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作者

Nuno F. da Cruz

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue6,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionCities are becoming increasingly central to our understanding of society. Institutional shifts towards the enabling state alongside welfare state retrenchment often have the unintended consequence of making cities more important – as platforms for collective decision-making, social service and infrastructure provision, economic development, emergency response and more ambitious environmental policies. At the same time, nation-states are institutional forms that are not particularly responsive to the challenges and opportunities that emerge from cities (Frug and Barron 2008). Cities are often left to confront these dynamics on their own, making the emergent practices and priorities of governing them a key contemporary field of inquiry (da Cruz, Rode and McQuarrie 2019). As a result, these practices have become a central focus of a new generation of scholarly work, cutting across diverse disciplines including urban studies, public administration and political sociology (e.g., Brenner 1999; Harvey 1989; Nelles, Gross and Kennedy 2018; Pierre 2014).Some offer positive and celebratory accounts. “If Mayors ruled the world,” it is argued, many of the basic dilemmas of the nation-state could be overcome and solutions to pressing problems like climate change and inequalities would emerge (Barber 2013). Others argue more critically and suggest that governance at the urban scale may provide opportunities, but faces obvious legal, institutional, and political constraints that limit its actual possibilities (Béal, Epstein and Pinson 2018; Schragger 2016). Still others use the governance framework to show the importance of shifting practices of governing, such as an increased reliance on participatory forums, non-government organisations (NGOs), and philanthropic initiatives rather than public agencies and their hierarchies (McQuarrie 2013). Urban governance is very much on the agenda of both theorists and practitioners.There is a growing body of empirical research on urban governance but the broad scope of the concept, theoretical disagreements, and the scarcity of systematically collected, comparable data, have been impeding progress in the field (Zhang 2020). Private-sector participation in all arenas of public decision-making, the existence of multilevel relationships and transactions (between tiers of government, through global networks of cities, etc.), the emergence of new non-governmental actors claiming power in the “governance network,” are all palpable and constantly (re)shaping urban policies and strategies (Pierre 2011). But the scale, scope and relevance of these exchanges and connections are difficult to formalise and map out through comparative empirical research.Governance frameworks are forged by many forces beyond the formal or informal relationships between actors, for example, legal frameworks, institutions, and availability and access to resources (Nelles 2013). All these remain critical research arenas. But because the “soft power” arising from the connections between the various actors is harder to grasp, comparative empirical research into this dimension is sparser – in particular, comparative research that attempts to identify and quantify patterns in these connections. To contribute to this strand of empirical literature on urban governance, this exploratory paper delivers an investigation of the relationships shaping strategic decisions in cities using techniques of social network analysis (SNA). In testing an interview-based, snowball sampling, SNA approach to generate empirical insights, it also juxtaposes current assumptions in the literature with new data. The key research questions are: “What are the social institutions/actors that form urban governance networks?,” “Who are the most important or influential actors within those?,” and “What are the structural features of the networks?”SNA is a particularly relevant empirical approach in this regard because it enables systematic comparisons between cities or between policy sectors (Klijn and Koppenjan 2016). We apply this method to formalise and compare the transport governance networks of Greater London and New York City (NYC). The similarities (e.g., in demographic and economic terms) and dissimilarities (e.g., in political terms, most notably the unitary and federal systems) between these two global cities make the comparison particularly relevant (Fainstein 2010; Kantor et al. 2012). Because the focus here is on comparing and contrasting the underlying network governance patterns, the paper does not delve into the particular dynamics of each city even though these in-depth analyses of governance would certainly be of interest. Due to space constraints, we emphasise the findings that could only be attained through a SNA approach.1 Therefore, we selected a few parameters to describe and analyse the structural features of the governance networks in these two cities.The focus on one policy sector is mainly due to feasibility concerns. The data collection method tested in this research and subsequent coding for SNA is extremely time-consuming (see Section 4), especially when carried out in major cities. The selection of the urban transport sector is linked to its public interest and close relationship with urban development. By mediating citizens’ access to opportunity, transport services have a significant impact on productivity but also on liveability and social equity. The long-term effects that these policy decisions have on strategic planning and spatial development and on the environmental and economic performance of cities make urban transport one of the key policy sectors of the 21st century (Rode 2019). Lastly, the level of complexity and major prominence that transport infrastructure development has on public sector budgets are similar for London and NYC.This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the literature on urban and metropolitan governance, emphasising the rationale for viewing the concept through a network perspective and using SNA for comparative research. Section 3 describes the institutional settings and political frameworks of the urban transport sectors in London and NYC. Section 4 describes our methodological approach and presents the data. The fifth section comprises the analysis and discussion and section 6 concludes the paper.