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7 Custodians of Place: Systemic Representation in Local Governance
- Georgetown University Press
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161 Chapter 7 Custodians of Place: Systemic Representation in Local Governance After years of research regarding local policies in such areas as the adoption of municipal reform, police response times, school desegregation , fluoridation, equal opportunity in municipal employment , transportation, air quality, and homelessness, among others, a kind of consensus has emerged among social scientists that the core policy domain for local governments is development policy. Certainly in the United States, the mix of land uses—between residential , commercial, industrial, manufacturing, and public enterprises —has a profound impact on the fortunes of communities and their residents. From the point of view of cities, the built form that development takes systematically shapes the value of property and the status of residents—and thereby, public service needs, the flow of resources to public treasuries, and the lifestyle values that are of importance to individuals. Because American local governments depend so decisively on the quality and substance of local development , one expects their officials and citizens to be very concerned, if not obsessed, with residential and commercial growth. Our purpose in this book, therefore, has been to examine how city governments approach a range of choices on growth and development , and to develop a theoretical framework to account for the differences in such choices among cities. We consciously chose to examine both residential growth policy and economic development policy within the same basic explanatory framework, despite the separate streams of research that have characterized past scholarship on these two topics. Because the sets of governmental actors involved—mayors, city council members, planners, and other administrators —are largely the same in either case, we thought there would be more to learn about the nature of city decision making by considering both these topics in concert rather than treating each in isolation. Indeed, a number of the questions we asked in our 162 Custodians of Place surveys were designed to ascertain whether local officials have a different preference for or approach to housing as compared with various types of commercial development, and whether their vision for the future of their community is particularly focused on commerce or on housing. We found a wide degree of variation among communities in how they approached these preferences and trade-offs. Local Growth Choices: Explaining Variations A key empirical task, therefore, was to probe for the city characteristics and factors external to local communities that would help us explain why different cities approached growth in different ways, with varying levels of enthusiasm for different types of land uses and contrasting policy approaches. In a fast-growing state like California, development pressures have been intense, yet local responses to those pressures—and opportunities—have varied significantly . As Oliver Williams wrote more than forty years ago, “The study of comparative government begins with the knowledge that different political regimes make different responses to widely experienced but similar problems.” Yet though comparativists studying nation-states see differences among countries “written quite large” and thus pursue these explanatory objectives in a focused way, “in local government, because of the number of units and their superficial similarity, the initial objectives become obscured.”1 Indeed, too often, urban politics scholars have devoted their energies to devising theories that characterize essential similarities among all local governments in the ways that they arrive at policy—simplifying local political life to heuristics such as growth machines, corporate-led regimes, or fiscal maximization—rather than explaining variations among municipalities. In other cases, researchers have focused on simple dichotomies or other a priori classificatory schemes—such as the distinction between reformed and unreformed institutions or between “private-regarding” and “public-regarding” urban residents—looking to see whether such categorizations are the key to underlying variation in city policies. Often, the answer seems to be no.2 In many cases the tradition of pushing a single framework as far as possible to provide as simplified a perspective as possible has been valuable. But the search for single-themed, single-factor interpretations of local politics and policy has also led to discrete, [54.210.83.20] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) Systemic Representation in Local Governance 163 disconnected interpretations of local decision making. When findings occur that do not fit a unicausal explanation, the discontinuities are often viewed as exceptions or aberrations to some more dominant, singular process.3 Our view, however, is that it is also important to come at the study of the myriad local government settings using a less brittle approach. Instead of imposing a relatively rigid...