Grocery Co-Ops as Governing Institutions
Grocery cooperatives dot the retail food landscape in cities across the United States. Most of these community-owned stores participate in an alternative food network that supports local farming, organic products and fair-trade goods. Many cooperatives are part of neighborhood commercial corridors. Those with a long tenure may be the most established, and largest, retailers on these corridors. These grocery cooperatives may play a crucial role in corridor governance, helping to convene other merchants to market the corridor, increasing visibility, sales, and corridor stability.
What Do Host City Residents Think about the Olympics?
Among the most common questions asked about the Olympics by scholars and the public alike is: “Why do cities want to host the Olympics anyway?” Our recent research shifts the question from the rationales proposed by elites to how local residents encounter the Games through its various stages from bidding to post-Games perceptions. Such a perspective is particularly important given the pressure that has emerged from local residents in recent years in bid cities that has frequently scuttled Olympic aspirations.
What 311 Calls (Cannot) Tell Us about Political Engagement
Let’s say that the last heavy rain left a pothole on your street significantly deeper, or that a streetlight went out right in front of your house.What do you do? Some of us stick to airing a few choice curse words when the car bottoms out or when we can’t see where we dropped those keys… but some call “311”, the non-emergency service request line that now operates in many cities across the US.
Can CBO's Alleviate Political Inequality?
The results of political inequality and disenfranchisement are becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to ignore. It is not just the horrific scenes of black people, almost always from poor urban communities, being shot by police officers on video. It is also the voices of despair and anger as well as calls for justice and reform that are heard after such horrendous events occur. Street protests, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and everyday people on social media platforms have shed light on the palpable sense of political and civic isolation that exists in many urban communities.
Why Do Some Foreclosed Properties Re-sell More Quickly Than Others?
The record number of foreclosures that occurred during the 2007-2009 financial recession was a cause of significant concern for low-income neighborhoods. Foreclosures were often found to be concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods, and foreclosures themselves have been associated with declines in neighborhood home prices.
Mayors, Partisanship, and Redistribution
In the face of federal and state intransigence, progressive policy advocates have increasingly looked to cities for innovative and aggressive redistributive policy. Recently promulgated local policies tackling issues like minimum wage and sick leave policies offer some preliminary evidence that urban governments are important players in this policy arena. Given their direct and indirect powers at the local level, mayors naturally play a salient role in pursuing these policies through agenda setting and other means. Despite mayors’ centrality in these issues, prior studies of local redistribution have not focused on their prioritization of redistributive policy and efforts to put it on the agenda.
How Cities Are Promoting Clean Energy and Dealing with Problems Along the Way
Cities are taking the initiative to promote environmental sustainability. They provide incentives for buildings and homes to go green. They adhere to smart growth. They design urban space in a way that facilitates the interactions of human, nature, and built environment. And their latest efforts are directed toward clean energy. Many cities are not only encouraging residents to use but also produce their own electricity through renewable sources. But the road to clean energy is not a straight path. It has twists and turns and many obstacles along the way.
Will New Light Tech Produce Safe Entertainment Districts?
How can we make our cities safe? Entertainment areas in big cities are places of fun but also of trouble. Thefts and fights frequently occur on these areas when people gather in masses and drink large amounts of alcohol. Police presence may help to enhance safety but is costly and may even have adverse effects. A large police presence may give people the impression that there are problems! For these reasons, cities are looking for innovative ways to enhance the safety of entertainment areas.
It’s Time for a Change: Rethinking Urban Policy in the Age of Trump
Recent political developments in both the United States and Europe have been, to say the least, jarring. They should give us cause to begin a process of systematically re-evaluating many of our accepted orthodoxies in political strategy and policy development. Regarding the latter, the urban sphere is a critical, if not essential, place to start. For embodied in what we call urban policy lies a host of core values and assumptions regarding what has been the central political question since at least the time of Aristotle: Namely, what constitutes the nature of “the good society,” and how it might be achieved? Urban policy – properly understood – thus is best thought of as representational of all matters concerning the public interest, at least in the sphere of domestic affairs.
Accomplishing Agonism in Urban Governance
Last year, Urban Affairs Review ran a Mini-Symposium on Urban Governance that featured by articles by Allison Bramwell and Jon Pierre (New Community Spaces), Susan Clarke (Local Place Based Urban Governance), and Jill Simone Gross (Hybridization and Urban Governance). We are now fortunate to have a set of follow-up pieces on Urban Governance written by the same authors to share with you on the Forum.
