In practice, achieving effective governance in the modern metropolis requires much more than a normative perspective for contemplating urban futures. Indeed, local authorities must be prepared to deal with several "facts of life" which detail the operating environment of contemporary urban government:
(a) capital in the intergovernmental marketplace is, as a matter of law, mobile. Because of this mobility, and because cities are tax-dependent, their capacities for providing stability and growth for themselves depend on forces over which they have little or no control (Peterson, 1981; Kantor & David, 1988);
(b) we have, today, a fundamentally restructured global economy. As a result of this, many American cities are suffering the direct effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; Castells, 1985; Kasarda, 1980). Many of these effects have been reinforced by federal policies and only weakly resisted by local politics;
(c) the metropolitan landscape is breaking up into a competitive geography of winners and losers winners live in suburbs, losers in cities. The interests of these two general areas are no longer unified, as in the past, by a dominant central city (Peirce, 1993b). Instead, local governments are faced with few informal, and even fewer formal, connections between themselves (Perry & Keller, 1991; Fletcher, 1993). This accentuates the fragmentation of interests between cities and suburbs;
(d) urban problems are no longer confined to inner cities. Rather, they are becoming more regional in nature. As of 1990, 42% of all metropolitan poor people lived in suburbs (Peirce, 1993a; Ames, Brown, Callahan, Cummings, Smock & Ziegler, 1992);
(e) a pressing issue is the "feminization of poverty": women and especially children have become the newest victims of urban deprivation (Peirce, 1993b), even while young black males, in particular, suffer horrendous educational and social handicaps that prevent most of them from entering the new high-tech, "high-touch" workforce where formal education, work skills, and personal presentation have become increasingly important (Goldsmith & Blakely, 1992; Galster & Hill, 1992);
(g) those institutions that have, traditionally, acted to democratize the public policy process have either been dismantled or transformed so radically that they no longer perform as expected (Greider, 1992). These, for instance, would include the labor unions, the political parties, the press, and the university system. Unions have become a thing of the past; voters have left the traditional parties and dismissed elections as meaningless; local public administration has been reduced to a co-conspirator in urban "growth machines" (Molotch, 1976); and, by in large, the local press and urban development researchers write in ways that are pleasing to elites, and about topics that seem most publishable;
(h) we have a federal government, a "contented" electoral majority (Galbraith, 1992), and a general public which, over the past couple decades, has withdrawn from urban policymaking, leaving urban policymakers neglected from above and alienated from below presumably, to develop their own visions/ solutions to local and regional problems (Colman, 1989);
(i) polarities in income and wealth continue to increase, particularly along racial lines: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, "the growth in the incomes of the richest one percent of Americans has been so large that just the increase between 1980 and 1990 in the after-tax income of this group equals the total income of the poorest 20 percent of the population. Congressional Budget Office figures show that in 1990, the top fifth will receive as much after-tax income as the other 80 percent of the population combined" (Mead, cited in Goldsmith & Blakely, 1992: 20);
(j) rather than polities, composed of citizens, cities are becoming collections of transient buyers and consumers who remain in communities only as long as higher profit margins or better tax packages are unavailable elsewhere (Long, 1991; Warren, Rosentraub, & Weschler, 1992). For many cities, the movement of the manufacturing industry to economically more-favored locations has denied the underclass the relatively stable jobs that were once available in large cities; and, most importantly,
(k) the normal upward movement that was for long the "solvent for discontent" has been arrested. The underclass has become a semipermanent, rather than a generational phenomenon (Galbraith, 1992: 38; Lowi, 1979). Thus, "it is an occasion for wonder," as Galbraith suggests, "that the [urban] discontent and its more violent and aggressive manifestations are not greater than they are." (Galbraith, 1992: 39).
We favor the urban setting for testing assumptions about the democratic process because barriers of size and complexity, that characterize state and national politics are largely absent. In other words, it is so large as to be unmanageable and whatever barriers remain are considerably less imposing (Presthus, 1964). And certainly, if one expects to find meaningful participation in salient issues at any level of American politics, the local level would most likely afford that advantage.
Nowhere today do we find a local policy area with as much salience as that of economic development. And nowhere do we find developmental issues of greater consequence than in the development of public assembly facilities (e.g., the arenas, stadiums, and entertainment complexes that house major league sporting events). Since the late 1950s, local governments have realized considerable financial and symbolic benefit from their efforts to retain and/ or enhance "their" professional sports teams (Petersen, 1989: 3).
Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.
About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. Hes now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see
http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.