Framing Space and Time in the City: Urban Policy and the Politics of Spatial and Temporal Scale

Abstract: This article seeks to analyze urban politics through the lens of the social constructionist approach to scale. This approach views scale not as a set of pre‐given, natural, and immutable levels upon which social life occurs. Rather, it regards scale as a fluid context for and product of power relations in society. The article argues that urban politics is frequently characterized by political strategies that frame reality in terms of scale. Agents of the state, capital, and civil society all engage in the politics around competing scalar framings. As a result, the politics of scale has important but contingent material consequences. The article illustrates these points through a case study of the politics that surrounded the development of a new neighborhood planning initiative in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s. Based on this case study, the article also argues that while geographers studying the politics of scale tend to explain it solely in terms of spatial scale, scalar politics in the urban context frequently combines framings of spatial and temporal scale. This simultaneous framing of space and time in the city has important, if sometimes unpredictable, implications for policy and politics.     

REFORMULATING URBAN REGIME THEORY: The Division of Labor Between State and Market Reconsidered

ABSTRACT: Urban regime theory has emerged as the dominant paradigm for the study of local politics. The ascendancy of regime theory has made it the subject of intense critical scrutiny. While urban scholars generally find it to be a valuable theoretical advance, many have uncovered conceptual limitations. This article develops yet another critique of urban regime theory. It argues regime theory suffers from an overly rigid and largely static conceptualization of the division of labor between state and market and identifies three alternative conceptualizations of this division. This exercise demonstrates the possibilities for building alternative urban regimes. It therefore suggests an enrichment of established urban regime typologies. Specifically, the article points to the existence of three previously unidentified regime types. These three urban regimes challenge the enduring tension in urban governance between a city's economic aspirations for vibrant development and its political aspirations for a vibrant democracy.     

>Racializing Regime Politics

This article considers in what ways Clarence Stone’s urban regime paradigm is a useful framework for analyzing African American politics in cities. The article begins with a critical appraisal by Jeffrey Edwards that largely dismisses Stone’s study of Atlanta. It then offers a different interpretation of Stone’s scholarship, showing where Edwards shortchanges Stone’s framework and where his criticisms seem appropriate. The article then discusses how Adolph Reed Jr.’s black urban regime paradigm enhances Stone’s regime politics approach.     

WHY IS JAPAN NEOLIBERALIZING? RESCALING OF THE JAPANESE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE AND IDEOLOGY OF STATE–CAPITAL FIXING

ABSTRACT: This study examines Japan's state spatial restructuring to explore the reasons behind it. By doing so, it investigates the grounds on which Japan is adopting neoliberalism. Since the early 2000s, Japan's leaders have been pursuing a combination of state decentralization and selective urban revitalization. At the same time, leaders have abandoned Japan's long‐held goal of balanced spatial development. On the surface, this policy mix resembles the neoliberal state spatial restructuring observed in Western Europe. This study finds, however, that Japan's state spatial restructuring has less to do with scalar adjustment to capital's uneven spatial expansion and the supply‐side economy for economic development. Rather, it has more to do with the political goal of addressing Japan's collectivist culture and government failure. To reach this conclusion, the “locality as agent” approach to politics of scale proposed by Cox and Mair (1991) is applied to the historic analysis of the Japanese developmental state.     

SCALES,REGIMES, AND THE URBAN GOVERNANCE OF GLASGOW

ABSTRACT: Over the last two decades, urban regime theory has become one of the most dominant paradigms of thought in urban studies. In particular, regime theory offers a complex account of urban governance, or how local governments, the business communities, and community organizations gain the capacity to shape the policies that affect cities, that is, govern. Although regime theory is a dominant theory in urban studies, it does, nevertheless, have its share of detractors, and one criticism has been its failure to take into account geographical scale. While there is an acknowledgment in urban regime theory of wider economic processes, such as the broad transformations in international and national trade, investment, finance, etc., or the role played by federal or state governments, the bias has remained mostly local, particularly in regards to urban governance. In urban regime theory literature the policies and actions of international and national institutions either nicely conjoin with local interests or are nearly totally absent. Due to this oversight, urban regime theory tends to underemphasize how the capacity to govern a city effectively is sometimes the result of the interaction of actions of people at multiple scales. This article attempts to address this oversight in an analysis of Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1980s. By focusing on the role of the European City of Culture in the revitalization of the city, this article demonstrates how the capacity for a ruling coalition to transform the city and to govern effectively was the consequence of the policy and administrative actions undertaken at other geographical scales.     

