Charting Change in the City: Urban Political Orders and Urban Political Development

Abstract

Cities matter. They are often the sites in which the helping hand and the clenched fist of the state makes first contact with the citizen. They are engines of national economic growth and, often, the source of political movements that become national and transnational in scope. Yet, the theoretical tools available to study change at the urban level are limited. This article seeks to address this shortcoming by offering a new account of urban political development. I argue that urban political development is driven by the impact of multiple political orders. My aim is to highlight three apparently contradictory patterns of urban political development: the imposition of urban austerity measures, the rise of the urban carceral state, and the emergence of progressive economic policymaking, such as local minimum wage ordinances. I suggest that these shifts reflect underlying operation and competition among neoliberal, conservative and egalitarian political orders respectively.