Information Sharing, Smartness and Megacities: Some Lessons
Megacities, metropolitan areas that concentrate more than 10 million people comprised of one or more cities plus their suburbs (UN 2006), showcase the advantages and richness, as well as the challenges and struggles, of large, diverse, and complex urban settlements. The continuous growth of metropolitan areas is creating a myriad of problems whose complexity often outpaces the ability of the city’s government to respond. In such situations, city governments are looking for new and innovative ways to solve problems and provide services.
Rebuilding the Cultural Sector in a Post-Pandemic World Requires Understanding the ‘Ecology’ of the Cultural City
As cities around the world have shut down due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural sector has been particularly hard hit. Even as some jurisdictions begin to ease public health restrictions, tourism and crowded events such as concerts and festivals are unlikely to return while we are still vulnerable to the coronavirus. Public subsidies for cultural organizations are also at risk as governments have shifted to prioritize public health. Lockdowns and social distancing have limited our participation in public spaces. In sum, the cultural landscape of cities looks extremely uncertain in the immediate future and it is likely that many cultural establishments will not survive.
Understanding the Adoption and Implementation of Body-Worn Cameras among U.S. Local Police Departments
Police use of deadly force against racial minority residents is a major concern of U.S. policing. The several high-profile police-involved deaths of racial minority residents, such as the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in New York City, along with the acquittal of police officers involved in those incidents, led to minority residents’ riots and looting in protest of police brutality. These incidents and the resulting public outcry brought major national debate on officers’ discriminatory treatment toward Black people and pressured the governments to devise a way to control officers’ discretionary decision to use of deadly force.
Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog
The prolonged and ongoing struggle of city newspapers to stay afloat and maintain full newsrooms made us curious about potential fallout for local politics. Our new article in UAR leverages 20 years of data to examine the relationship between newspaper staffing cuts and measures of political competition and voter engagement in mayoral elections.
American Regionalism and the Constellation of Mechanisms for Cross-Boundary Cooperation
The question of how local governments coordinate policies and projects across jurisdictional boundaries fascinates a small subset of scholars across a broad range of disciplines. In the social sciences, research focuses on (among other things) governance, institutions, the consequences of political fragmentation, collective action, and the practicalities of service and infrastructure provision. Much of the literature questions the suitability of the institutions that have emerged in response to multiplying cross-boundary problems and highlights concerns of effectiveness, equity, and accountability.
![Getting STIF[ed]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6430525b8f320756ebe23070/1681744547644-FBZ3SVPDJTYTLFK8T4VP/image-asset.jpeg)
Getting STIF[ed]
Cities getting fleeced by professional sports teams on stadium and arena deals is nothing new. Nor is the underperformance of infrastructure megaprojects, which frequently go over budget, take longer than expected, or fail to meet revenue targets. Despite sports facilities representing some of the most financially significant and visible megaprojects that many cities will contemplate, there is often a disconnect between discussions of sports venues and the larger suite of infrastructure megaprojects.
Culture Wars and City Politics, Revisited
The so-called ‘culture wars’ – conflicts between progressives and conservatives over morality, values and identity – are often considered purely national in scope. When James Davison Hunter first popularized the concept in the early 1990s, he had in mind a clear vision of an all-encompassing conflict between the forces of orthodoxy and progressivism over the ‘meaning of America’. Yet the fiercest manifestations of culture war conflicts very often occur in localities, turning ostensibly national debates into issues that cities and towns have to deal with. Indeed, recent events – the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, the COVID-19 pandemic – have only served to underscore the increasingly localized dimensions of culture war skirmishes and the challenges they present for local and municipal governance.
Characterizing the Non-linear Relationship Between Capacity and Collaboration in Urban Energy and Climate Initiatives
In the wake of the United States’ initiation of its formal withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the continued commitment of city governments is serving, for some, as a beacon of hope. However, although there are many examples of cities achieving significant reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, individual local governments cannot generate the necessary scale of changes alone. The emphasis that both scholarly and practitioner-focused studies place on understanding the dynamics that facilitate successful inter-jurisdictional and inter-organizational collaborations around local climate and energy objectives reflect this recognition.
The Urban Turn in Comparative Politics
In this post, UAR Co-Editor Yue Zhang shares her article that was originally published in the Spring 2020 newsletter of The Organized Section In Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Experimenting With Public Engagement Platforms in Local Government
Citizen consultation and participation in decision making at the local level has a long history in the U.S., rooted in traditions such as the New England town meeting. In recent years, however, new digital platforms have emerged to facilitate online town hall meetings or to gather collective input on policy issues in new ways. Who are the governments experimenting with these participatory innovations? We explore this question using US national survey data that examines use of these platforms, goals and activities for civic engagement, and practices for local innovation.