Regime Theory,State Government,and a Takeover of Urban Education

Abstract State government possesses the resources and authority to directly shape urban education policy but regime theorists understate the roles governors, state legislatures, and other state actors play as members of urban education regimes. This article examines the state takeover of schools in Newark, New Jersey to demonstrate why and how a state government leads an urban education regime. The Newark case illustrates how politics and structural conditions motivated state government to change the nature of the education regime and directly shape education policy at the local level. It highlights the role state government played in reshaping an educator‐centered coalition that operated a poorly performing school district. Despite the existence of a new regime, Newark students’ achievement scores have not significantly improved, and in some instances they have declined under the state‐led regime. This article encourages scholars of city politics to continue to investigate state government's role in urban governing coalitions because state political players maintain the capacity and motivation to join urban regimes.     

Urban Regime Theory: A Normative‐Empirical Critique

Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory of structuring with limits in its analysis of the market economy. These limits undermine its ability to explain the importance of political agency—the scope of individual or collective choice in political decisions and the impact of those choices in the evolution of US cities. It is further argued that there are important normative dimensions to urban regime theory, most fully articulated in Elkin’s commercial republic, which academic commentaries have not acknowledged. However, the empirical analysis developed in regime theory contradicts its normative objectives. The absence of a conceptualization of market dynamics, in the light of pessimism about the prospects for equitable regime governance, not only limits it as a theory of structuring but it also renders it unable to explain how the commercial republic can be realized. Regime theory is, therefore, unconvincing for two reasons. It cannot explain how much local politics matter, and it fails to demonstrate that its normative goal—more equitable regime governance—can be achieved, given the realities of the US market economy. Regime theory needs a more developed understanding of structuring. It may be fruitful, therefore, for regime theorists to re‐engage critically with variants of Marxism, which unlike Structuralism, recognize the possibility of agency.     

URBAN REGIME CAPACITY: A Comparison of Birmingham,England, and Detroit,Michigan

ABSTRACT: Urban regime analysis has focused primarily on governance in US cities. This study takes a cross-national approach by investigating regime formation and capacity in the “Motor Cities” of Birmingham, England, and Detroit. The study concludes that the local polity is indeed important in both United States and United Kingdom contexts. The authors argue that regime analysis is equally useful in understanding urban governance within unitary systems such as Great Britain's.     

Opportunities and Constraints on Mayoral Behavior: A Historical‐Institutional Approach

Abstract A theoretical perspective that situates mayoral behavior within broader patterns of partisan competition is asserted here as a more satisfying explanatory framework for mayoral leadership than rival theories that focus on personality. Behavior is structured by the mayor's relationship toward the regime in power. Mayors are either affiliated or independent of the regime, and regimes are either strong or weak. Four leadership postures result, and case studies are used to demonstrate the robustness of the approach. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (1954–76) practiced reconstructive politics by modernizing the city's Democrat political machine. Atlanta mayor Andrew Young (1982–90) practiced the politics of articulation by upholding the commitments of the city's African‐American electoral coalition. New York City mayor David Dinkins (1990–93) practiced disjunctive politics when the liberal order to which he was faithful suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Finally, Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich (1977–79) practiced preemptive politics by challenging the robust regime of party regulars and bankers in his city with little success.     

Rethinking public land ownership and urban development: A Canadian perspective

Traditionally, scholars of urban development have focused almost exclusively on the behaviour of private landowners, on the assumption that private developers invariably dominate urban politics and governance. Yet a closer look at the Canadian experience reveals that public property in Canada's cities is abundant, and that public landowners often have a defining impact on urban development outcomes. What is lacking are systematic analyses of the relationship between public land ownership and urban development, and the forces that shape the behaviour of public landowners.     

