The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry

Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities

Community Wealth Building — Urban Affairs Review

Scholars of urban politics have long debated the issue of what cities can and should do to promote the economic well-being of their residents. As the of election Zohran Mamdani illustrates, urban residents are increasingly demanding that city governments do more to address the increasingly exorbitant costs of housing, childcare, and transportation. One obvious solution is to raise taxes on the private holders of wealth. By the same token, his election has prompted handwringing on the right about the “inevitable” flight of capital out of New York City. Scholarship that runs the gamut from the public choice school associated with the “city limits” perspective (Peterson 1981) through to Marxian accounts (Logan and Molotch 1987) all recognize that the private ownership of wealth and the mobility of capital puts cities in a bind, especially in a context of highly circumscribed levels of federal urban spending. Though several scholars (Logan and Swanstrom 1990; Kantor and Savitch 1993; Schragger 2016) have demonstrated that cities have greater latitude to promote egalitarian public policies than these perspective allow, few would argue that the deep structural problems of economic and social inequality can be fully resolved by tax-and-spend liberalism (Imbroscio 2010).

Can Politicians Bargain with Business?: A Theoretical and Comparative Perspective on Urban Development

These authors examine the capability of local government to influence economic development by formulating a framework that treats state-business relations as a bargaining process. This framework suggests that governmental influence is tied to the distribution of bargaining advantages along three dimensions of a liberal-democratic political economy: market conditions, popular-control systems, and public-intervention mechanisms. The authors offer an explanation of how characteristics of these dimensions strengthen or weaken city governments in dealing with private enterprise; experiences of U.S. and Western European cities are drawn upon to illustrate this. They conclude that differences in bargaining resources accounts for wide variation in local political control of business development.

A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)

Leveraging and Deleveraging Toward Thick Sovereignty

Planning for isolation? The role of urban form and function in shaping mobility in Brasilia

Brasília offers a rare test of how urban form shapes experienced segregation. Built almost at once around modernist neighbourhood units, then expanded through planned satellites and informal peripheries, it lets us ask whether urban form turns mobility into mixing or into a more efficient engine of separation. We combine data on human mobility with urban morphometrics, amenities, road networks, along with enclosures and tessellations that capture segregation at the scales where access is structured: districts, neighbourhoods, blocks, and street-and-building cells. We find that segregation intensifies as resolution sharpens, from 0.282 at the district scale to 0.545 at the block scale, indicating that Brasília looks most integrated at coarse units and most segregated where everyday encounters are actually organised. Mobility softens home segregation for most users, but not symmetrically: poorer groups travel farther, while affluent groups remain the most selectively exposed. civic cores and mid-rise, mixed-use areas are the least segregated morphotypes, yet they occupy only a sliver of the metropolis. Elsewhere, rich lakefront suburbs and dense poor settlements reach similarly high segregation through opposite spatial logics. Amenities predict lower segregation, while barriers and enclosed residential interiors predict higher segregation. Built form explains more of this pattern than visit volume alone in the segregation models: integration is less a property of residential design than of shared destinations and porous connections. Planned capitals can build order without building isolation if they distribute mixing space rather than sequestering it.

PUBLIC POLICY NETWORKS AND ‘WICKED PROBLEMS’: A NASCENT SOLUTION?

The last two decades have seen a shift in public services organizations from hierarchies to networks. Network forms are seen as particularly suited to handling ‘wicked problems'. We make an assessmen...

Private-sector Trumpism

Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.

Replication Data for: Public Infrastructure and Economic Development: Evidence from Postal Systems

While postal systems have been central to statebuilding efforts around the globe, their contributions to development are largely unclear. We argue that the post office affected economic development in both the short and long terms. To test our argument, we combine original data on the cross-national distribution of postal systems from 1875 to 2007 with granular county-level data in the U.S. from 1850 to 2000. In both country- and county-level analyses, we show that the spread of postal systems affected economic outcomes and persisted over the long term. The results are robust across dependent variables, model specifications, and estimation strategies. We provide additional evidence that suggests these effects were generated by reducing transaction costs and strengthening social capital. Our findings highlight the role of public infrastructure in promoting economic growth, documenting a channel through which state institutions precede growth, and suggest that statebuilding efforts have longstanding effects on relevant communities.

The Pre-emption of Resistance: Occupy Oakland and the Evolution of State Power

Author(s): Behbehanian, Laleh | Advisor(s): Burawoy, Michael B | Abstract: This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary state strategies targeting social movements by examining the case of Occupy Oakland. Emphasizing how state strategies, both tactical and discursive, dynamically evolve through their iterative relation to movement strategies, it presents a detailed empirical account that is disaggregated into three “moments”, each of which are characterized by the predominance of a distinct state strategic repertoire. The objective is to highlight an underlying transformation through which the state’s strategies evolve from being highly reactive, indiscriminate and vulnerable to spectacularization to becoming increasingly pre-emptive, targeted and discursively buttressed.The first “moment” commences with the movement’s occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza. Faced with Occupy Oakland’s highly disruptive tactics and its firm rejection of any forms of negotiation or cooperation with City officials, the state resorts to a strategy of Naked Coercion (reactive, indiscriminate violence that is highly vulnerable to spectacularization) which backfires and results in an internationally televised disaster on the evening of October 25th. This creates an extraordinary window of opportunity for the movement, dramatically increasing public support and enabling it to undertake the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946. This fuels a process of adaptation as the struggle proceeds into the second “moment”, and the state shifts to a strategy of Targeted Repression that is increasingly pro-active, targeted and discursively buttressed so as to diminish the danger of its spectacularization. The new strategy succeeds in permanently dislodging the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza, as well as criminalizing the tactic of occupation and excising it from movement’s repertoire. Still unsatisfied with the repression it had achieved, in the third and final “moment” the state introduces a strategy of Pre-emptive Neutralization that is pre-emptively oriented, targeted at high “risk” populations and discursively buttressed by powerful spectacles of “risk”. This enables a thorough incapacitation of the movement – fully neutralizing its potential for collective action by rendering Occupiers a target population that could no longer even publicly assemble without inciting highly militarized police responses that were now pre-emptively justified by the risk of “violence” they collectively posed.

The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy

Abstract The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring. Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases—and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the twenty-first century.

Interoperable Sovereignty: The Democratic Alternative to Digital Authoritarianism

A Democratic Architecture for the Digital Age Digital sovereignty has become a central concern for governments worldwide, yet its meaning remains contested. Too often it is framed as...

From global trends to local realities: A multi-scale scenario-building methodology for community infrastructure planning

This paper details a multi-scale scenario-building methodology designed to explore transport infrastructure futures in rapidly changing Circumpolar North communities, bridging global trends and national contexts with local realities. Focusing on Churchill, Canada, and Kirkenes, Norway, we employed a hybrid approach that combined top-down adaptation of existing global and regional socioeconomic scenarios with bottom-up, participatory ethnographic research to ensure local relevance and incorporate stakeholder knowledge. We developed coherent scenarios across global, regional (national), and local scales, allowing higher-level archetypes to manifest differently depending on locally specific features identified through fieldwork. This consecutive, nested process utilized morphological analysis and the Factor-Actor-Sector framework to maintain consistency while accommodating local specificities. The methodology centered not just on scenario creation but also on the function of scenarios as a tool for community dialogue, utilizing artistic visualizations in workshops to engage diverse stakeholders. This approach demonstrates a way to navigate the tension between global and national drivers versus local community needs, yielding distinct yet comparable local futures grounded in broader development pathways. It offers practical insights for deliberations and planning in uncertain environments, both built and unbuilt.

Communities are not fungible

There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured