City Bureaucracy Research Articles

Bureaucratizing Black Lives Matter murals: Racial capitalism, policing and erasure of radical politics

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder during the summer of 2020, protestors painted large ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ murals on streets of the United States, forcing politicians to confront these words tattooing their cities. Each creation and reception of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) mural is entwined within the machinations of city bureaucracies whose foundations are built upon racial capitalism and is enforced by militarized police. To analyse the removal of Black Lives Matter murals is to contextualize them within this history of racialized police violence and erasure, but to do so within an environment of mundane policy-hearings. The removal of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s BLM mural by its city government will be a case study of how bureaucracy can implement ‘race neutral’ policy language that ‘leaves no choice’ but erasure. But while some conservative politicians erased BLM murals to neutralize the radical abolitionist and police reform messages, other politicians similarly embraced the creation of BLM murals as a buffer against, instead of a bridge to, making substantial structural change. Washington, DC’s famous BLM mural will be my exemplar of this type of deceptive radical performative politics. This article explores how protest movements and bureaucracies interact, focusing on how the radical demands of the BLM movement can be subsumed by ‘colour blind’ city responses and/or performative politics while pointing to larger combative histories of how race is policed within the United States.

Superimposition: How Indian city bureaucracies are responding to climate change

City governments are facing complex challenges due to climate change, but those in the global South often have limited capacities and governance arrangements to develop and execute a response. Cities must also manage other existing priorities such as housing, water and waste management, which have established bureaucratic practices and incentives. How are such cities with limited climate governance capacity and with existing non-climate priorities developing a climate response? From interviews and participant observation in two Indian cities that are pioneering climate action, we find that actors are ‘superimposing’ climate objectives onto existing bureaucratic practices. Building on analysis of ongoing projects in the two cities, we theorize superimposition as an approach taken by bureaucracies that have the intention of responding to climate change but have limited control over their planning practices and mandates, high levels of institutional inertia to change existing practices, and multiple other objectives related to development that dominate agendas. As superimposition does not involve the modification of existing bureaucratic practices or incentives, the types of climate actions which emerge from this approach reflect the features, scope and limitations of existing political arrangements. We highlight five such features of how Indian city bureaucracies respond to climate change: (1) the primacy of central and state ‘schemes’, (2) the prioritization of ‘development’ as an objective, and the imperative to implement (3) ‘quick win’, (4) ‘visible’ and (5) ‘bankable’ projects. Superimposition has led to creative and politically tenable climate projects that meet both climate objectives and those of existing schemes on housing, water and waste. But these projects are also limited by existing governance arrangements with tradeoffs for long-term planning, urban justice and public ownership of infrastructure.

The Museumification of Treasure Hill: Authenticity, Authority and Art in a Taiwanese Urban Village

AbstractThis article discusses the “museumification” of an urban village in Taipei into the Treasure Hill Artist Village in the context of wider debates on gentrification and the redevelopment of marginal urban spaces. Populated by soldiers evacuated to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War, Treasure Hill became a hybrid space, combining welfare provision for elderly veterans with an artist colony, forming part of the Taipei Cultural Foundation. Lauded as a compromise that combined social, cultural and economic aspects of urban regeneration, the mix of high-modernist paternalism and neoliberal place-making resulted in the integration of the space into the existing city bureaucracy as a museum-like institution, with elderly residents and artists becoming exhibits in a living diorama. Although widely understood as “gentrification” at the time, the article argues that the museumification of Treasure Hill was a process led by a coalition of state and spatial experts which has distinct implications for the study of state-led neighbourhood amelioration.

A "Health in All Policies" Evolution in New York City's PlaNYC

Background: Health in All Policies (HiAP) is a framework requiring that the promotion of health be embedded in all substantive policy areas to have a comprehensive approach to the health and well-being of local citizens. Purpose: To determine the extent to which the Bloomberg Administration in New York City used an HiAP approach to promote attention to health outcomes in peer agencies (outside the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) within the city bureaucracy. Methods: Document analysis was completed on a hallmark sustainability plan in New York City, called PlaNYC: the 2007 PlaNYC report, 2011 PlaNYC update, and PlaNYC progress reports from 2008 to 2013. Two coders, using standard qualitative techniques, coded the reports in March and April 2014. The reports were analyzed to gauge the extent to which peer city agencies incorporated health as a policy justification or planned outcome into their initiatives. Results: The analysis shows that New York City has stimulated attention to health outcomes in peer agencies implicitly more than explicitly, that the extent to which peer agencies reference health has increased over time, and that every policy area in PlaNYC has some stated health relevance and health outcomes. Further, New York City appears to have progressed from early to later stages in the maturity model, indicating embedded HiAP. Implications: The results illustrate the feasibility of a comprehensive HiAP initiative and could provide inspiration and direction for other jurisdictions.

Polyglot Bureaucracies: Nonprofit Advocacy to Create Inclusive City Governments

This article examines the role of immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations in making city bureaucracies more accommodating of immigrants' needs. Scholarship highlights the importance of bureaucrats' professional norms and agencies' inclusive missions in this process of “immigrant bureaucratic incorporation,” but this article shows that these factors are not always sufficient to explain it. Case study material of campaigns to make government multilingual in New York City and San Francisco, two cities with immigrant-friendly orientations, shows that constant pressure from nonprofit organizations on legislative and administrative officials was required to make city agencies and their services accessible to limited English proficient immigrants.

Politics, Informality and Clientelism Exploring a Pro-Poor Urban Politics

This paper explores what we have learned about how to instigate, negotiate or otherwise secure pro-poor government in towns and cities of the global South. With competition for scarce resources, the processes of urban development, and specifically the acquisition of land and basic services, are intensely political. While the nature of urban poverty differs, there is a consistent set of needs related to residency in informal settlements; tenure is insecure and there is a lack of access to basic services, infrastructure, and sometimes other entitlements. Households and communities have to negotiate these collective consumption goods in a context in which political relations are primarily informal, with negotiations that take place away from the transparent and accountable systems of 'modern' government. Clientelist bargaining prevails. Much of the existing literature is polarised, either critiquing clientelism for its consequences, or arguing that it has been dismissed without any grounded assessment of what might take its place and any considered analysis of what it has managed to deliver.In this paper I explore how networks and federations of the urban poor seeking to access secure tenure and basic services have sought to advance their cause and the interests of their members. These organised collectives recognise that they have to challenge clientelist practice; however leaders also recognise that, given existing power relations, they have to work from within to change the realities of clientelism. Their own relative powerlessness means that confrontation is not an effective strategy. To strengthen their influence, they have to make common cause with those in need across the city building a unified and aware movement, and they have to establish their own legitimacy as agencies operating in the public interest and towards the common good. As and when they gain an increased influence, they seek greater flexibility from the city bureaucracy and to reduce the hierarchical highly vertical relations between the urban poor and the political elite. To maintain and extend their advances towards a pro-poor politics, they act to strengthen public accountabilities.

Conversation with Raul Caetano

In this occasional series we record the views and personal experience of people who have especially contributed to the evolution of ideas in the Journal's field of interest. Raul Caetano qualified in medicine in Brazil. While retaining close academic and cultural links with his native country, he has developed a career as an alcohol epidemiologist with research positions first in Berkeley,California and then at the University of Texas. He has contributed very widely to epidemiological research on drinking but with a sustained ability to develop the important ethnic dimensions of such studies.

Learning cities: Knowledge, capacity and competitiveness

The paper is based on quantitative evidence and case examples of city learning drawn from both developed and developing countries to explore selected questions raised in the literature on learning and competitiveness. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that a large shadow market for knowledge has already formed among cities around the world. Case observations reviewed here suggest that the best learners are deliberate and systematic, finding or creating new knowledge, converting it to use, and storing learning experiences that draw on collective memory. Acquired knowledge resides in two main forms: one is hard data, stored in documents, computers, or specialized units of government. Another is soft data stored in professional and social networks that link a wide array of actors in the community—not just staff in the city bureaucracy. The analysis leads to a number of propositions that deserve attention and testing: several kinds of learning systems can be observed, that the process of learning may be as important as the product in contributing to competitiveness, that policies can helpful to facilitate learning, and that a radical departure from customary policy, especially in donor institutions, may be needed to effectively meet requirements of institutional capacity building in cities of the developing world.

Black Political Power Reassessed: Race, Politics, and Federal Funds

An increase in the number of black elected officials and community need did not result in more resources for the black community. Instead, there was a decrease in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds allocated to the black community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. African-American council members did not vote as a racial bloc and they supported using CDBG funds to pay for city services instead of neighborhood projects. The biracial political coalition that Blacks counted on to help them was often time divided. The city bureaucracy that controlled CDBG funding used practices that often worked to the disadvantage of black community.

Art Rules? Brokering the Aesthetics of City Places and Spaces1

In a narrative built around our experience of art placed in the lobby of a corporate edifice, we argue that a city bureaucracy is actively participating in the legitimised abduction of community resources by urban developers: that however well‐intentioned, subscription to the notion that social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities can be expected of, and accounted for, by corporate business, is naïve. Our intention is to signal the outcome—corporate control of our aesthetic environment—that our discussion foreshadows.

Seeds of Corruption, and: Children of the Waters, and: Dunyazad (review)

Reviewed by: Seeds of Corruption, and: Children of the Waters, and: Dunyazad Hala Nassar Seeds of CorruptionSabri Mousa, translated by Mona K. Mikhail. New York: Interlink Books, 2002. Children of the WatersIbtihal Salem, translated by Marilyn Booth. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2002. DunyazadMay Telmissany, translated by Roger Allen. London: Saqi Books, 2000. The English translations of works by Sabri Mousa, Ibtihal Salem, and May Temissany offer new insights into the political and economic challenges facing modern Egyptian society. The rich material and prose reflect the process of globalization sweeping Egypt, poverty, gender inequality, and women's sexuality. While Seeds of Corruption narrates the tale of the process of modernizing Egypt from the nineteenth century until King Farouq in 1952, Children of the Waters takes us to the daily lives of Egyptians under the regimes of Nasser and Sadat. Contemporary Egyptian society and waves of globalization are the subject of Dunyazad. Seeds of Corruption is set in the eastern desert, Darhib, in Egypt and tells the story of Nicola, a man without a country. Through Nicola, the main character, Mousa tells an enchanted story about the corruption of urban life and the purity of the desert and its people. Nicola grows up in Istanbul, the son of Russian émigrés, and then lives for some years in Italy. He marries Ilya, and they have a daughter, also named Ilya. Influenced by his friend Mario, a mining engineer, Nicola becomes obsessed with stories about the Nile, its desert, and the mountains containing a vast variety of minerals and ores. Leaving his family behind, Nicola joins Mario on a ship that carries them to a new life in Darhib. Nicola's trajectory takes place against the backdrop of the westernization movement that began in Egypt in the nineteenth century. The determined and learned Nicola explores the desert, obtains a permit to drill the mountains for minerals and eventually becomes the owner of one of the mines. Nicola recruits men from the desert tribes, and his [End Page 119] mine becomes successful. Soon Nicola becomes part of the desert and the mountainous landscape. The detailed and beautiful description of the landscape is reflected in the novel's structure, as the narrative continuously shifts between past and present events, the history of the desert tribes, myths, and what goes on inside Nicola's head. In the desert, Nicola learns from the tribes how to survive in the desert and becomes acquainted with its secrets. As for dealing with the city bureaucracy, Nicola leaves that to Antun Bey, his Cairo partner. When his now grown daughter, Ilya, joins him from Italy, Nicola leaves her with the childless Antun Bey, but Ilya feels suffocated by the city life, and her spirit can only run free in the desert, like her father. Although the mine in Darhib uses modern technology and explosives to drill, it relies on the pulse of the desert and the knowledge and manpower of its people. Nicola keeps drawing maps and digs deep tunnels to extract talc to export to Cairo. Nicola even develops the port of Ra's Banas, on the Red Sea, to more effectively transport the riches of the Darhib. However, with the growing reputation of Nicola's mine among Cairo's aristocracy, it becomes a showpiece to the extent that the king, and here we are meant to think of King Farouq of Egypt, who was supported by the British, makes arrangements to come and visit the mines. Thus, the process of polluting the waters of the Red Sea and the desert begins with the arrival of the urban aristocracy. To entertain the king and his entourage, the Bedouins and the fishermen are ridiculed by the city people. When the fisherman 'Abd Rabu Krishab is made to fulfill his oath to wed the sea mermaid after catching it, he is forced to have sex with the sea cow. Similarly, women are violated; Nicola's daughter innocently accompanies the king on a hunting trip and is raped by him. Nicola's inability to protect his treasured desert landscape from the corrupted city people nor to protect his daughter leads him to delirium, and he escapes to...

