new form of competition through which the competitive advantage of firms is set by actors and institutions that operate at a regional or metropolitan scale (Sabel 1989; Storper 1997). Ultimately, there is an emerging consensus in the academic literature as well as policy discourse that the metropolitan scale is a key level of economic exchange