Local Place-Based Collaborative Governance
Last year, Urban Affairs Review ran a Mini-Symposium on Urban Governance that featured by articles by Allison Bramwell and Jon Pierre (New Community Spaces), Susan Clarke (Local Place Based Urban Governance), and Jill Simone Gross (Hybridization and Urban Governance). We are now fortunate to have a set of follow-up pieces on Urban Governance written by the same authors to share with you on the Forum.
New Community Spaces
Last year, Urban Affairs Review ran a Mini-Symposium on Urban Governance that featured by articles by Allison Bramwell and Jon Pierre (New Community Spaces), Susan Clarke (Local Place Based Urban Governance), and Jill Simone Gross (Hybridization and Urban Governance). We are now fortunate to have a set of follow-up pieces on Urban Governance written by the same authors to share with you on the Forum.
Politics or Professionalism? Budgeting for Bilingual Education
Strike up a conversation about politics with a friend, relative, or colleague, and you’d be hard pressed to surprise them by noting the increasing diversity in the demographic face of the United States. You might also argue that this population shift is important because it is changing the political landscape—the presence of demographic change in America is well noted by political pundits and casual observers alike. The American public now finds itself inundated with a flood of election media coverage and, almost inescapably, claims about how the electoral prospects of one candidate or another hinge upon the voting choices of historically underrepresented groups. On the governance side, these claims are important because many believe (or certainly hope) that some policymakers, be they aspiring or incumbent, are more likely to support policies that can improve the outcomes of which minorities care about the most.
Race and State in the Urban Regime
In most U.S. cities, local authorities are responsible for governance of the local public schools and managing the local water supply, among other things. However, in many U.S. cities, local residents and their local elected officials do not have decision-making authority over traditional local government functions. In cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark, states control the local schools. In Flint, the state of Michigan has governance authority over the city’s water supply. These cities have experienced state takeovers of their local governments.
The Social and Fiscal Consequences of Urban Decline
Most big cities grow, but a handful of once-large American cities continuously shrink. Twenty-one of the 110 largest central cities in the US have lost population every decade since 1980. Once centers of wealth and industry, these places are shadows of their former selves. In 1950, 1.8 million people lived in Detroit; in 2013, 700,000 did. Since 1950 Buffalo, New York has lost 55 percent of its population. Cleveland, Ohio has lost 56 percent, and Youngstown, Ohio has lost 61 percent.
What Affects Our Sense of Security?
Japan has a lower crime rate (number of recorded crimes per 100,000 people) for homicide and theft than France, Germany, the UK and the US. The theft rate in Japan is less than one-third that of the US, while the homicide rate is around one-sixth. However, the nation’s sense of security with regard to crime remains low. Our recent study showed that crime rates affect residents’ sense of security in their neighborhoods, and that these effects differ by the type of crime and spatial scale.
The Politics of Urban Climate Change
Cities are becoming an important focal point for climate change policy: they are responsible for a large portion of energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and have shown tremendous leadership in committing to GHG emissions reductions, even as many national governments fail to do so. Indeed, Scientific American recently claimed that, “Climate Change Will be Solved in Cities – Or Not at All” and more than one thousand city leaders attended the recent international climate change negotiations in Paris.
The Nationalization of Local School Board Elections
School board elections have a reputation for being sleepy affairs—low voter turnout, minimal campaigning, and little media attention. But recent news coverage of school board elections in cities like Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New Orleans seems to indicate heightened interest in these races: out-of-state donors are writing very large checks to support candidates and PACs in local elections. Many of the outside donors are very wealthy and some are billionaires, such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.
Can Urban Agriculture be a Solution to Blight? Not necessarily.
Like other post-industrial or legacy cities in the United States, such as Detroit and Cleveland, New Orleans has garnered attention for its boom in urban agriculture over the past few years. While the city has historically boasted a backyard gardening culture, along with a surge of community gardening movement in the 1990s, commercial and non-profit gardens became more prevalent in the years following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There were over 100 urban gardening and farming projects in the city as of 2014, with growers engaging in a wide range of agricultural activities from growing vegetables and flowers, planting fruit orchards, keeping bees to raising chickens and goats.
Left on Base
In 2013, El Paso, Texas took the sacrifices cities make in building sports facilities to new symbolic heights when it demolished its 34-year-old city hall in order to clear the land for a new minor league baseball stadium. El Paso committed to the project, not for the love of the game, but in order to anchor their downtown redevelopment, which included 85 projects receiving nearly $500 million in total from municipal bonds.