City Politics by Judd and Swanstrom: Power and Urban Governance

City Politics is the textbook with which the political scientists Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom have explained for three decades, in successive editions published by Pearson and later Routledge, how American cities are governed and who has the power to decide about them. Their thesis is that urban politics is a permanent tension between private power, that of developers, firms and property owners who control investment, and public power, that of local governments with limited authority dependent on federal and state levels, in a system where competition among cities for capital and population conditions almost every decision on land, housing and transport.

From political machines to suburbanization: the history of urban power

The book starts from history. The political machines of the nineteenth century, which governed immigrant cities in exchange for jobs and favours, were replaced by the reform movement, which professionalised administration and shifted power to the middle classes; postwar urban renewal and highways, federally funded, demolished poor and Black neighbourhoods to serve downtown real estate interests; and suburbanization, subsidised by federal mortgages and exclusionary zoning, emptied central cities of taxpayers while filling them with needs. Judd and Swanstrom show that each stage redistributed power and that none was neutral.

Private power and growth orientation: Peterson, Molotch and Stone

The central concept is private power. Following Paul Peterson, who in City Limits (1981) argued that cities are compelled to prioritise growth because they compete for mobile capital, and Harvey Molotch and Clarence Stone, who described growth coalitions and urban regimes, the authors explain that local governments depend on private investment to fund services and therefore subordinate housing, environment and equity to large projects: stadiums, convention centres, financial districts, tax incentives for firms. That growth orientation displaces vulnerable communities and explains why urban policy favours those who already have.

Federalism, the Sunbelt and race

The second key is federalism. Although cities enjoy formal autonomy, federal and state decisions on infrastructure funds, housing, transport and taxation determine what they can do: the public housing programmes and the cuts of the 1980s, highway funding versus public transport, state limits on local taxes and the preference for suburbs in credit policy. Judd and Swanstrom devote chapters to the Sunbelt city versus the Rust Belt city, to metropolitan fragmentation and to race, which runs through American urban politics from segregation to the coalitions of Black mayors.

Influence and updating of the textbook

The textbook has trained generations of students and its influence shows in the teaching of urban politics worldwide, although its focus is strictly American. Recent editions incorporate gentrification, financialisation, climate change, sanctuary cities and racial justice movements, and keep the question that organises it: how citizens, through weak local governments, can control strong private power. The authors' answer is politics, neighbourhood coalitions, unions, progressive mayors and metropolitan governments, rather than technical administration.

The lesson of City Politics is that cities are governed neither by themselves nor by their residents on equal terms, but in a field of forces where mobile capital, higher levels of government and local coalitions decide what gets built and for whom. Understanding those power dynamics is the condition for changing them, which is why urbanism, Judd and Swanstrom suggest, is inseparable from politics: every plan is the result of who won the last dispute over the city.