ancient cities

Ur b a n po l i t i c s
The study of urban politics brings together several
disciplines to understand the governance and
political development of urban areas. Although
U.S. and European scholars have often drawn
upon different perspectives and intellectual traditions,
in recent years they have converged in
response to an interest in the comparative study of
urban politics.
Theoretical Approaches
Until the 1950s most scholarship on U.S. city politics
was dominated by institutional analysis. This
approach focused on formal administrative organization
and the charters and laws pertaining
to local governance. This perspective paralleled
the teachings of the early-twentieth-century urban
reform movement in the United States. The latter
viewed city governance as primarily an administrative
activity rather than a political matter. Although
some political scientists took exception to this
approach, most scholars assumed there was a
broad consensus on political fundamentals in running
cities and local governments. This conclusion
led them to study ways of making government
more efficient.
The behavioral movement in political science
reoriented the study of urban politics during the
1950s and 1960s. This movement emphasized
looking at groups and other informal influences on
local government rather than legal institutions. Its
key assumption was that politics and administration
could never be separated and that the proper
focus of investigation was power and political conflict.
This led to community power studies in
which investigators searched for methods and
theories that could best explain who governed
urban areas and how power was distributed. Elite
theorists, such as Floyd Hunter, relied on social
surveys and sociological models to study how
power was concentrated despite the presence of
formal democratic institutions. Robert A. Dahl
and other pluralist theorists disputed this approach.
Focusing on decision making as evidence, they contended
that power was more decentralized than
elitists claimed. Further, they argued that democratic
institutions ensured sufficient organized
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political competition to keep public officials
accountable to the citizenry most of the time. Still
other critics asserted that neither elite nor pluralist
theories took into account “nondecision” activities
whereby anticipated political pressures, cultural
norms, ideologies, and other means that are not
part of the overt decision-making process could
restrict the political agendas that came up for
debate.
Although the debate over community power
was never resolved, it demonstrated that many
kinds of social and political influences needed to
be understood in order to adequately explain
urban politics. Since the community power controversy,
scholars have been intent on describing
these diverse forces in a parsimonious way
in order to shed insight on the nature of local
politics. Critical of earlier researchers for their
focus on only internal political influences in local
politics, contemporary analysts seek to develop
theories that treat the entire political economy of
local government.
The Contemporary Debate
Paul Peterson, with his landmark study of 1981,
City Limits, precipitated the political economy
view. Peterson argued that cities must, at all
costs, avoid redistributive services, provide basic
services at an adequate level, and place the greatest
possible emphasis upon policies that stimulate
economic growth. Even the social health of a city,
he claimed, depends on its economic prosperity:
When the economy is growing, tax revenues
increase, city services can be improved, donations
to charitable organization become more generous,
and the social and cultural life of the city is
enhanced.
In Peterson’s view, local civic leaders cannot
leave economic growth to chance. Unlike the
national government, cities lack the authority to
regulate immigration, currency, and the importation
or exportation of goods and services. Cities
occupy a specific space; if the local business environment
is not pleasing to them, investors and
businesses can go elsewhere. This drives cities to
compete with each other to minimize taxes, avoid
expensive regulations, and offer a variety of subsidies
to businesses. Put simply, Peterson’s argument
is that issues of growth and development are