Foundations of Urban Governance and Politics

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Foundations of Urban Governance and Politics
Geg309 Urban Geography
Instructor Jun Yan Geography Department SUNY at
Buffalo
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Outline

• Urban Governance in Early Age (pre-1840)
• Municipal Socialism Machine Politics
  (1840-1875)
• Boosterism and Reform (1875-1920)
• Metropolitan Fragmentation (1920-1945)

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Politics in City

• Types of political issues
• scope of government
• sources of financial support
• control over land use
• service provision performance
• allocation of existing/scarce resources
• civil rights
• They change over time
• democracy does not happen over night

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Urban Governance in Early Age (Prior 1840)

• Rooted in laissez-faire ideology
• free market
• Cities were limited service providers
• municipalities to assist state governments
• sanitation and basic law order
• Politics associated with landed local elite
• weak, disorganized, corrupted
• Based on principles of home rule

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Urban Governance in Early Age (Prior 1840)

• Limited powers/capacity to develop public
  infrastructures
• Later, incorporation
• passive ? active in local economic development
• dept financing

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Municipal Socialism

• Side effects of urbanization and
  industrialization fire, disease, the mob
• Local government steps in to provide key service
  provision infrastructures not provided by
  private sector to limit the disorder
• simultaneously associated with physical
  (sanitation/sewer systems) social (morality
  laws) infrastructure in cities
• social welfare programs begin
• scope and scale of government grows
• initial signs of private sector regulation

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Machine Politics

• Functions as a Brokerage System
• brokers access to services goods to working
  class, poor
• exchange votes for jobs and benefits ? corruption
• Tommany Organization in NYC
• quickly spread to other cities
• especially big cities

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Machine Politics

• Strength based on hierarchical spatial politics
• single member districts with wards precincts
• highly centralized
• donation by members
• Benefited from spatially ethnically distinct
  neighborhoods found in northern industrialized
  cities
• rarely happens in southern cities

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Machine Politics

• Undermines notion of ruling class
• broadens political participation
• empowers disenfranchised groups working class
• Ironically, this system did bring fast
  modernization of cities
• The more development, the more patronage

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Famous Bosses
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Boosterism

• New emergence of urban elite
• Downtown business owner and professionalists
• An elite attempt to limit the political power of
  the working class ethnic political machines
• key for boosterism (the expansion of current
  urban space, thus attract more investors to the
  city)

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Boosterism

• Assures stable capital-labor relationships in
  industrial cities
• to meet the needs of industrial development
• to retake over the urban political power from
  working class, later on with the help from fast
  growing middle class
• public interests aggregate economic benefits
  rather than equity, social justice, civil rights,
  democracy or community well-being

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Reform

• Key Themes of Progressive Reform
• Efficiency of delivery of public services
• Politics election v. Day-to-Day of
  administration
• Taylors Scientific Management city became more
  and more complex, call for experts ? business
  like management
• Merit system used written exams to determine the
  suitability of employment
• Strategy is to weaken impacts of machines and
  working-class immigrant voters

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Reform

• Core argument for change was based on
  corruption of machine politics
• eliminate hierarchical election spaces through
  at-large council seats
• create new city government styles associated with
  professionalization of government civil service
  model
• city manager-council
• weak-mayor
• commission

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Annexation

• Rapid urban growth ? annexation
• addition of unincorporated land ? addition of tax
  bases in suburbs
• boosterism is behind this as well
• economics of scale in government
• further reduce the influence of machine politics
• benefits most were speculators
• example Chicago, NYC
• Central city and suburbs both benefited in a way,
  but the conflicts increased between them

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Fragmentation

• Response to rapid annexation of efforts of urban
  boosterism to expand industrial space
• urbanized spaces incorporate to prevent
  annexation
• Suburban development promotes fragmentation
  preemptive action
• new communities beyond urban limits incorporate
  to provide local services
• suburbites not only can escape from central city
  but also the tax burden
• governance politics confined to their value

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Fragmentation

• Result Central city was surrounded by a ring of
  hostile governments

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Consequences of Fragmentation

• Urban centers are not able to deal with
  metropolitan change UFC
• lose a poor of highly educated person
• decreasing income
• increasing services demands metropolitan wide
• Fiscal Squeeze

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Consequences of Fragmentation (Cont.)

• Intensified socio-economic segregation
• a result of the political independence of middle
  class
• exclusionary zoning exclude undesirable ?
  further enhance segregation based on social
  status
• Consolidate different tax structures service
  packages

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Consequences of Fragmentation (Cont.)

• Metropolitan planning impossible because of
  political fragmentation
• minimized intra-community conflicts
• but little or no benefits to embrace regionalism
  hard to solve area wide problems home rule
• competing growth coalitions competing for
  economic development dollars Zero Sum Game

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Next Class

• City As Growth Machine and Service Providers
  (1945-1973)
• Reading chp 13. pp 345357