Conversation with Robert L. DuPont

Conversation with Robert L. DuPont

Who Ya Gonna Call? The Police as Problem-Busters

Current police practice is dominated by two, competing strategies—“community policing” and “crime control policing.” Both are limited: they each apply a standard set of police tactics to a wide variety of differing circumstances; they focus on incidents, rather than the underlying problems which cause these incidents. Recently, two police departments have developed an alternative. Through “problem-oriented policing,” officers focus on these underlying causes. They collect information from numerous sources, and enlist the support of a wide variety of public and private agencies and individuals in their attempts to solve problems. Case studies in these departments show that use of the problem-oriented approach can substantially reduce crime and fear. In the long run, problem-oriented policing will require changes in management structure, the role of the police in the community and the city bureaucracy, and the limits of police authority.

The Politics of Urban Personnel Policy: Reformers, Politicians and Bureaucrats, by Wilbur C. Rich

In this volume, Wilbur Rich joins the handful of scholars who have studied the politics of public personnel administration. His book constitutes an ambitious attempt to provide historical perspective on the deadly serious struggle for power and in New York City's personnel (p. 151). Rich devotes particular attention to four groups that have shaped this city's personnel policies. The genteel reformers consisted of nineteenth-century liberal Republicans and reform Democrats who sought to cleanse the city of corrupting influences through personnel reform. Academic reformers, primarily management consultants, academics, and researchers, followed. This group sought to improve the personnel system by introducing scientific principles of management via management training and other means. Fiscal managers accountants, investment specialists, and lawyers surged to the fore during the city's fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. While the actions of this group have reverberated through the personnel system, Rich argues that the fiscal managers are distinguished from prior reform groups by their lack of coherent policy toward the civil service (p. 5). Aside from these three reform elements, Rich considers another pivotal actor-the unions. While a focus on these four groups drives Rich's analysis, he also devotes a chapter to explaining the ways in which groups, politicis, and negotiations affect such personnel functions as labor planning and selection and the handling of grievances. Although Rich doubts that the city's work practices can be effectively reformed (p. 161), a final chapter recommends certain ameliorations. Rich's volume at times reveals considerable insight, especially in the two chapters on the genteel and academic reformers. In dealing with the genteel reformers, for instance, Rich perceptively sorts out three connotations of the term merit-merit as a struggle among individuals in a form of social Darwinism, as a moral imperative for purifying local government, and as the opposite of patronage. Some of Rich's other observations, such as his argument about the insularity and low level of professionalism in New York City's bureaucracy, also prove intriguing. If the volume at times gratifies, however, it also frustrates. Perhaps in part because of its ambitious scope, the analysis often seem superficial. Observations appear that whet the reader's appetite but then get dropped before they can satiate. For instance, Rich bemoans the demise of party influence in personnel policy (pp. 156-57), but other than briefly citing E. E. Schattschneider and Supreme Court Justice Powell, he never develops this potentially fruitful line of inquiry. If parties become stronger, precisely how might that benefit personnel practices and the overall functioning of city politics? The normative posture adopted by the book also proves confusing at many points. While early in the volume Rich asserts that he will not offer any normative judgments about the groups competing in the public personnel arena (p. 14), these judgments subsequently surface. He suggests, for instance, that New Yorkers should welcome the arrival of the new fiscal managers (p. 122) and considers the city's response to union demands as all too often dubious policy of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul (p. 97).