City Politics Research Articles

Racial Capitalism and City Politics: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis

Racial Capitalism and City Politics: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis

Politics of Memory in Cities Divided by State Borders: Theoretical and Methodological Framework of Research

In the article the author attempts to outline theoretical and methodological framework used in analyzing the phenomenon of specific history politics in cities divided by state borders – places where sometimes radically different history narrations meet or even clash. The article is composed of three parts. The first one specifies the concept of history politics in nationwide dimension (“history politics”). The second part analyzes history politics in local dimension (“local politics of memory”). With reference to these two concepts – levels of history politics and politics of memory – the author indicates: goals, subjects, methods and tools of history politics/politics of memory. The final section of the paper aims at capturing the specificity of history politics in cities divided by state borders and indicating models of relations between different kinds of politics of memory in cities divided by state borders.

Politics, Identity and Ethno-Religious Conflicts in Richard Ali's City of Memories

Politics, Identity and Ethno-Religious Conflicts in Richard Ali's City of Memories

Assistance of Madiun City Political Party Managers in Compiling Accountability Reports on the Use of Political Party Financial Aid Funds

Finance is one of the important aspects in determining the sustainability and credibility of political parties, and will indirectly affect the political quality of a country. For this reason, transparency in the financial management of political parties is required in accordance with applicable regulations. However, some cadres of political party administrators in the regions have difficulty in compiling accountability reports because they do not have an educational background in accounting. For this reason, assistance is needed to compile a simple accountability report with the help of a general cash book that is easy to understand and practical. The results of the activity showed that the preparation of the general ledger was able to increase participants' understanding of the procedures for preparing accountability reports more easily even though they did not previously have basic knowledge of accounting.

Politics of Harmony, Social Capital, and Tolerant City

The city of Singkawang in the West Kalimantan Province of Indonesia is one of Indonesia's regions, which has a significant level of ethnic heterogeneity. It is very vulnerable to various conflicts. However, in 2018, Singkawang City was designated the most tolerant city in Indonesia through an assessment from the Setara Institute. For this reason, this study was conducted to analyze the political form of harmony and social capital as a Tolerant City in Singkawang City. The method used in this study is descriptive qualitative with literature study as a method of data collection. Data analysis was carried out in stages, namely collecting data, summarizing the data, and making conclusions. This study finds that the form of political harmony is the cooperation of state actors, the Forum for Religious Harmony and intense society, communicative interactions, and relationships that complement and provide mutual reinforcement. The people of Singkawang City as the main actors have also seen and understood having a diverse perspective not to discriminate and intolerance. Besides, it was also found a form of social capital created from the relationship between ethnic communities in Singkawang City, namely in general norms and group characteristics. Keywords: Politics of Harmony; Social Capital; Tolerant City

Entwicklungspfade städtischer Klimapolitik

Our paper explores the climate pathways of the three mid-sized cities German of Potsdam, Remscheid and Würzburg. Particular emphasis was put on key events (e.g. disruptive events) and key actors (e.g. local decision-makers) that significantly influenced the development of local climate policy. The path analyses are based on the analysis of several key policy documents such as climate strategies and reports and 34 interviews with local actors from city administration and politics. Main results were that all three cities started tackle climate change strategically despite the absence of major disaster events. Furthermore, it emerged that key events driving local climate action were often not directly related to the topic of climate change but concerned other areas of city development in the first place. Lastly, the results suggest that the set of key actors advancing local climate policies should most favorably consist of powerful initiators and accelerators on the executive level, active, well-connected and third-party funds generating supporters within the city administration, and information brokers from science. Future research needs to focus on the interplay between these different key actors. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on mid-sized cities in Germany. There is a need for more case studies in German cities, particularly in those that have not been visible as forerunners. This applies particularly to cities with limited local capacities that have nevertheless managed to pioneer climate policies. Their successful strategies and approaches could serve as models for cities that have to work under similar conditions. English title: Development pathways of local climate governance – Relevance of key events and key actors for the climate activities of Potsdam, Remscheid and Würzburg

Representation in American Cities: Who Runs for Mayor and Who Wins?

Business leaders emerge as key players in canonical accounts of urban politics, but data limitations have hampered efforts to quantify their role in city politics. Drawing on an original dataset that includes gender, race, occupational, and political experience for over 3,500 mayoral candidates from 259 cities over fifty years, I document who runs for office and who serves as mayor, with a focus on candidates who are business owners and executives. Overall, the data indicate that mayors tend to be White and male with prior political experience and white-collar careers. Business owners and executives account for nearly one-third of the candidates in the sample, but I find no indication that they win elections at higher rates than other candidates overall. However, my results do suggest that business owners and executives have better electoral prospects in more conservative cities, especially those that hold nonpartisan elections.

