The write-up contains an overview of the historical and geographical emergence of city-regions and to reflect on some of the debates that have arisen in regard to the theoretical status of these phenomena. I briefly describe the growth and spread of city-regions in the world since the mid-1950s and I consider how contemporary capitalism and globalization have fostered the development of this distinctive urban form. The internal organization of city-regions is then examined, with special reference to four generic outcomes, aestheticized land-use intensification; gentrification; social polarization and informality; and  post sub urban landscapes. Issues of governance and policy are scrutinized and basic dilemmas of political coordination in city-regions are described. The argument ends with an evaluative review of certain critiques of the city-region idea in the current academic literature.

The idea of the city-region has been present in the literature on urban studies at least since the publication of Patrick Geddes’ Cities in Evolution in 1915. However, it was only after the 1980s and 1990s when attention was focused on certain disproportionately large and economically vibrant “world cities” (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982; Knox and Taylor, 1995) and “global cities” (Sassen, 1991) that the term “city-regions” started to proliferate in the literature, particularly in association with the qualifier “global” (Scott et al., 2001; Simmonds and Hack, 2000). This trend, of course, was a reflection of the widespread emergence of large spatially extended urbanized areas all over the world, each of them vocationally anchored by one or more metropolitan centers, and each of them spreading far outwards into diffuse hinterlands comprising mixes of agricultural land, suburban tract housing.