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Examines the complex ecology of quasi-public and privatized institutions that mobilize and administer many of the political, administrative, and fiscal resources of today’s metropolitan regions

In recent decades metropolitan regions in the United States have witnessed the rise of multitudes of “shadow governments” that often supersede or replace functions traditionally associated with municipalities and other local governments inherited from the urban past. Shadow governments take many forms, ranging from billion-dollar special authorities that span entire urban regions, to public–private partnerships and special districts created to accomplish particular tasks, to privatized gated communities, to neighborhood organizations empowered to receive private and public funds. They finance and administer public services ranging from the prosaic (garbage collection and water utilities) to the transformative (economic development and infrastructure). Private Metropolis demonstrates that this complex ecosystem of local governance has compromised and even eclipsed democratic processes by moving important policy decisions out of public sight. 

The quasi-public institutions of urban governance generally escape the budgetary and statutory restraints imposed on traditional local governments and protect policy decisions from the limitations and vagaries of electoral politics. Moving major policy decisions into a privatized and corporatized realm facilitates efficiency and speed, but at the cost of democratic oversight. Increasingly, the urban electorate is left debating symbolic issues only tangentially connected to the actual distribution of the resources that affect people’s lives. 

The essays in Private Metropolis grapple with the difficult and timely questions that arise from this new ecology of governance: What are the consequences of the proliferation of special authorities, privatized governments, and public–private arrangements? Is the trade-off between democratic accountability and efficiency worth it? Has the public sector, with its messiness and inefficiencies—but also its checks and balances—ceded too much power to these new institutions? By examining such questions, this book provokes a long-overdue debate about the future of urban governance.

Contributors: Douglas Cantor, California State U, Long Beach; Ellen Dannin, Pennsylvania State U; Jameson W. Doig, Princeton U; Mary Donoghue; Peter Eisinger, New School; Steven P. Erie, U of California, San Diego; Rebecca Hendrick, U of Illinois at Chicago; Sara Hinkley, U of California, Berkeley; Amanda Kass, U of Illinois at Chicago; Scott A. MacKenzie, U of California, Davis; David C. Perry, U of Illinois at Chicago; James M. Smith, U of Indiana South Bend; Shu Wang, Michigan State U; Rachel Weber, U of Illinois at Chicago.

Manninen approaches the abortion controversy through a variety of perspectives and ethical frameworks. She addresses the social circumstances that influence many women's decision to abort and considers whether we believe that there are good and bad reasons to abort. Manninen also looks at the call for post-abortion fetal grieving rituals for women who desire them and the attempt to make room in the pro-choice position for the views of prospective fathers.

The author spells out how the two sides demonize each other and proposes ways to find degrees of convergence between the seemingly intractable positions.

Although the commission government movement is often treated by historians as an element of the reform surge of the Progressive Era, this is the first full-scale study of the origins, spread, and decline of the commission idea.

Commission government originated in Galveston, Texas, where business leaders conceived the plan as a temporary measure to speed recovery from the great hurricane of 1900. Other cities in Texas and across the nation soon followed; by 1920, about 500 municipalities had adopted the plan in which elected representatives serve as heads of city departments and, collectively, as a policy-making body.

Beginning with Galveston and Houston and Des Moines, Iowa, Bradley Robert Rice presents detailed case studies of the earliest commission cities and shows how the plan was developed and modified to suit each community’s needs. He goes on to chronicle the adoption of the commission plan by other cities across the country that strove for “businesslike efficiency” as a reaction against corruption and machine politics in urban government. Most commission charters included a wide-ranging package of municipal reforms, such as the short ballot, at-large representation, nonpartisanship, civil service, and direct legislation. Yet Rice shows that the commission plan generally offered little in the way of social reform to accompany its reorganization of municipal government.

Applying a model of innovation diffusion, the author analyzes how and why the new form of city government spread across Progressive Era America. He also thoroughly explores the relationship between the commission plan and other Progressive Era reforms and reports on the reasons for its decline from both a social and a practical perspective.

Progressive Cities is described by Professor Bruce M. Stave, editor of the Journal of Urban History, as “a sound piece of work which should make a useful and worthwhile contribution to the existing scholarship on urban reform and should appeal to an audience which cuts across disciplines: history, political science, urban studies and urban planning.”

Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Lloyd demonstrates that despite the persistent hope that a new technology (from the telegraph to the Internet) will rise to serve the needs of the republic, none has solved the fundamental problems created by corporate domination. After examining failed alternatives to the strong publicly owned communications model, such as antitrust regulation, the public trustee rules of the Federal Communications Commission, and the underfunded public broadcasting service, Lloyd argues that we must re-create a modern version of the Founder’s communications environment, and offers concrete strategies aimed at empowering citizens.

Technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and geoengineering promise to address many of our most serious problems, yet they also bring environmental and health-related risks and uncertainties. Moreover, they can come to dominate global production systems and markets with very little public input or awareness. Existing governance institutions and processes do not adequately address the risks of new technologies, nor do they give much consideration to the concerns of persons affected by them.

Instead of treating technology, health, and the environment as discrete issues, Albert C. Lin argues that laws must acknowledge their fundamental relationship, anticipating both future technological developments and their potential adverse effects. Laws should encourage international cooperation and the development of common global standards, while allowing for flexibility and reassessment.
 

Lessons from Bologna on how ordinary people take charge of urban spaces and make their cities more democratic

Proprietors for a Democratic City examines how nonelite individuals politically engage with urban spaces—even when they do not formally own them. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork throughout Bologna, Italy, Robin M. LeBlanc presents valuable models of democratic community-making through imaginative occupation, curation, and coalition-building projects, with critical implications for the study of cities and democracy.

Once a standard-bearer of progressive governance, contemporary Bologna now faces globally emergent challenges to its democratic functioning, from a lack of affordable housing to the rise of an authoritarian and xenophobic Far Right. But amid this precarity, everyday citizens employ the spaces around them to influence the political life of the city. Through interviews with a wide range of Bolognese, from urban planners and real estate developers to housing office staff, retirees in public gardening plots, and members of immigrant and youth squatter collectives, LeBlanc illuminates the humble origins of coalitional work that can meaningfully address today’s urban economic, environmental, and demographic crises.

Challenging both capitalistic and Marxist conventional wisdom, Proprietors for a Democratic City is a vivid portrait of the urban landscape and an inspiring call to empower regular people to create vibrant democratic spaces.

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Protected Children, Regulated Mothers examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.

Protest in Belgrade addresses one of the most important social movements of this decade - the civil and student peace demonstrations which took place in Belgrade during the winter of 1996/97. The demonstrations, the largest ever in history, were in response to Milošević’s nullifying of the results of local elections in fourteen towns in Serbia which created global media attention and attracted worldwide sympathy.

This in-depth study of a society calling for democracy is based on interviews with over 1000 civilians and students. The book is unique because much of the research was carried out and completed while the demonstrations were still in progress and before the outcome of events was known. A chronology of events is also included.

The book provides an abundance of valuable information for analysts of post-socialist transformation, researchers of social movements and social change, and for all those concerned with the tragic events in Southeast Europe.

"The conversation between political psychology and constructivism is essential and long overdue. By exploring the interaction of individual cognition and social processes, this 'ideational alliance' more fully explains how ideas work all the way down to shape world politics."
---Theo Farrell, King's College London

"This is a worthwhile and engaging volume. Political psychology is gaining ground as an essential perspective to consider when analyzing international relations, and the book's focus on constructivism provides key insights into the relationship between identity, norms, and behavior---bedrock concepts in understanding the social underpinnings of global politics."
---Mira Sucharov, Carleton University

"An indispensable guide to understanding what distinguishes and what unites psychology and constructivism. A wonderful resource for political psychologists, constructivists, and their critics."
---Jonathan Mercer, University of Washington

Constructivist IR scholars study the ways in which international norms, culture, and identities---all intersubjective phenomena---inform foreign policy and affect the reaction to and outcomes of international events. Political psychologists similarly investigate divergent national self-conceptions as well as the individual cognitive and emotional propensities that shape ideology and policy. Given their mutual interest in human subjectivity and identity politics, a dialogue and synthesis between constructivism and political psychology is long overdue.

The contributors to this volume discuss both theoretical and empirical issues of complementarity and critique, with an emphasis on the potential for integrating the viewpoints within a progressive ideational paradigm. Moreover, they make a self-conscious effort to interrogate, rather than gloss over, their differences in the hope that such disagreements will prove particularly rich sources of analytical and empirical insight. 

Jacket illustration © Ocean Photography/Veer