Urban Struggles over Water Scarcity in Harare

Abstract This essay counters the growing tendency in current scholarship to attribute nearly all the enduring water scarcity problems to climate change. Focusing on Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, this essay contends that recurrent water crises can only really be understood within the contentious, long, and complex history of water politics in the capital city from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Although the colonial and postcolonial states in Zimbabwe had very different ideological and racial policies, for various reasons, neither was willing nor able to provide adequate supplies of water to the urban poor even as water was abundant in the city's reservoirs. It posits that while the colonial government racialized access to water by restricting its use by urban Africans, the postcolonial government failed to change the colonial patterns of urban water distribution and did little to increase water supplies to keep pace with a swiftly growing urban population and a geographically expanding city.

“A Dumping Ground for the South”: Race, Place, and Poverty in Newburgh, New York (1945-1961)

This article explores the urban politics that led to the outbreak of the Newburgh, New York, welfare controversy in 1961. It uncovers the intricate interplay between race, place, and poverty that led to the early backlash against social welfare from the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s. Newburgh officials engineered their welfare reform as a political response to the economic, demographic, and urban transformations the city underwent in the 1950s. Race was central to their concerns as they scapegoated newly arrived African American migrants and blamed them for the city’s population loss and slowing economy. Welfare reform served at once as a tool for migratory, demographic, and racial regulation. The Newburgh story demonstrates that welfare regulation was used by city officials to enforce racial hierarchies in the Jim Crow North and suggests that city politics should be taken into greater account in the history of the American welfare state.

Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender, intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence

Drawing from deep longitudinal and ethnographic work, this article interrogates a set of key relationships between bodies, gender and infrastructure in the context of understanding cities such as Bharatpur and Dhangadhi in Nepal as well as Delhi, India. This article seeks to make two contributions. First, utilizing feminist political geography approaches, we examine bodies as infrastructure, referring to how the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop and maintain cities through gendered infrastructures in the everyday. We show conceptualizing bodies as infrastructure reveals important and intimate dimensions of the everyday politics and social and material forms that enable critical resources to flow and integral networks be built in cities. Second, we demonstrate from our comparative case studies the ways that gendered “slow infrastructural violence” accrues through patterns of infrastructural invisibility. Particular bodies act as urban infrastructure in everyday and unremarkable ways, shaping the uneven social and political consequences of embodied infrastructural configurations. We specifically examine slow violence and informal financial infrastructure in Bharatpur and the provisioning of health in Dhangadhi followed by the exploration of slow violence and fragmented water in Delhi. This article thus raises a simultaneous call for theoretical engagement with the socio-materiality of infrastructure and the body, an increased regard for the multiplicity of urban infrastructures, and an interrogation of gender and infrastructural politics in cities where more people will be living in the future and where politics and infrastructure are being actively created.

Politics of Harmony, Social Capital and Tolerant Cities

Objective - Singkawang City, which is located in the Province of West Kalimantan-Indonesia, is a city with a significant level of ethnic heterogeneity, making it very vulnerable to various conflicts. However, in 2018, Singkawang City was named the most tolerant city in Indonesia through an assessment from the Setara Institute. For this reason, this study was conducted to analyze the political form of harmony and social capital, E-government as a Tolerant City in Singkawang City. Methodology – The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative with literature study as a data collection method. Data analysis was carried out in stages, namely collecting data, summarizing data, and making conclusions. This study finds that the form of political harmony is the intense collaboration be-tween state actors, the Religious Harmony Forum, and the community. Findings – Interaction and commu-nicative relationships complement and strengthen each other. As the main actor, the people of Singkawang City have also seen and understood that they have diverse perspectives to avoid discrimination and intolerance. In addition, there are also forms of social capital created from the relationship between ethnic communities in Singkawang City, namely in the form of general norms and group characteristics.Therefore, it is concluded that the success of the Singkawang City government in making its area the most tolerant city in Indonesia from the Setara Institute in 2018 cannot be separated from the social capital owned by each tribe to live side by side in harmony with high values. spirit of tolerance. Novelty – In addition, e-government and knowledge management are also important points in the formation of a tolerant society in Singkawang City which has people from various backgrounds. Type of Paper - Review Keywords: political harmony; social capital; tolerant city; e-government JEL Classification: G32, H79. URI: http://gatrenterprise.com/GATRJournals/JFBR/vol6.1_2.html DOI: https://doi.org/10.35609/jfbr.2021.6.1(2) Pages 51 – 61

