LIST OF WORKSHOPS

Towards an urban policy analysis: Linking urban politics and public policy

We propose to study urban policies and processes by linking public policy theories with urban politics literature. Public policy scholars analyze local policies often without reference to theoretical frameworks developed by urban politics scholars; likewise, urban politics research often examines urban policies, but without reference to public policy theories (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007). We propose to bridge this gap to explore what makes the “urban” dimension of urban policy distinctive, and how such an understanding can, in turn, deepen knowledge and theorizing of public policy more generally.

Our workshop will include several panels organized thematically with ample time for discussion and critique. The conveners’ goal is to produce an edited volume or a special issue of a journal that would focus on urban policy analysis, along the lines sketched out below. Workshop papers will ideally represent a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, with the common thread of urban policy, and the common goal of seeking to theorize and empirically analyze urban policy through bringing different sets of literature into dialogue. We seek contributions that approach urban policy within and across cities, as well as those that approach urban policy beyond the city, at a global scale.

Bringing “the urban” into policy analysis

Whether responding to climate change, migration, or addiction, whether aiming to generate growth or reduce the negative impacts of growing inequality, cities are often posited as policy innovators. Yet they also are characterized as adapting to, and complying with, the needs and interests of global capital, in the process slighting the well-being of everyday residents and especially the most vulnerable. Cities clearly are active policy makers and policy implementers, whether progressive, innovative, neoliberal or regressive. Yet a specifically “urban” policy analysis seems as yet to emerge.

As Clarence Stone reminds us, “cities are not the nation state writ small” (2015, 117). Thus, urban policies differ from policies formulated nationally, subnationally, or in suburban or rural areas. We wonder how policy process, policy designs, policy implementation differ when undertaken by urban decision makers and advocates, as opposed to those at the national or supranational levels; whether contextual differences in institutions, actors, or ideas generate a distinctive type of policy at the urban scale. And we propose that comparative analysis, within and across nation-states and world regions, may be among the keys to answering these questions.

Wolman (2012, 145) defines urban policies as policies generated and implemented by city governments through local political processes (i.e. not federal or national policy towards cities). However, since urban policies are often at the forefront of tackling complex societal problems, we may think of urban policies as well as traveling beyond city boundaries, to other levels of government and to other regions of the world.

There are several interrelated reasons that make the study of urban policies distinctive and particularly relevant. First, societal problems accentuate themselves in densely populated spaces. Cities are spatially concentrated expressions of societies that “reflect the social and economic conditions of the moment and are arenas where socioeconomic transformations, developments, and problems first become manifest” (Kübler and Wälti 2001, 35). Thus, urban policies tackle relevant societal problems on the ground. Various examples have shown the high relevance and sometimes trailblazing impact of urban policies that were later copied by other cities and other levels of government. For example, Swiss cities in the early 1990s were at the forefront of designing strategies to cope with their open drug markets. Swiss cities implemented harm-reduction strategies by helping to pioneer heroin maintenance treatments and by providing clean syringes and needles (Kübler 2001; Kübler and Wälti 2001). A more recent example is the effort of U.S. cities to curb greenhouse gas emissions in light of few tangible efforts on the national level (Hughes 2017). In Germany, cities are important actors in designing proactive refugee and integration policies after Germany took responsibility for over 1 million refugees in 2015 (Mayer 2017). U.S. cities on the West Coast have enacted living-wage ordinances due to campaigns of low-wage worker organizations (Milkman, Bloom, and Narro 2010).

Second, and relatedly, policies addressing urban problems that find no majorities on the national and/or sub-national level (i.e. state, province etc.) may be nevertheless pushed forward by cities. Again, the prime example is environmental policies and climate protection efforts of U.S. cities. As Hughes (2017, 365) explains: “In the face of policy stagnation at the international and, in the case of the United States, national levels, many city governments have been developing plans of their own”. Under the auspice of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, cities pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the spirit of the Kyoto protocol that the U.S. never ratified (Sapotichne and Jones 2012, 442–44). Further examples are the so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with national immigration enforcement agencies and forbid city officials from inquiring into an individual’s immigration status (Gonzalez, Collingwood, and El-Khatib 2017). Irregular migrants tend to live in cities given that urban settings facilitate job opportunities and the possibilities to tap into social networks. Therefore, cities haven an interest in protecting immigrants who are directly affected by the negative consequences of harsh national immigration policies that marginalize irregular immigrants.