New State Spaces and Contested Territories: A Critical Analysis of Joint Regional Planning Panels

This article critically analyses the Joint Regional Planning Panels (JRPPs), a series of planning panels in the New South Wales planning system predominantly made up of appointed planning experts to determine ‘regionally significant development’. The stated intent of the JRPPs is to improve objectivity and transparency in planning decision-making, however, this has come at the expense of the traditional role of local councils in determining planning applications. Key to this analysis are Brenner's concept of ‘new state spaces’ as evolutionary models of urban governance which act between conventional levels and hierarchies of political authority, and Allmendinger and Haughton's conceptualisation of new state spaces of planning operating in ‘soft spaces’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries’. This article explores the changing nature and function of the JRPPs since their establishment in 2009, and highlights that while opportunities exist for new state spaces to ‘harden’ as enduring tiers of urban governance, there is a pervasive need for connections between territory and politics to give popular legitimacy to permanent shifts of authority.     

CANADIAN URBAN POLITICS: ANOTHER “BLACK HOLE”?

ABSTRACT: This article supplements and enriches Judd's and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe's controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholarship is equally isolated. Yet for the most part, the underlying causes of this predicament differ greatly from the U.S. experience. We offer three interpretations—one institutional, one epistemological, and one ontological—to explain the marginality of Canadian urban political science in relation to both mainstream Canadian political science and American urban politics. First, the growth of Canadian urban political science has been inhibited not because there are too few interested scholars, but rather because interested faculty are so thinly dispersed across the country's academic institutions. Second, unlike the American experience, the historical development of Canadian political science as a discipline has led it to focus on national‐level issues at the expense of local and urban politics. Finally, Canadian cities have developed differently from American cities in important respects, again leading Canadian scholars to privilege the national over the local.     

IN BETWEEN SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND GENTRIFICATION: URBAN RESTRUCTURING,SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,AND THE PLACE POLITICS OF OPEN SPACE

ABSTRACT: The article examines the emergence of urban countercultures and social movements in Christiania, Copenhagen, and Haga, Gothenburg in the context of the Scandinavian welfare state, from the 1970s to the present. Specifically, it investigates the relations between urban governance, gentrification processes, and social movements in the urban restructuring of Scandinavian cities. While Christiania today remains a space for counterculture, the struggle to save Haga contributed to a gentrification of the district, as it became officially “re‐evaluated” and upgraded. The article examines the similarities and differences in the urban movement trajectories in these two cases, highlighting their “place politics of open space.”     

The Borough System of Consolidated Montréal: Revisiting Urban Governance in a Composite Metropolis

Abstract: In the last decade, new political and institutional arrangements have begun emerging in differing European and North‐American metropolises. These new institutional arrangements deal in different ways with the rescaling of jurisdictions in a context of evolving intergovernmental relations, social movements, visions of urbanity and mobilization, urban public policies, etc. This article is about the case of Montréal (Quebec, Canada). This case is important because from 1996 to 2004 Montréal experienced intense public debates and implemented a diversity of institutional innovations. A multi‐level reform of the municipal regime was introduced that comprises measures of metropolitan governance, large‐scale amalgamations of local municipalities in the urban core area, and the introduction of a new political and administrative scheme at the borough level. Our focus is on this third pillar as it has shifted the municipal reform into an unusual direction as it activates the expression of the numerous spatial logics of the fragmented metropolis and gives way to a composite rescaling of urban governance.     