Disaster and the lived politics of the resilient city

The deployment of the resilient city concept remains divided between those who see resilience as a set of (bottom-up) enabling capacities, and those who accuse it of (top- down) post-political tendencies that normalize the status quo and cast off the vulnerable. This paper offers a conceptual framework that overcomes this binary. We argue that a critical and trans-historical deployment of resilience to the actually-existing conditions of urban crisis can re-politicize the very conditions necessitating cities to be resilient. Politicizing the lived experiences of resilience draws attention to the relationality and agency of resilience: how resilience is constructed, negotiated and resourced, at which temporal and spatial scales, and with what political antecedents, consequences and power struggles. The paper considers the lived politics of the resilient city juxtaposed across two purposefully disparate case studies: Leningrad during the 872-day siege in 1941-1944, and New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This unorthodox comparison both transgresses clear-cut ideological and epistemological conventions and develops a complex picture of how resilience unfolds in reality. These tragic events show a range of conditions that incorporated state-imposed cast-off top-down resilience and, in response, individual and community-led bottom-up resilience. We demonstrate the pre-eminent role of the state in how both disaster and resilience are constructed and (mis)managed, but also how cast-off resilience compels citizens and communities to activate mechanisms for negotiating disaster and recovery, generating a co-constituted resilience of cities and individuals.

Developing an Expert Community and Defining its Role in the Politics and Decision-Making of a World Heritage City: The Experience of Bamberg

This article investigates the role of expertise and the expert community through local politics and decision-making in a World Heritage City. The expert public community and its inclusion in decision-making are important factors influencing the successful coordination of public interests. The authors demonstrate how developing forms of public governance change the local expert community and transform its structure and core principles, leading to more open and democratic expertise. Using the case study of local urban politics, the authors illustrate that the social authority of expert knowledge and its influence on decision-making is increasingly dependent on public opinion and the diversification of the structures of expert communities. The latter implies, in particular, the inclusion of citizens who do not have formal expert status but who have sufficient experience and authority to influence urban policy. Using the example of the World Heritage City, the authors consider cases where the harmonization of the interests of the participants of urban policies requires an unusual approach from the public administration, taking into account its obligation to follow formal procedures and regulations and its need to ensure greater involvement of citizens in the decision-making process. Our research showed that, in some situations, these recommendations were more authoritative and earned a higher degree of trust from the citizens than recommendations from people with formal expert status. This trend is in line with larger changes in public administration, which is becoming more adaptive, complex, polycentric, and oriented towards productive cooperation. Expert communities are becoming more fragmentary due to the active involvement of actors who, by their socio-professional status, are not formal experts but have significant experience and social influence, especially in the local community.

Urban attributes and the spread of COVID-19: The effects of density, compliance and socio-political factors in Israel

Current debates identifying urban population density as a major catalyst for the spread of COVID-19, and the praise for de-densification and urban sprawl that they entail, may have dire environmental consequences. Juxtaposing competing theories about the urban antecedents of COVID-19, our key argument is that urban political attributes overshadow the effects of cities' spatial characteristics. This is true even when considering levels of compliance with movement restrictions and controlling for demographic and socio-economic conditions. Taking advantage of Israel as a living lab for studying COVID-19, we examine 271 localities during the first 3 months of the outbreak in Israel, a country where over 90% of the population is urban. Rather than density, we find social makeup and politics to have a critical effect. Cities with some types of political minority groups, but not others, exhibit higher infection rates. Compliance has a significant effect and density's influence on the spread of the disease is contingent on urban political attributes. We conclude with assessing how the relationship between the politics of cities and the spread of contagious diseases sheds new light on tensions between neo-Malthusian sentiments and concerns about urban sprawl and environmental degradation.

PARTISIPASI MASYARAKAT DALAM MEMBERDAYAKAN SISKAMLING

The purpose of this research is to describe the community participation in empowering the mobile security system. This research is a qualitative descriptive research. This study uses interview data collection techniques, observation and documentation. Checking the validity of the data used triangulation of sources, triangulation of time and triangulation of techniques. The results obtained from the research are the participation of citizens in participating in the security system at Neighborhood Association 19, Cempaka Permai Village, including the participation of thoughts, energy, assets, skills and skills as well as social participation. On the other hand, there is also internal citizen participation and external participation of residents in participating in the participation system of the Neighborhood Association residents around them supporting and attending even though they do not participate in patrols, from agencies from Babinsa, Bhabinkamtibmas, Head of Rukun Warga, Head of Subdistrict, then from the Mayor's Government give an award, one of them is the Bengkulu City Political and National Unity Body.