Third, structural economic pressures down-scale policies to the local level. For example, economic development policies are down-scaled to regional or local levels. Cities are forced to be geographical spearheads for economic growth (Brenner 2000, 2004). As a consequence, cities have been pressured to become entrepreneurial and they respond by formulating neo-liberal urban policies (Harvey 1989). Thus, many cities develop a variety of locational policies to strengthen their competitiveness in global interurban competition (Kaufmann and Arnold 2017). However emerging literature on shrinking cities and slow cities proposes alternatives to pursuit of large-scale growth (e.g., H. Mayer and Knox 2006; Joo and Hoon Park 2017).

Finally, urban policy features global and conceptual dimensions that broaden “the urban” and thus must not be restricted or localized to one city. With what some scholars have called “planetary urbanization” occurring (e.g. Brenner and Schmid 2015), globalization and the transnational flows of knowledge enable the travel of policy ideas, so that leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, or Mexico City can assist mayors in Chicago or New York (Peck and Theodore 2015). Simultaneously, local opposition movements are connected with each other and informed by each other; claims of “rights to the city” are made locally but also in concert with movements worldwide (Purcell 2014; Huchzermeyer 2017). Global connections, however, do not mean necessarily that cities across North and South can be studied in the same way, or have the same relevant dimensions for policy analysis (Roy 2009). How can urban policy analysis be attentive to global power relations at the level of knowledge-production? As well, conceptualizations of urbanism derived from geographic space and human experience of that space, refer as much to frames of mind or perspectives on power and social order/disorder, ways of life, ways of interaction that distinctively incorporate diversity, complexity, chaos, flexibility, ongoing change – even ungovernability that perhaps defies policy analysis as conventionally construed (Simone 2004; Magnusson 2010). Cities are relevant for the policies and policymaking that occur within them (thereby affecting the majority of the world’s population who live in cities) but also because the urban transcends “the local.”

Linking urban politics and public policy

Although urban politics and public policy are separate subfields in many professional associations, with their own sections and journals and conferences, these fields share common interests and orientations to research that could lead to more explicit dialogue. Both subfields share an awareness of complexity and a related openness to interdisciplinarity. The problems that policy seeks to address, and the urban environments that scholars seek to understand, emerge from complex webs of factors that often can only be understood through multidisciplinary inquiry. Key journals in both of these subfields not surprisingly feature work by scholars across the social sciences. As well, at least within political science, these subfields share some intellectual origins in the ideas of Bachrach and Baratz (1962). The community power debate in the 1950s and 1960s was an important intellectual dispute over the nature and organization of power in democracies. Floyd Hunter (1953) advocated an elitism theory by demonstrating the dominance of senior business leaders in Atlanta’s politics. Robert Dahl (1961) offered a pluralistic picture of urban politics in New Haven. Bachrach and Baratz (1962, 1963) objected that the concept of power remained incomplete if power in the agenda-setting process, and especially if non-decision-making, was not considered. This work became critical to public policy theories on agenda setting, which continue to be a major area of research within the subfield of public policy – thus joining together the study of cities with the study of public policy.

Despite the commonalities of the two subfields, there are today hardly any ties between urban politics and public policy theories (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007). The ideas of Bachrach and Baratz (1962, 1963) about power in the policy-making process have resonated with policy scholars (see for example Hacker 2004; Knill and Tosun 2012, 110; Pierson 2004, 37, 2015; Weible 2017, 8). However, these ideas left not many traces in the urban politics literature. Urban politics within political science mainly focused on political economy approaches such as growth machines (Molotch 1976; Logan, John; Molotch 1987) and urban regimes (Stone 1989, 1993). Another strand of urban politics research studied urban policies in so-called domains (Peterson 1981). The environment of the policy domain must be therefore considered to explain the policy process. As a consequence, the policy processes have to be strictly contextualized. Public policy theories, on the other hand, may not automatically apply to cities, because they are mostly built from analyzing national policy-making (Sapotichne and Jones 2012, 444). Some noteworthy exceptions have studied urban policies by adopting public policy theories or concepts (e.g. Rast 2009, 2012; Sapotichne and Smith 2012; Sidney 2003). To be sure, policies are an important object of urban studies, however, we do not detect many conscious efforts that would link empirical work in cities to public policy theories or concepts. As Trounstine (2009, 613) noted, “we lack a comprehensive body of theoretically driven research that explains variation in policy outcomes (…) at the local level”.

