An Introduction to Volume 59, Issue 1: Progressive Cities, Voters and their Elected Officials, Privatized Services, Neighbors and Neighborhoods, and Housing

《An Introduction to Volume 59, Issue 1: Progressive Cities, Voters and their Elected Officials, Privatized Services, Neighbors and Neighborhoods, and Housing》

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作者: Richardson Dilworth Mara Sidney

来源: URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue1,P.

语言: 英文

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摘要: This first issue of 2023 offers a set of articles and research notes that examine at least three sets of questions:1.How might cities be more progressive or socially just? What are the building blocks, the theories of governance, and their potential and limits?2.What motivates voters and officeholders in local government, and how do local managers assess privatized services?3.What explains neighborhood dynamics, including conflicts between residents, and barriers to affordable housing, such as eviction, housing vacancy, and limited availability of multifamily housing?The authors use a range of methods and data to explore these questions, including comparative case studies, surveys, experiments, and statistical analysis of secondary data.Progressive CitiesAs Andrea Restrepo-Mieth (2023) puts it in her article on city planning in Medellin, progressive urban policy is “Characterized by citizen involvement, local-government activism, …a focus on equity, … the construction of public amenities, the creation of social programs, and the implementation of socio-spatial interventions aimed at improving the material well-being of individuals in traditionally marginalized neighborhoods, while advancing the exercise of active citizenship” (pp. 101–102). The procedures and practices she includes in this definition – local government activism and active citizenship – are vaguely suggestive of Althorpe and Horak's (2023) argument for a reconceptualization of the “right to the city” (RTTC) as one attained by “self-governed cooperation across social difference” (pp. 15–16).While Restrepo-Mieth focuses on the institutional dynamics – what she calls “institutional compounding” – by which one progressive goal in one city was achieved, Althorpe and Horak (2023) focus not on goals or outcomes but rather on the potential for unique forms of community and collective action that might arise from uniquely urban characteristics, namely the proximity and heterogeneity of city residents. In doing so they connect their discussion of the RTTC to the decidedly non-radical tradition of urban studies stretching back to the Chicago School. Yet their analysis stops at the point of specifying specific policies or approaches that could enhance and expand the existing collectivist spaces of the contemporary city.Some of the other articles in this issue begin to fill the gap between theory and practice. Beveridge and Naumann (2023), for instance, examine the attitudes and actions of progressive Left Party mayors in various small towns throughout the German Federal State of Brandenburg. The focus on small towns is notably different from Althorpe and Horak's focus on the links between urbanism and progressivism; and indeed, Beveridge and Naumann find that their mayors, though they embrace and pursue progressive policies, especially related to housing, transportation, and open space, also operate in more small-scale settings where “politics is not about expounding progressive political visions and wider movements but is about local projects with concrete aims and outcomes.” (pp. 58–59)Restrepo-Mieth suggests that the successful development and implementation of progressive city planning is a result of “institutional compounding,” or the interaction effects between formal institutions and informal networks when the goals of those institutions and networks are aligned. As she traces the development and implementation of progressive city planning in Medellin in the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century, she finds that the informal network was able to sustain progressive planning goals even when a new mayor was less supportive of those goals. Yet that network—which consisted of community-based organizations and civil-society organizations but also “reform-oriented business elites…, academic research centers, and traditional media”—was not necessarily what Althorpe and Horak may have been thinking about when they imagined the actors that would animate their version of the RTTC.The role of institutional compounding in making progressive planning more resilient in Medellin is geographically specific in the sense that formal institutions in the Global South are weaker and thus rely more on informal networks than in the Global North (Respetho-Mieth 2023, p. 102). Here there are hints of the debate over the comparability of urban spaces, especially across hemispheres, that come through more forcefully in the second case study of Medellin in this issue, Betancur and Brand's (2023) examination of Medellin's rapid transformation from, as they put it, “murder capital to model city” – the same transformation that brought the progressive city planning discussed by Respetho-Mieth. This transformation, Betancur and Brand argue, “suggests that the ‘Medellin model’ is unique and irreplicable. In other words, there is no paradigm to export but a series of award-winning programs with enormous appeal but no proven record.”(p. 91) As this brief quote suggests, Betancur and Brand depart from Respetho-Mieth in claiming that the governance experience in Medellin is not just unique to the Global South but even within the Global South.Moreover, Betancur and Brand claim that there are no exportable lessons or paradigms from Medellin precisely because they see the city's progressivism as a superficial neoliberal cooptation of civil-society and community-based organizations by business and government groups. By contrast, Respetho-Mieth sees a genuine network that makes progressive policy more resilient. Looked at together, these two articles on Medellin thus bring up deeper issues regarding the comparability of city-based case studies and how we might apply theoretical notions of progressivism, such as that provided by Althorpe and Horak, to concrete examples of urban politics and policymaking.