A vehicle for valorising the labour power of commuting: The politics of mobility fixing in Shanghai's Dockless Public Bike Sharing Sector

This paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates around the politics of hybrid mobilities, smart cities, surveillance capitalism and mobility fixing. Based on a set of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and secondary sources, the paper uses the emergence of dockless public bike sharing in Shanghai between 2016 and 2018 as its case study. In order to explain the emergence of dockless PBSS and illustrate our contention that this system seeks to create surplus value from the work of mobility (in this case cycle commuting), we examine the processes of valorisation that have occurred in order to both position PBSS as a worthy activity (and therefore remunerate participants affectively) and produce use values for the data generated by users. In doing so we also highlight the ways in which these processes of valorisation seek to ensure that the mobility work of users is not aligned with the products of that labour in order to avoid calls for this mobility work to be remunerated as wage labour (which would reduce any surplus value extraction). Ultimately we argue that these processes of valorisation are not only invasive, but exclusionary in that they prioritise select aspects of social practice that address matters of (governmental) concern, rather than a more rounded interpretation. We argue that there is an urgent need to recognise mobility practices beyond registers that simply prepare the ground for their marketisation.

Review: Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer: Nathan Burkan and the Making of American Popular Culture, by Gary A. Rosen

Review: <i>Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer: Nathan Burkan and the Making of American Popular Culture</i>, by Gary A. Rosen

The role of food gardening in addressing urban sustainability – A new framework for analysing policy approaches

In recent years, urban gardens have received increased interest from urban citizens as well as urban planners as a tool to promote sustainable urban development. The increased demand by citizens and planners for different forms of garden areas, however, is at odds with a densifying city and the loss of green spaces. Urban planners are therefore faced with the challenge of rethinking the functions and objectives of city gardens and, in turn, adapting the governance mechanisms with regard to sustainable urban development. The aim of this paper is to develop a new framework to analyse governance mechanisms, expressed as policy approaches to urban food garden development, which can serve as an analytical tool to enable comparison of cities and to analyse their efforts to achieve urban sustainability. The framework is based on case study analysis of public policies towards urban food gardening in the Swiss cities Berne, Lausanne and Zurich. We identified three core dimensions to characterise policy approaches in cities for the further development of city gardening: frames, level of institutionalisation, and policy-society relationship. Frames refer to the perception of gardening which is expressed by the objectives set by the city policy and the contributions gardening should fulfil in urban development. Level of institutionalisation provides information on the extent to which garden support is anchored in urban policy. Policy-society relationship refers to the type of leadership by city politics and the possibility for non-political actors to participate. For the further development of urban food gardening, the challenge for urban planners is to find the best possible combination of the three elements for their cities, adapted to the respective city context, the dominant sustainability goals and the social actors involved.

Off-Cycle and Off Center: Election Timing and Representation in Municipal Government

Who governs America’s cities: organized interests or mass publics? Though recent scholarship finds that local governments enact policies that align with citizens’ preferences, others argue that it is organized interests, not mass publics that are influential. To reconcile these perspectives, we show that election timing can help shed light on when voters or groups will be pivotal in city politics. Examining 1,600 large US cities, we find that off-cycle elections affect city policy responsiveness asymmetrically, weakening responsiveness on those issues where there is an active and organized interest whose policy objectives deviate from the preferences of the median resident. Here, we focus on public employees’ interests and find that local governments that are elected off cycle spend more on city workers than would be preferred by citizens in more conservative cities. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of interest groups and representation in local politics.

People as infrastructure politics in global north cities: Chicago’s South Side

People as infrastructure politics, a fruitful new analytic in urban political studies, has mysteriously been minimally studied in global north cities and their most punished places, America’s rust belt environments. I chronicle a flourishing people as infrastructure politics in one American rust belt city setting, Chicago’s neglected South Side. Here hundreds of subalterns participate in this resistance politics to reverse what I focus on: a commodifying blues club. Subalterns extract life-giving stuff from this space as they toil in Chicago’s and the South Side’s low-wage economies and marginalized communities. I show that this group’s political acts and practices, guided by their ordinary space’s interwovenness with taut political alliances and alternative ways to see, prove more sly and proactive than we have recognized. This slyness, first, entails an active use of a “back-path politics” as actions confront less club practices than the discursive content of practices. This slyness, second, leads with what I term resistive fragments: momentary, political charged interventions that powerfully resound across the club. The results suggest that this distinctive resistance politics is alive in America’s rust belt cities, closely mirrors realities in global south cities, and is far more complex that we had previously known.