Collaborative governance: A potential approach to preventing violent demolition in China

Due to the unbalanced and confrontational state-citizen relationship, China's urban redevelopment has been accompanied with continuous violent conflicts, which to a large extent damages the public image of Chinese government in recent years. This article first overviews the governance dilemma underlying China's violent demolition from the perspective of institutional arrangement, and then argues a collaborative approach can be a remedy for the dilemma. After the introduction and definition of collaborative governance, this article demonstrates its application in preventing violent demolition with the Caojiaxiang project in Chengdu as a case. It is found that collaborative governance is advantageous in enhancing the legitimacy of governance, increasing the potential to find effective solutions, and enhancing the trust between government and citizens. Despite the disadvantages of collaborative governance, including limited effect and the dependence on social capital, quality of stakeholders' interaction and leadership, this paper argues the success of Caojiaxiang project may be duplicated given the following institutional requirements are met: 1) an institutional procedure to establish and operate evictees' association in urban redevelopment projects; 2) an effective complaint system for the upper-level government to monitor the malpractice of lower-level government; and 3) an judicial system independent of local governments and legal proceeding over any illegal behavior in demolition.     

FOLLOWING THE SIGNS: APPLYING URBAN REGIME ANALYSIS TO A UK CASE STUDY

ABSTRACT: As the debate continues regarding the applicability of urban regime analysis in a UK context, three aspects stand out as highly significant: the target for analysis, the mode of scrutiny, and the context of local governing arrangements with its implications for interdependence as an impetus for co‐operation. This article will examine urban regime analysis and the move from government to governance in order to answer why and how the private, voluntary and public sectors might be inclined to collaborate in regimes. In addition, the regime analysis will provide the parameters for examination whilst the issue of governance will afford context for local governing arrangements. Although some issues require slight reframing to reflect the UK context, the article will follow a rigorous framework for examination utilizing the full weight of regime analysis as articulated by Stone such that it could not be accused of “concept stretching.” Far from it: Through the examination of an informal partnership, a coalition of actors from the public, private, and voluntary sectors that has been in existence for more than 13 years, the article focuses, specifically, on the long‐term, less visible aspects of local governance. As such, it is able to demonstrate how economic and political change can have a tangible effect on the manifestation of interdependence as an impetus for co‐operation, not only for this specific locale but also for other cities facing similar challenges.     

URBAN REGIMES AND NEIGHBORHOOD MOBILIZATION AGAINST URBAN REDEVELOPMENT: The Case of an Arab-Jewish Neighborhood in Israel

ABSTRACT: This study deals with the effects of an urban bureaucratic regime on urban development and neighborhood mobilization. It examines the sociospatial transformations in an Arab-Jewish neighborhood in a major city in Israel. During the period of 1948–1990, the neighborhood experienced population turnover, planned deterioration and decline, and subsequent renewal and gentrification. The paper deals with the factors which shaped those policies and processes. the author argues that the political economy of Israel contributed to the emergence of a bureaucratic urban regime which effectively drove off all private entrepreneurial involvement in the area's development process. It is also shown that the inherent features of the bureaucratic regime facilitated community mobilization opposing development plans and made the governing agencies vulnerable to citizens' protests and court rulings.     

RESCALING AMBITIONS: WATERFRONT GOVERNANCE AND TORONTO'S 2015 PAN AMERICAN GAMES

Toronto is a rare global city because negotiating public land ownership remains a defining feature of the city's urban politics. The awarding of the 2015 Pan American Games to Toronto is a prime occasion to witness how fragmented governance can limit the ambition and enthusiasm of a sporting mega‐event. Historically, Toronto has not been known for its ability to host large‐scale sporting events but it has recently used a series of failed Olympic bids and smaller sporting events to trigger piecemeal “legacy” development. In this article we argue that the awarding of the Pan American Games to Toronto was predicated on a process that removed local politics from the bidding process. Focusing on the development of the athletes’ village in the West Don Lands and incorporating a number of interviews with key stakeholders across Toronto, this research illustrates that the heavy involvement and investment of the Province of Ontario in the Pan American spectacle forces us to ask: Whose waterfront? Whose games?     

Explaining urban economic governance: The City of Macao

This paper traces the root causes of the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) government's inability to regulate the city's major economic issues. This regulatory deficiency can be partly attributed to the city's 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule, although some of the problems have been caused by the casino boom, which began with the liberalization of Macao's gaming industry, and the government's failure to cope with ensuing dramatic changes. From a historical and institutional perspective, the author illustrates and analyzes the dynamic relationship between economic regulation and urban politics on a rapidly growing urban island facing various governance challenges.