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作者

Andrea Restrepo-Mieth

来源

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

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city, has suffered for decades from a dearth of public space. In the 1990s the city began attempts to renew existing public spaces and create new ones downtown and near government buildings. The 2000s brought a shift in the approach to public space provision by recognizing that interventions needed to be carried out in the most marginalized neighborhoods since these had the highest need. The result was the creation of linear parks along creeks; integrating public space to public infrastructure systems like the metro; building new parks, plazas, community centers, and children's playgrounds; and creating and upgrading sports facilities. Interventions were carried out with community input and considerably changed the landscape of long-neglected hillside neighborhoods. Progressive approaches to public space provision continue to take place despite their less-than-enthusiastic embrace by the most recent mayor. What explains this situation? How do different actors embed progressive public space practices in new or existing institutions, and how do they strengthen the practices they manage to set in place?The pursuit of the progressive city is characterized by an emphasis on democratic participation as process, local-government activism as practice, and increased equity as outcome. Changes in cities in the Global South brought about through democratization, decentralization, and devolution have created real opportunities for municipal leadership to be contested and for progressive leaders to come into power (Abers 2000; Berney 2017; Goldfrank 2011). Furthermore, openings in political opportunity structures have allowed community-based organizations (CBOs) and civil-society organizations (CSOs) to access new avenues to impact public policy (Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011; Beard, Miraftab and Silver 2008; Warner 2018). Similarly, increased spaces for citizen participation and contestation have led to new ways of exercising citizenship such as “neighborhood citizenship” (Zaban 2019). Traditional powerbrokers such as local economic elites have had to reformulate approaches to engaging state and nonstate actors alike (Rubin and Bennett 2015). While the changes seen in some cities are promising and encouraging, their institutional realities should give pause regarding the possibility of sustained implementation of progressive planning practices. This concern for continuity leads to the question motivating this article: What explains the institutionalization of progressive city planning practices in Medellín?A common point of departure among new institutionalism literatures is that institutions impact individuals and organizations, and these in turn actively influence the maintenance or transformation of institutions. The dominant approaches to planning the city are likewise influenced by the prevailing social, economic, and political institutions that constrain and enable state and nonstate actors by creating both formal and informal contingencies. However, actors can transform planning institutions by taking advantage of conducive political structures and challenging those formations aimed at constraining their preferred approach to planning or managing the city. Institutional design and change are highly relevant to urban politics and planning theory as evidenced by among others Carmin, Anguelovski and Roberts (2012), Durose and Lowndes (2021), Einstein, Glick and Palmer (2020), Morrison (2017), Neuman (2012), Rast (2011), Salet (2018a, 2018b), Salon, Sclar and Barone (2019), and Sorensen (2018). Despite this attention, the city planning and urban politics literature analyzing institutions focuses heavily on formal institutions, with less attention paid to informal institutions and their role in achieving continuity.This article introduces the idea of institutional compounding and examines the mechanisms and processes that give rise to it in order to highlight its importance in the pursuit of institutionalization. I define institutional compounding as the quest by networks of individuals and organizations to create and sustain both formal and informal institutions, where each institutional form maintains its particular defining features, yet together they provide continuity and legitimacy to an existing practice. Individually each institutional form is susceptible to weakness, yet combined these institutions are more likely to achieve persistence through time. I build on theoretical developments by Lauth (2000) and Helmke and Levitsky (2006) on complementary institutions and apply this expanded theoretical framework to the analysis of nascent progressive public space institutions in Medellín. This article contributes to institutional theories in urban politics by conceptualizing how nascent institutions become effective through compounding, thereby highlighting how state and nonstate actors strengthen the redistributive practices they are able to set in place and how they seek to embed them through networked efforts.Progressive Planning, Institutions, and NetworksProgressive Planning in the Global SouthCities in the Global South have witnessed extraordinary changes in the past three decades as democratization, decentralization, and devolution altered national-local dynamics, giving local actors greater autonomy over planning and managing cities (Beard, Miraftab and Silver 2008; Falleti 2010). In Latin America, new approaches to urban administration have ranged from municipal neoliberalism to municipal socialism (Goldfrank and Schrank 2009). Progressive cities have emerged as part of these changes. I define progressive cities as follows: Characterized by citizen involvement, local-government activism, and a focus on equity, progressive cities prioritize 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. Similar to progressive cities in the United States, where innovations “had roots in a social movement that found a common cause in neighborhood issues” (Clavel 2010, 7), Global Southern progressive practices have emerged from community mobilization to give visibility to neighborhood problems, with the ultimate goal of engaging the local administration to meet its long-neglected responsibilities. Recent work on the endurance of progressive policies and practices in the Global North has emphasized the importance of active nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and policy networks with access to resources and able to achieve public legitimation of progressive policy goals (Schrock 2015).The challenge with work carried out to conceptualize the progressive city, when based on analyses from the Global North, is that these make assumptions about political and administrative institutions that are not consistent with the experiences of cities in the Global South. One such important challenge faced by change agents in the Global South is institutional weakness, defined as institutions that are ineffective and easily circumvented (Helmke and Levitsky 2006). Institutional strength, commonly assumed in the Global North, is something that cannot be assumed for all institutions in the Global South (O'Donnell 1994; Watson 2009). Weak institutions lead to ambiguity, uncertainty, and unclear expectations—precisely the opposite of what institutions are meant to accomplish. In weak institutional environments, actors often choose when and how to enforce rules (Mahoney and Thelen 2010).Studies of progressive cities in the Global South have the potential to contribute to the planning and urban politics literature by giving greater emphasis to the analysis of how actors strengthen the redistributive practices they manage to set in place and how they seek to embed them in new or existing institutions. For example, authors analyzing the neighborhood scale in both the Global North and South have found that intermediary bodies such as CBOs and neighborhood councils are uniquely positioned to represent low-income people and to promote more equitable planning processes (Park, Mosley and Grogan 2018; Rosen and Avni 2019; cf. Collins and Rey 2020). Less prominent but just as import as a potential source of support for progressive initiatives and their continuity is the private sector. Often thought of as exploitive and obstructionist (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer 2012; Harvey 2006), authors have recently shown that this segment of society is a lot more complex and can play an important role in the emergence and continuity of progressive practices (Bennett and Rubin 2015). The focus of this article however is not corporate social responsibility or philanthropy, but rather on undertakings by private actors to hold the state accountable for the implementation of progressive practices. In sum, the pursuit of the progressive city in the Global South requires not only government leadership and societal mobilization, but also recognizing the role of the private sector and focusing on building and strengthening progressive institutions.