Urban Regimes

Abstract

Urban regimes and its conceptual partner, urban regime theory, has been a dominant perspective in urban geography, political geography, and the social sciences for more than three decades. This work identifies urban regimes as amalgams of city‐based institutions that construct, manage, and regulate the social, political, and spatial domains of cities. Such regimes – city governments, builders, developers, realtors, businesses, corporations, chambers of commerce – are seen to operate as semi‐monolithic political entities in order to advance goals and plans. More recently, regime theory has deepened to incorporate the realities of how city regimes must be responsive to political struggles, changing political and cultural conditions, and contradictions in local, regional, and national economic formations. As poststructuralist and postmodern sensibilities have suffused urban studies since the turn of the twenty‐first century, regime theory has seamlessly incorporated these concerns.