How urban politics shapes city growth

Urban politics is politics within United States cities, where mayors or city councils run governments with limited governing power. The lessons answer how cities shape their growth and help readers understand how political relationships and economic forces influence that process. They trace the connections between governing coalitions, public policy, investment, and urban development.

2 articles, 1 book · about 1 hr 9 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   URBAN REGIMES AND THE CAPACITY TO GOVERN: A Political Economy Approach · mesopolhis.fr · 60+ min read

   Urban regime analysis is a way of understanding how politics and economics interact in city governance. It recognizes the political importance of privately controlled investment without treating politics as subordinate to economics, and sees economic forces as both shaping and being shaped by political arrangements. One version of regime theory holds that public policies are shaped by a community's governing coalition: its composition, relationships, and members' resources. The socioeconomic environment supplies problems and challenges to which regimes respond.

2. Read
   urban politics · Wikipedia · 6 min read

   Urban regime theories explain relationships between elected officials and people who influence their decisions. Corporate or development regimes promote growth, normally reflecting major corporations' interests while neglecting poor, distressed areas. As congestion, overcrowded housing, poor sanitation and health epidemics persisted, affluent citizens left central cities for the outer edges, beginning suburbanization. Urban America slowly lost importance as it moved toward metropolitan America, which in most cases consisted of poor, underdeveloped old-city centers surrounded by wealthy suburbs and edge-cities.

3. Book
   

   City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles · Bookshop.org

   City of Quartz by Mike Davis describes power struggles within the Llano community and friction among the downtown Protestant elite, the new elite of the Jewish Westside, homeowner groups, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Catholic Church.

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