Those are at least divided by a river (shared watershed). The suburbs and their respective city centers are divided by entirely arbitrary lines in the sand. Usually the suburbs have entirely different and discrete land use and taxation policies living as they do on harvests of real estate values of proximity to the central cities.

Worse, Federalism and the Constitution that creates it have a sort of a talisman, dead sea scrolls mysticism about them that precludes any sort of consideration of rearranging things politically to accommodate a more cohesive government organization.

In this season you see how central urban issues are to the political debate, hog futures have gotten more press than critical land use considerations in the national campaign despite many critical transportation funding issues confronting Congress during this campaign.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2008/id20080211_959496.htm?chan=innovation_special+report+--+green+design_green+design

And our brief summary of it:

http://blog.smartgrowthamerica.org/?p=116

That sums up the biggest problem with the US, in my opinion. We have developed our land over the last 50-80 years with cars in mind, not people. It's about damn well time we changed that.

Unfortunately, I haven't heard much from the political leadership about this. And it doesn't even mean that everyplace needs to become a city. In many cases, it just means hiding parking and orienting streets towards people, clustering buildings together so that people can easily walk between them, reconnecting the street grid, and allowing businesses to locate in and around neighborhoods, so that people can actually walk to a grocery store or coffee shop instead of driving.