Urban Governance and Politics

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Urban Governance and Politics
Geg309 Urban Geography
Instructor Jun Yan Geography Department SUNY at
Buffalo
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Last Class

• City As Growth Machines and Services Providers
  (1945-1973)
• Urban renewal growth machines
• Grassroots protest black politics
• Struggles for social and territorial justice

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Outline

• Fiscal Crisis Entrepreneurial Politics
• Fiscal crisis
• Fiscal retrenchment
• Privatized city
• Entrepreneurial politics
• Models of Local Governance

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Background of Fiscal Crisis

• Started at 1970s
• Long last economic crisis in 1970s
• After the crisis and economic restructuring
• Deindustrialization and decentralization to
  sunbelt cities, to third world
• Advanced capitalism flexible production system
• Postsuburban development suburbs (e.g. edge
  cities) begin to overshadow central cities
  informational mode of city

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Background of Fiscal Crisis

• Scale of impact is so huge self-propelling
  process in reverse

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Fiscal Crisis

• Symptoms started at 1970s
• infrastructure deteriorates
• rising crime enforcement costs
• increased need for specialized inner city
  services for elderly, unemployed, single parent
  families immigrants
• federal government passes along cost of federal
  programs revenue-sharing system
• simultaneous reduction in federal aid
• bankruptcy or at the edge of bankruptcy

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Sources of Fiscal Crisis

• Root I
• Long standing and intensified Fiscal Squeeze
  caused by suburbanization and political
  fragmentation

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Sources of Fiscal Crisis

• Root II
• Somehow conflict roles played by cities
• Service providers equity/social wage
• Infrastructures for private economic growth
  efficiency/social capital

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New Urban Politics?

• Neo-Conservatism--as a response
• tax payer revolts failure of social welfare
  middle and upper class e.g. Californias
  Proposition 13 (1978) and Massachusettss
  Proposition 21/2
• changed perception of governments New
  Federalism, initiated by Richard Nixon small
  size
• political devolution alliance formed
• weakened labor union deindustralization/decentral
  ization

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Strategy I

• Fiscal retrenchment
• reduction in service bundle
• increased efficiency
• decreased payroll

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Strategy II

• Privatized City
• private sectors to provide certain services and
  infrastructures roads, bridges, sewage, drinking
  water, street lighting?
• advantages
• decreased costs increased efficiency
• risks sharing
• new markets

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Strategy II (Cont.)

• Privatized City
• problems include
• low balling
• accountability/measurement
• trading high pay jobs for low pay jobs
• corruption
• narrow define of public interest as low cost

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Entrepreneurial Politics

• After economic restructuring, increased municipal
  expenditures
• Difference
• stimulate more involvement of private sectors
• through tax subsiding

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Entrepreneurial Politics

• Creating new public-private partnerships
• capital investment through image creation
• open new urban spaces for redevelopment e.g.
  gentrification
• capitalize the new federal government
  expenditures e.g. military, aerospace in sunbelt
  cities (San Diego)
• creation of positive entrepreneurial industrial
  ethos risk taking high tech start-ups

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Entrepreneurial Politics (Cont.)

• Creating new public-private partnerships
• creation of new quality of lifeor consumption
  districts e.g. Disneys Time Square Baltimores
  Inner Harbor
• create a complete marketable urban package
  offices, hotels, theaters, major-league sports
  franchise, mall complex, festival markets

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Buffalo Theater Historic Preservation District
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Models of Local Governance

• Elitist
• stable pyramid, general public accepted
  leadership
• Neo-Elitist
• consensus driven pyramid, general public opposed
  leadership
• Pluralist
• competition between groups
• multiple elite clusters
• emerging elite clusters

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Models of Local Governance (Cont.)

• Corporatist
• Interests clearly represented in local
  government creation of symbiotic hierarchies
  between government business/labor/community
• Hyperpluralistic
• unstable political coalitions
• contemporary US cities
• political regimes

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Next Class

• Urban Planning and Policy
• Reading chp 14. pp 377403