urban regeneration and revitalization in the americas - Woodrow ...

The Relationship between State Stability and Urban Regeneration
government agendas. This competition is sometimes tacit and sometimes
explicit. It is a result of differences in the order of priorities of each governmental
level’s agendas. Here too urban primacy becomes an intervening variable
in this relationship of interdependence. The greater the expression of
this phenomenon in a country, the greater the proclivity to conflictive competition
between the mayor of the large city and the president.
Even if it is possible to expect the existence of a close agreement on problematic
matters and items within each of the agendas in question, there will
always be differences and specifities in each of them. It is obvious that in the
municipal-urban agenda there will be fewer items and components than in
the national agenda. It is also clear that this discrepancy is a result of the simple
gradual and hierarchical differences among the difference levels of territorial
legislature. That is to say, it has to do with the preponderance of national
order over subaltern orders of that hierarchical structuration.
However, we come to a point in which the coincidences mentioned turn
out to a large extent to be the source of conflictive competitions that, in turn,
impose the prevailing lack of resources in Latin American countries, which
will be further discussed below. This is where the budget of the large cities
and the national budget collide. It is due to the lack of agreements between
the two political actors that, instead of establishing and constructing strategies
of complementarity and harmony to understand the common problem
of their respective agendas, make it difficult to coordinate and rationalize
policies in order to increase national stability. This insufficiency of intergovernmental
cooperation is accentuated in circumstances in which the political
projects of the mayor and the president are antagonistic or different. The
simple fact that both actors have been elected by popular vote when they represent
different party forces becomes a determinant in the disagreements and
differences in the order of priorities on the agendas.
The Latin American experience can offer several examples of this. Here it
is sufficient to mention the recent cases of Mexico and Colombia. In the case
of Mexico, there were ideological and pragmatic differences between the PRD
platform of the mayor of the Federal District, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and the
PRI government of President Ernesto Zedillo in the period of 1994 to 2000.
The case of Colombia, which is even more recent, alludes to the discrepancies
between the government agenda of Mayor Luis Eduardo Garzón as the mayor
elected with a leftist political project, the Democratic Pole, in marked contrast
with the government of President Álvaro Uribe, who, despite formally repre-
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