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Finding local solutions when the nation cannot, or will not. With the rise of the politics of populism in the United States and much of Europe, how can openness and diversity survive? The answer, according to urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, lies within communities around the country that have been creating their own solutions to the problems of modern postindustrial societies. While the United States has struggled unsuccessfully, as a nation, with such systemic problems as decaying...

How do leaders and innovators drive change and improvement? Governments often depend on a geographic context for making major decisions, sharing information, and expanding its operations. When organizations face the need for change from a drastic event, such as economic downturns or a pandemic, how do they maintain the quality of their day-to-day operations while continuing to find solutions to existing and new problems? Many governments and professionals turn to geographic information systems (...

All societies face a key question: how to empower governments to perform essential governmental functions while constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. This balance, always in flux, is particularly fluid in today's China. This insightful book examines the changing relationship between that state and its society, as demonstrated by numerous experiments in governance at subnational levels, and explores the implications for China's future political trajectory. Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Y...

Winner of the 1981 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs. "City Limits radically reinterprets urban politics by deriving its dominant forces from the logic of the American federal structure. It is thereby able to explain some pervasive tendencies of urban political outcomes that are puzzling or scarcely noticed at all when cities are viewed as autonomous units, outside the federal framework. Professor P...

Provides a portrait of the Military-Industrial Complex embedded in an exploration of six American communities, showing how national and international policies and interests affect local economies and politics. Analyzes US foreign policy, industrial policy and budget priorities through stories of people and places, giving students a glimpse of the practical and local impacts of large scale political and economic forces. Examines the shifting landscape of national security, showing routes of ent...

How do survivors recover from the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives? This question has haunted the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and informed the response to the subsequent flooding of New Orleans across many years. Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchar...

It started two decades ago with CompStat in the New York City Police Department, and quickly jumped to police agencies across the U.S. and other nations. It was adapted by Baltimore, which created CitiStat -the first application of this leadership strategy to an entire jurisdiction. Today, governments at all levels employ PerformanceStat: a focused effort by public executives to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning,...

Studies of urban neoliberalism have been surprisingly inattentive to gender. Brenda Parker begins to remedy this by looking at the effect of new urbanism, ""creative class,"" and welfare reform discourses on women in Milwaukee, a traditionally progressive city with a strong history of political organizing. Through a feminist partial political economy of place (FPEP) approach, Parker conducts an intersectional analysis of urban politics that simultaneously pays attention to a number of power rela...

In November 2013, a little-known progressive stunned the elite of New York City by capturing the mayoralty by a landslide. Bill de Blasio's promise to end the 'Tale of Two Cities' had struck a chord among ordinary residents still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. De Blasio's election heralded the advent of the most progressive New York City government in generations. Not since the legendary Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s had so many populist candidates captured government office...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping of twentieth-century New York. One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century. Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New...

The true story of a teenage killer and the silence of a small New England town. For twenty years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie- redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge.

For decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift s...

Given the pressures of integration and assimilation, how are people within communities able to make decisions about their own environment, whether individually or collectively? Governing Ourselves? explores issues of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across Canada. It shows how communities large and small, from Toronto to Iqaluit, have distinctive political cultures and therefore respond differently to cha...

Some of the most populated and storied American cities had mayoral elections in 2013. Open contests in New York City, Los Angeles and Boston, for example, offer laboratories to examine electoral trends in urban politics. Cities are facing varied predicaments. Boston was rocked by the bombing of the marathon on April 15. Detroit is roiled by being the largest U.S. city to declare bankruptcy, and Chicago, which had an open, competitive election in 2011, is dealing with significant gun violence. Sa...

One-third of America's adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more have never been convicted, but are still subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens. A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has recas...

Just because Milwaukee isn't Manhattan, doesn't mean that those urban centers face completely unique challenges. Through effective comparative analysis of key issues in urban studies--how city managers share power with mayors, how spending policies affect economic development, and how school politics impact education policy--students can clearly see how scholars discern patterns and formulate conclusions to offer theoretical and practical insights from which all cities can benefit.Pelissero brin...

The Dynamic Dominion tells the dramatic story of Virginia's political transformation since the Second World War. The cradle of American democracyoand thus of the democratic movement that is sweeping the globe todayothe venerable Old Dominion has emerged again in the second half of the 20th century as a dynamic political pacesetter for the nation. Virginia today has become a national bellwether, studied by political analysts and strategists in both parties for clues to the direction of the natio...

Based on years of practical experience in small towns, Carrel argues for municipal autonomy--for turning what are now "colonies" of the federal and provincial orders of government into independent, mature, and fully democratic entities. For Carrel, the citizen is the sole legitimate source of political power, and the best tool for citizen empowerment is the controversial tool of the referendum. This is the story of how a small municipality broke the rules of local government. It also recounts th...

Across government bodies, from local to federal, legislative responses to mass gun violence in the new millennium have varied greatly. Lack of communication or collaboration between government officials forestalls the implementation of practiced strategy. In an effort to encourage widespread solutions, this collection of resources outlines the state of gun legislation in the 21st century and provides strategies that have been implemented across the U.S. Combining a wide range of perspectives, t...

In a multi-level government system institutional legacy and the assignment of roles and responsibilities between the federal and the subnational governments create imbalances. These imbalances in economic terms are a result of a mismatch between revenue-raising capacity and the spending responsibilities of the different levels of the government. Intergovernmental Transfers in Federations presents a synthesis of recent international experience of large federations in addressing the most fundame...

"Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a side line business in national defense and homeland security) which only does its accounting on a cash basis-only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door.  An insurance company with cash accounting is not an insurance company at all.  It is an accident waiting to happen." Peter R. Fisher, former Bush Administration Undersecretary of the Treasury   "Our objective in preparing the fiscal year 2005 Fina...