Across the past two centuries, cities in the United States and in Canada have faced many of the same broad sets of economic transitions, technological shifts, population pressures, and city-building challenges. First, industrialization, integration into national economies, and rapid—sometimes haphazard—urban development; later, increasing automobile usage and the accompanying challenges of mass suburbanization, including residential dispersal and decentering of economic activity; and more recently, deindustrialization, globalized economic competition, the transition to a knowledge economy, and yawning socioeconomic inequalities. In contrast to European cities, urbanization in these two North American countries took shape in a setting where land (initially, at least) seemed plentiful and where a liberal political-economic order favored light regulation and minimal national intervention in local land use.

Despite these commonalities, most urban-focused social scientists on both sides of the border probably would agree that—at least in the post–World War II era—large Canadian cities faced their challenges and transitions more gracefully than did their US counterparts. The economic dislocations, concentrated poverty, and budgetary exigencies faced by the likes of Detroit and Cleveland largely have been avoided by cities of a similar industrial-era vintage north of the border. Canadian city centers have been less afflicted by population loss, and their urban fabric less marred by the aggressive slum clearance and highway building that disfigured many American cities. Suburban sprawl has been less widespread in Canadian metropolises than in the United States, and environmental injustices less pronounced. Undoubtedly, some of these national differences in urban fortunes are attributable to the deeper scars of racism in the US context, which led to hyper-segregation, dual and unequal housing and labor markets, and white flight and disinvestment from many central cities. Nevertheless, political scientists also should consider whether variation in public-sector institutional arrangements across these two national contexts has contributed significantly to their different urban patterns.

Zack Taylor’s Shaping the Metropolis shines a bright analytical spotlight on the institutional dimension, suggesting it provides key leverage to explain Canada/US urban differences. In a well-argued, lucidly written, and handsomely produced volume, Taylor draws evidence from rich, chapter-length historical case studies investigating the governance of urbanization in four metropolitan areas: Toronto, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Vancouver (British Columbia), and Portland (Oregon). More importantly, he develops a persuasive theoretical framework illuminating key institutional factors that underlie the different trajectories of these urban regions.

US academics who study the governance of urban and suburban development, Taylor contends, usually take a bottom-up view, focusing on local-level institutions and civil-society efforts at regional coordination. Other US scholars—particularly those arguing for progressive reforms—are fixated on the relationship between the national government and cities, despite the relatively meager share of local budgets financed from Washington. Instead, Taylor argues, much greater focus belongs on the intermediate level in the federal system, given the authority of states and provinces to constitute, constrain, enable, and rearrange the structures of local and metropolitan governance. Thus, the institutional arrangements of this intermediate level are the focal point of his comparisons; specifically, Canadian provinces’ executive-centered Westminster parliamentary systems versus US states’ separation-of-power systems, with their plural executives, multiple veto points, and tendency toward legislative particularism. Drawing on insights from Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins, Taylor argues that these differences provide Canadian provincial policy makers with greater decisiveness and resoluteness in formulating and implementing policies to shape metropolitan development and reform local government structure.

Taylor provides clear empirical evidence that Canadian metropolitan areas are less complex governmentally and their populations more dominated by central cities than US metros, which are famously fragmented. Rather than using these institutional differences as his analytical starting point, however, he traces the origins of these dissimilar local government arrangements, which he shows have deep historical roots in state–local and provincial–local relationships. Taylor’s analysis is inspired by historical institutionalism and reflects a strong grounding in American political development, but he also draws on a wide array of literature from urban-regional planning and other fields.

In the historical-institutionalist tradition, sequence matters, and Taylor delves back well into the nineteenth century to show the roots of later patterns of intergovernmental relations. By 1900, the burgeoning reform movement in many US states had enacted guarantees of local home rule, attempting to reduce the intrusion of partisan state politics into local affairs. Taylor’s main temporal focus, however, is on the three decades following World War II. During this critical juncture, Canadian provinces established self-reinforcing institutional mechanisms to address the infrastructure demands and negative externalities of their expanding metropolises. The policy-making coherence and insulation of Westminster systems, Taylor argues, enabled hands-on, programmatic approaches to metropolitan governance in the Canadian provinces. This point of departure for empowered metropolitanism in Canada was abetted by a temporary but important confluence of three factors: high public trust in government, generalized support for technocratic approaches, and single-party dominance. Ontario and British Columbia intervened at key points to control the proliferation of small-scale local governments, create a metropolitan-level government in Toronto, and protect sensitive rural lands. Ironically, reformers in both provinces were heavily inspired by New Deal-era US thinking on economic and resource planning, even as such efforts failed to gain much traction in the “irresolute” US political system.

The metropolitan areas that Taylor chose as case studies are in no sense typical, as he readily admits, but they enable him to focus on institutional variables with a minimum of confounding factors. Choosing Minneapolis and Portland, which have grown diverse only relatively recently, allows him to avoid cases where racialized perceptions of the central city have played an outsized role in metropolitan politics, and limiting his Canadian cases to the English-dominant provinces takes Quebec’s distinctive linguistic politics out of the equation. Nevertheless, it may strike some readers as odd that his two US cases are outliers—among the very few US regions with long-standing metropolitan governing units (the Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities and Portland’s directly elected Metro). These two cases could present challenges for Taylor’s theoretical framework, because Minnesota and Oregon managed to create and retain metropolitan-scale institutions that, superficially at least, resemble the metropolitan institutions in Canada. However, Taylor is able to demonstrate the relative fragility of these metropolitan units—which is more evident in the Twin Cities than in Portland—and their shaky political legitimacy in comparison to municipalities and counties.

One might have wished for more sustained analysis of legislative districting in both countries to help assess a possible competing hypothesis; namely, that the greater anti-urban impulse of US states arose from the persistently severe underrepresentation of cities in the years before the US Supreme Court overturned such malapportionment in the 1960s. In other respects, however, Taylor’s analysis is extremely thorough. Although the case studies are lengthy and extensively documented, drawing on archives, interviews, primary government documents, and secondary sources, he avoids foundering in the historical weeds by bookending each narrative with incisive discussion of its key comparative institutional features. In sum, Shaping the Metropolis should become the authoritative source for scholars seeking to understand how these North American neighbors, despite a common local government heritage, evolved quite different approaches to governing metropolitan growth.