References

Bachrach, Peter, and Morton S Baratz. 1962. “Two Faces of Power.” American Political Science Review 56 (4):947–952.

———. 1963. “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework.” American Political Science Review 57 (3):632–642.

Brenner, Neil. 2000. “Building ”Euro-Regions” Locational Politics and the Political Geography of Neoliberalism in Post-Unification Germany.” European Urban and Regional Studies 7 (4):319–345.

———. 2004. New State Space: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2015. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19 (2–3):151–182.

Dahl, Robert Alan. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven.

Fung, Archon. 2015. “Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future.” Public Administration Review 75 (4):513–522.

Gonzalez, Benjamin, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib. 2017. “The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration.” Urban Affairs Review.

Hacker, Jacob S. 2004. “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States.” American Political Science Review 98 (2):243–260.

Harvey, David. 1989. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography, 3–17.

Hooghe, and Gary Marks. 2003. “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-Level Governance.” American Political Science Review 97 (2):233–243.

Huchzermeyer, Marie. 2017. “The Legal Meaning of Lefebvre's the Right to the City: Addressing the Gap between Global Campaign and Scholarly Debate.” GeoJournal, 1–14.

Hughes, Sara. 2017. “The Politics of Urban Climate Change Policy: Toward a Research Agenda.” Urban Affairs Review 53 (2):362–380.

Hunter, Floyd. 1953. Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Joo, Yu-Min, and Se Hoon Park. 2017. “Overcoming Urban Growth Coalition: The Case of Culture-Led Urban Revitalization in Busan, South Korea.” Urban Affairs Review 53 (5):843–867.

Kaufmann, David, and Tobias Arnold. 2017. “Strategies of Cities in Globalised Interurban Competition: The Locational Policies Framework.” Urban Studies.

Knill, Christoph, and Jale Tosun. 2012. Public Policy: A New Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kübler, Daniel. 2001. “Understanding Policy Change with the Advocacy Coalition Framework: An Application to Swiss Drug Policy.” Journal of European Public Policy 8 (4):623–641.

Kübler, Daniel, and Sonja Wälti. 2001. “Drug Policy-Making in Metropolitan Areas: Urban Conflicts and Governance.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (1):35–54.

Logan, John; Molotch, Harvey. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. London, University of California Press.

Magnusson, Warren. 2010. “Seeing Like a City: How to Urbanize Political Science.” In Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, edited by Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio, 41–53. SUNY Press.

Mayer, Heike, and Paul Knox. 2006. “Slow Cities: Sustainable Places in a Fast World.” Journal of Urban Affairs 28 (4):321–34.

Mayer, Margit. 2017. “Cities as Sites of Refuge and Resistance.” European Urban and Regional Studies.

Milkman, Ruth, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro. 2010. Working for Jusfice: The LA Model of Organizing and Advocacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Molotch, Harvey. 1976. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology, 309–332.

Peck, Jamie, and Nik Theodore. 2015. Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism. University of Minnesota Press.

Peters, B. Guy, and Jon Pierre. 2004. “Multi-Level Governance and Democracy: A Faustian Bargain?” In Multi-Level Governance, edited by Ian Bache and Matthew Flinders, 75–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peterson, Paul. 1981. City Limits. University of Chicago Press.

Pierre, Jon. 2017. “Multilevel Governance as a Strategy to Build Capacity in Cities: Evidence from Sweden.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–14.

Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton University Press.

———. 2015. “Power and Path Dependence.” In Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis, edited by James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, 123–147. Cambridge University Press.

