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Throughout this century, reformers have fought to eliminate party control of city politics. As a result, the majority of American cities today elect council members in at-large and nonpartisan elections. This result of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, which worked for election rules that eliminated the power of the urban machine and the working class on which it was based, is today still a subject of lively debate. For example, in the mid-1980s, regular Democrats in Chicago sought to institute a nonpartisan mayoral election. Supporters thought that reform would make the electoral process more democratic, while opponents charged that it was meant to dilute the voting powers of blacks. Clearly, the effect of urban reform remains an important issue for scholars and politicians alike. Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe clarify a portion of the debate by investigating how election structures affect candidates and the nature of representation. They examine the different effects of district versus at-large elections and of partisan versus nonpartisan elections. Who gets elected? Are representatives' socioeconomic status and party affiliation related to election form? Are election structures related to how those who are elected approach their jobs? Do they see themselves as representatives concerned with the good of the city as a whole? Urban Reform and Its Consequences reports an unprecedented wealth of data drawn from a sample of nearly 1,000 council members and communities with populations between 50,000 and 1 million across 42 states. The sample includes communities that use a variety of election procedures. This study is therefore the most comprehensive and accurate to date. Welch and Bledsoe conclude that nonpartisan and at-large elections do give city councils a more middle- and upper-middle-class character and have changed the way representatives view their jobs. Reform measures have not, however, produced councils that are significantly more conservative or more prone to conflict. Overall, the authors conclude that partisan and district elections are more likely to represent the whole community and to make the council more accountable to the electorate.
Most American cities are now administered by appointed city managers and governed by councils chosen in nonpartisan, at-large elections. In the early twentieth century, many urban reformers claimed these structures would make city government more responsive to the popular will. But on the whole, the effects of these reforms have been to make citizens less likely to vote in local elections and local governments less representative of their constituents. How and why did this happen? Ariane Liazos examines the urban reform movement that swept through the country in the early twentieth century and its unintended consequences. Reformers hoped to make cities simultaneously more efficient and more democratic, broadening the scope of what local government should do for residents while also reconsidering how citizens should participate in their governance. However, they increasingly focused on efficiency, appealing to business groups and compromising to avoid controversial and divisive topics, including the voting rights of African Americans and women. Liazos weaves together wide-ranging nationwide analysis with in-depth case studies. She offers nuanced accounts of reform in five cities; details the activities of the National Municipal League, made up of prominent national reformers and political scientists; and analyzes quantitative data on changes in the structures of government in over three hundred cities. Reforming the City is an important study for American history and political development, with powerful insights into the relationships between scholarship and reform and between the structures of city government and urban democracy.
Over the next 20 years, most low-income countries will, for the first time, become more urban than rural. Understanding demographic trends in the cities of the developing world is critical to those countries - their societies, economies, and environments. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation presents many challenges. In this uniquely thorough and authoritative volume, 16 of the world's leading scholars on urban population and development have worked together to produce the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the changes taking place in cities and their implications and impacts. They focus on population dynamics, social and economic differentiation, fertility and reproductive health, mortality and morbidity, labor force, and urban governance. As many national governments decentralize and devolve their functions, the nature of urban management and governance is undergoing fundamental transformation, with programs in poverty alleviation, health, education, and public services increasingly being deposited in the hands of untested municipal and regional governments. Cities Transformed identifies a new class of policy maker emerging to take up the growing responsibilities. Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, this essential text will become the benchmark for all involved in city-level research, policy, planning, and investment decisions. The National Research Council is a private, non-profit institution based in Washington, DC, providing services to the US government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The editors are members of the Council's Panel on Urban Population Dynamics.
Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. The central case study in this book, Henderson-Hopkins, is a PK-8 campus serving as the civic centerpiece of the East Baltimore Development Initiative. This study reflects on the persistent notions of urban renewal and their effectiveness for addressing the needs of disadvantaged neighborhoods and vulnerable communities. Situating the master plan and school project in the history and contemporary landscape of urban development and education debates, this book provides a detailed account of how Henderson-Hopkins sought to address several reformist objectives, such as improvement of the urban context, pedagogic outcomes, and holistic well-being of students. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.
Central America is undergoing an important transition. Urban populations are increasing at accelerated speeds, bringing pressing challenges for development, as well as opportunities to boost sustained, inclusive and resilient growth. Today, 59 percent of the region’s population lives in urban areas, but it is expected that 7 out of 10 people will live in cities within the next generation. At current rates of urbanization, Central America’s urban population will double in size by 2050, welcoming over 25 million new urban dwellers calling for better infrastructure, higher coverage and quality of urban services and greater employment opportunities. With more people concentrated in urban areas, Central American governments at the national and local levels face both opportunities and challenges to ensure the prosperity of their country’s present and future generations. The Central America Urbanization Review: Making Cities Work for Central America provides a better understanding of the trends and implications of urbanization in the six Central American countries -Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama- and the actions that central and local governments can take to reap the intended benefits of this transformation. The report makes recommendations on how urban policies can contribute to addressing the main development challenges the region currently faces such as lack of social inclusion, high vulnerability to natural disasters, and lack of economic opportunities and competitiveness. Specifically, the report focuses on four priority areas for Central American cities: institutions for city management, access to adequate and well-located housing, resilience to natural disasters, and competitiveness through local economic development. This book is written for national and local policymakers, private sector actors, civil society, researchers and development partners in Central America and all around the world interested in learning more about the opportunities that urbanization brings in the 21st century.
A renowned economist argues for the importance of property rights in "the most intelligent book yet written about the current challenge of establishing capitalism in the developing world" (Economist) "The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.
A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography. In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.
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As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind." “Largely missing from this debate [over sprawl] has been a sound and reasoned history of this pattern of living. With Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, we now have one. What a pleasure it is: well-written, accessible and eager to challenge the current cant about sprawl.”—Joel Kotkin, The Wall Street Journal “There are scores of books offering ‘solutions’ to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book.”—Witold Rybczynski, Slate