Exploitative Revenues, Law Enforcement, and the Quality of Government Service
One aspect of recent criticism of police departments has been centered on the aggressive imposition and collection of fees, fines, and civilly forfeited assets. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri police department, for example, revealed that a key driver of the behavior of the Ferguson police was the desire to generate municipal revenue by issuing traffic tickets and imposing fees. More broadly, a growing body of evidence indicates that local police departments are being used to provide revenue for municipalities by imposing and collecting fees, fines, and asset forfeitures.
Democracy, Exclusion, and White Supremacy
This post by Edward Goetz (University of Minnesota) is the last of three posts based on the Exclusionary Zoning Colloquy published in 2019. The entire colloquy is available here. If you missed the first post by David Imbroscio (University of Louisville) you can read that here, and the second post by Katherine Levine Einstein here.
The Privileged Few
This post by Katherine Levine Einstein (Boston University) is the second of three posts based on the Exclusionary Zoning Colloquy published in 2019. The entire colloquy is available here. Check back soon for another response from Edward Goetz (University of Minnesota). If you missed the first post by David Imbroscio (University of Louisville) you can read that here.
How to Stop Worrying (So Much) about Exclusionary Zoning
This post by David Imbroscio (University of Louisville) is the first of three posts based on the Exclusionary Zoning Colloquy published in 2019. The entire colloquy is available here. Check back soon for responses from Katherine Levine Einstein (Boston University) and Edward Goetz (University of Minnesota).
Capitalizing on Collapse
A well-documented consequence of the recent foreclosure crisis was a pronounced dislocation in the single-family home market. Large institutional buyers backed with Wall Street capital emerged to capitalize on this dislocation. These firms acquired hundreds of thousands of single-family homes to create a pool of institutionally-owned single-family rentals (SFRs) in markets across the U.S. Existing research highlights both positive and negative effects of this investor activity. Analyses suggest that home purchases and subsequent investments by these actors have reduced vacancies and aided recovery from the housing bust, however, studies also show associations between institutional investment in SFRs and increases in home prices and evictions.
Gangnam Style – A Symbol of Fast Urban Growth and Deep Inequality
In 2012, South Korean singer Psy’s Gangnam Style became a global sensation, earning three billion views on YouTube. In several interviews, Psy mentioned that the theme of the song was intended to satirize the extravagant and speculative culture of the place (Jung and Li 2014). With his motto to “dance cheesy, dress classy,” the music video showed Gangnam’s trendy and luxurious lifestyle, as well as the high-rise properties of the wealthy. Indeed, Gangnam has become an emblematic and successful example of Korea’s compressed economic development. At the same time, it also began to symbolize deepening urban segregation, as Gangnam is concentrated with the super-middle class with socio-economic, and even political, superiority in South Korea.
The City in International Political Conflict
In this time of increased hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity, I contribute to our understanding of fractured cities and nations in my UAR article, “National Policy Agendas Encounter the City: Complexities of Political-Spatial Implementation”. In examining two urban areas of enduring and deep inter-group violence, I reveal the contentious relationship that exists between the national political realm of policy agenda setting and the urban realm of implementation. I focus on the city and its role in perpetuating or attenuating inter-group conflict. I concentrate on how urban dynamics are both shaped by national political goals and capable of disrupting the implementation of these national programmes.
Intermunicipal Cooperation in Metropolitan Regions in Brazil and Mexico
Metropolises, not states, are the ones capable of saving the world from its most pernicious problems. This common theme is frequently present in the rhetoric of multi-national organizations echoed in newspapers’ headlines. Clearly, cities and metropolitan regions have advantages over other levels of governments in terms of their proximity and policy tools to face problems such as water shortage, waste management, human security, housing, urban mobility, among others. For most countries, especially in the developing world, these topics present formidable challenges into reaching sustainable models of livelihood due to the lack of intermunicipal cooperation. The real question is whether metropolitan regions are actually capable of cooperating to address these and other problems independent to the surrounding institutional context.
Governing Without Government
In 2018, the City of Detroit kicked off fundraising for the Strategic Neighborhood Fund, an effort to attract private funds to support infrastructure improvements in city neighborhoods. This initiative came five years after Detroit went through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Based on major media accounts, this bankruptcy was a rousing success, ushering in the rebirth of a great American city. As a feature article in National Geographic put it: “Tough, real, and cheap, Detroit, with the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy behind it, is suddenly attractive to investors, innovators, and would-be fixers, especially young adventurers.” The credit ratings agencies seemed to agree; by February 2019 the city’s bond rating had made considerable progress towards regaining investment grade status.
Disasters and Economic Shocks Virtual Issue
In advance of the research that will soon be coming forth about the varied impacts of COVID-19 on our lives, UAR Co-Editor Peter Burns has identified several UAR articles that engage issues he thinks will receive a lot of attention from urban scholars. This “virtual” issue on Disasters and Economic Shocks highlights previously published articles on emergency management networks, inequities in public services, public health, immigration policy, and city responses to economic shocks.