"The Boundary Bargain: Growth, Development, and the Future of City-County Separation addresses a burgeoning area of study in Canadian local government-growth, development, and sprawl. Specifically, the manuscript examines the role of municipal organization in urban growth and the role of institutions in the city-county separation. Using Ontario as case study, the manuscript highlights the coordination problem posed by this separation. Traditionally, the two areas have been seen as distinct with different sets of values, economies, labour trends, and ways of life. Despite these cultural and geographic divergences, rural and urban have always had a reciprocal relationship and both play an important role in the strength of the national economy, trade, commerce, and population growth. This complex inter-connected relationship presents a challenge to policy-makers. In Ontario, more recent structural responses to the divide have tended to view the city and its rural periphery as part of a common political unit,if not also a sociological and economic one. In the past when an urban area of a county was declared a city it was politically separated from its surrounding county thereby severing any institutional linkages the two once shared. More recently responses to regional growth began to see urban and rural as connected and have since designed institutions that linked the two in order to provide greater policy and service continuity. The Boundary Bargain details this shift in institutional thinking and municipal organization while examining best practices for addressing growth and development from a regional perspective."-- Provided by publisher.