Methods, architectures and techniques of operating a joint beam-forming and user-selection system across multiple cells for downlink communication in a multi-cell environment. The system coordinates beamforming vector and user selection across multiple cells, but is cellular in the sense that users are served only from the transmission signals originating from one cell. There is provided methods, architectures and techniques to control the level and effect of inter-cell interference through a partially coordinated multi-cell process of user scheduling and beam selection based on the division of cells into different subsets. Multi-step techniques are utilized that can scale to large numbers of cells, specifying which operations remain as independent operations within a cell, and which operations, with what cells, require information exchange.