Public policy
Urban public policies are the government decisions —laws, plans, budgets, taxes, programmes— through which the state, at its three levels, intervenes in the city: housing, transport, land, services, safety. They are the instrument that turns a diagnosis into change, or into its absence.
Urban governance studies how those decisions are made when the municipality no longer decides alone: Clarence Stone described urban regimes, stable coalitions between government and business; Gerry Stoker, the shift from government to governance. Evaluating a policy means asking what changed and for whom, not how much was spent.
Videos on this term (49)
- Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner: Global Urbanization Goes Beyond City Borders
Neil Brenner argues that urbanization does not fit administrative boundaries: scale, state restructuring, extended…
Neil Brenner 3 min read - Urban AI
Proximity Transforms: Edward Glaeser on Productive Cities
Edward Glaeser explains why concentrating people and firms makes cities more productive: agglomeration, human…
Edward Glaeser 3 min read - Housing
Natalie Jeremijenko: The City as a Participatory Ecology Lab
Natalie Jeremijenko's devices make pollution and urban biodiversity visible so citizens can investigate and act.…
Natalie Jeremijenko 3 min read - Urban form
Mariana Valverde: How Small Rules Order Our City
Mariana Valverde shows that licences, zoning, regulations and policing produce urban order decision by decision.…
Mariana Valverde 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Fulong Wu: The Chinese State Still Leads Urban Transformation
Fulong Wu explains how China's shift to a market economy changed urban production without removing the state: land,…
Fulong Wu 3 min read - Urban economy
Closed Shutters Close Businesses and Communities: The Ground Floor
Why a street full of homes can feel empty: Jacobs's eyes on the street, Klinenberg's Chicago heatwave, thousands of…
3 min read - Housing
What a Housing Bubble Is and Why It Is a Problem for the City
A housing bubble appears when price detaches from rents and wages and is sustained by credit and resale…
3 min read - Urban ecology
Where Does Your Trash Go? Waste and Environmental Injustice
Household waste ends up burned or buried next to the neighbourhoods with the least power to refuse.
3 min read - Housing
Empty Homes and Price Crisis: How Does the Market React?
Why homes stay empty amid a housing crisis and how the market reacts to correction: the home as store of value,…
3 min read - Urban economy
Guggenheim Versus the Rest: Myths and Realities of Iconic Museums
Why the Guggenheim effect worked in Bilbao and failed when copied: the prior plan, Beatriz Plaza's data, the…
3 min read - Urban economy
The Heart Beats at the Last Mile: What Delivery Costs the City
How much city it takes for a parcel to arrive in two hours: sheds on the periphery, ghost supermarkets, more…
3 min read - Mobility
Your Free Parking Costs Way More Than You Think: Shoup's Numbers
A supermarket lot could hold a hundred homes: Donald Shoup's high cost of free parking, minimums copied from…
3 min read - Housing
How Airbnb Changes the City: Rising Rents and Vanishing Neighbours
Airbnb raises rents, replaces local shops and dissolves neighbourhood ties. What the studies show and how…
3 min read - Climate change
Shade in Extreme Heat: A Divisive Privilege and an Urban Right
Shade is survival infrastructure distributed unequally: redlined neighbourhoods are hotter, awnings are cut as…
3 min read - Public space
Who Controls Your City's Public Spaces? Private Plazas
Privately owned public spaces look like squares but carry private rules. From New York's 1961 zoning to Occupy,…
3 min read - Urban economy
The House With a Yard That Is Quietly Bankrupting Your City
Dispersed detached housing gives municipalities fast revenue and leaves an unpayable maintenance debt: Charles…
3 min read - Climate change
Resilience Is Just a Mask for Resignation
How resilience went from physics and ecology to an urban agenda that asks communities to absorb risks they did not…
3 min read - Housing
The Historic Centre as a Deceptive Façade: Tourism Without Neighbours
Historic centres restore their stones and lose their residents to short-term rentals and souvenir shops.
3 min read - Urban ecology
Smart for Whom? The Other Side of Smart City Rankings
Smart city rankings do not describe the city but define it: what they measure, what they omit, how weighting…
3 min read - Urban economy
Siliconized Cities: Who Is Running Your City Now?
How tech platforms became the operating system of the city: San Francisco's tech gentrification, Airbnb, dark…
3 min read - Housing
Chinese Urbanization: Land, Superblocks, Hukou and Ghost Cities
Chinese urbanization moved more than 900 million people into cities in four decades. How land sales, superblocks,…
3 min read - Public space
Raúl Zibechi: Urban Social Movements and Territories in Resistance
Raúl Zibechi argues that Latin America's urban movements build non-state powers in their neighbourhoods. His ideas…
Raúl Zibechi 3 min read - Urban form
Michael Hibbard: Regional Planning for Social Justice
Michael Hibbard defends a regional and community planning that shares development between city and countryside.…
Michael Hibbard 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities
Michael Peter Smith argues in Transnational Urbanism that globalisation is made by migrants and networks in…
Michael Peter Smith 2 min read - Urban economy
Nik Theodore: Neoliberal Urbanism, Informal Work and Migrants
Nik Theodore explains how neoliberal urbanism produces precarity, what his studies of day labourers and migrants in…
Nik Theodore 2 min read - Urban economy
Peter Marcuse: Social Justice and Urbanism Against Neoliberalism
Peter Marcuse explained how neoliberalism put planning at the service of capital and what a just city requires.…
Peter Marcuse 2 min read - Urban economy
Jamie Peck: Constructions of Neoliberal Reason and the City
Jamie Peck's Constructions of Neoliberal Reason explains neoliberalism as a process that finds its laboratory in…
Jamie Peck 2 min read - Housing
The Right to Housing According to Raquel Rolnik
The right to housing is in treaties and constitutions, but policies hollow it out. What Raquel Rolnik defended as…
Raquel Rolnik 3 min read - Public space
Participatory democracy: Arnstein, Forester, Porto Alegre
What participatory democracy means in cities: Arnstein's ladder (1969), Forester's deliberative planning and…
2 min read - Urban economy
Land Policy: Power, Value Capture and Spatial Justice
Land policy decides who gains from urban growth. What it is, how Edward Soja links it to spatial justice and which…
2 min read - Housing
Sonia Hirt and Zoning: The Roots of Urban Inequality in the USA
Zoned in the USA (2014) by Sonia Hirt shows that the exclusive single-family zone, unique in the world, raises…
3 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urban Studies by Davies and Imbroscio: Social Justice
Critical Urban Studies (2010), edited by Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio, revisits urban studies from social…
2 min read - Urban economy
Michael Storper: The Regional World and regional development
What Michael Storper argues in The Regional World: why regions still matter in a global economy, regional worlds of…
Michael Storper 2 min read - Housing
Naked City by Sharon Zukin: Gentrification and Urban Authenticity
Naked City (2010) by Sharon Zukin shows how the search for authenticity gentrifies New York's neighbourhoods.
Sharon Zukin 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces: Globalisation and Urban Governance
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces explains how globalisation reorganised states in space: from spatial Keynesianism…
Neil Brenner 2 min read - Urban form
David Rusk and Metropolitan Fragmentation: Cities Without Suburbs
David Rusk explained in Cities Without Suburbs how metropolitan fragmentation produces inequality: elastic and…
David Rusk 2 min read