Purcell, Mark. 2014. “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.” Journal of Urban Affairs 36 (1):141–154.

Rast, Joel. 2009. “Critical Junctures, Long-Term Processes: Urban Redevelopment in Chicago and Milwaukee, 1945–1980.” Social Science History 33 (4):393–426.

———. 2012. “Why History (Still) Matters: Time and Temporality in Urban Political Analysis.” Urban Affairs Review 48 (1):3–36.

Roy, Ananya. 2009. “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43 (6):819–830.

Sapotichne, Joshua, and Bryan D Jones. 2012. “Setting City Agendas: Power and Policy Change.” In The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics, edited by Karen Mossberger, Susan E Clarke, and Peter John, 442–467. Oxford University Press.

Sapotichne, Joshua, Bryan D Jones, and Michelle Wolfe. 2007. “Is Urban Politics a Black Hole? Analyzing the Boundary between Political Science and Urban Politics.” Urban Affairs Review 43 (1):76–106.

Sapotichne, Joshua, and James M Smith. 2012. “Venue Shopping and the Politics of Urban Development: Lessons from Chicago and Seattle.” Urban Affairs Review 48 (1):86–110.

Sidney, Mara. 2003. Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action. University Press of Kansas.

———. 2010. “Critical Perspectives on the City: Constructivist, Interpretive Analysis of Urban Politics.” In Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, edited by Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio, 23–40. SUNY Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3):407–429.

Stone, Clarence. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988. University Press of Kansas Lawrence, KS.

———. 1993. “Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach.” Journal of Urban Affairs 15 (1):1–28.

———. 2015. “Reflections on Regime Politics: From Governing Coalition to Urban Political Order.” Urban Affairs Review 51 (1):101–137.

Stone, Clarence N, Jeffrey R Henig, Bryan D Jones, and Carol Pierannunzi. 2001. Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools. University Press of Kansas.

Trounstine, Jessica. 2009. “All Politics Is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics.” Perspectives on Politics 7 (3):611–618.

Weible, Christopher M. 2017. “Introduction: The Scope and Focus of Policy Process Research and Theory.” In Theories of the Policy Process (Fourth Edition), edited by Christopher M Weible and Paul A Sabatier, 1–16. New York: Westview Press.

Wolman, Harold. 2012. “What Cities Do: How Much Does Urban Policy Matter?” In The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics, edited by Karen Mossberger, Susan E Clarke, and Peter John, 415–441. Oxford University Press.

We invite scholars from across social sciences, working on research in a range of cities and policy issues, to propose papers that bring the study of urban politics and the study of public policy into dialogue. For example, work might engage concepts focused on policy actors like street-level bureaucrats or policy entrepreneurs (e.g., Stone et al. 2001). Some scholar might consider how policy theories developed for national studies can transform to incorporate urban settings; as Sapotichne and Jones note, “models of policy agenda setting (…) are mostly built and applied to national policymaking, both in the U.S. and abroad, rather than in the domain of city government” (2012, 444). Path dependence and policy feedback can be applied to the urban context (Rast 2012). Contributions might evaluate multi-level governance perspectives, which bring networks of government and non-state actors into focus and challenge conventional wisdom about hierarchies of scale, and assumptions about where “important” actors are situated (Hooghe and Marks 2003). Multi-level governance opens transnational spaces for city leaders both for purposes of learning and for opportunities to lead and shape policy beyond their city; its informal, non-hierarchical dimensions of decision making, however, raise questions about democratic accountability (Peters and Pierre 2004; Pierre 2017). Critical interpretive policy perspectives such as those focused on social construction processes and outcomes, discourse analysis, tacit and expert knowledge can investigate urban policy making (Sidney 2010). Critical policy studies focus often at the urban scale, but usually do not theorize the urban. How might studies of deliberative governance and citizen participation, typically rooted at the local level, inform theories of public policy and theories of urban politics (Fung 2015)?

We invite papers that examine urban policy from a lens within the city, or beyond the city. We invite theoretical and/or empirical papers, and are open to all methodological and disciplinary approaches. Global comparative research is especially welcomed. We want to bring together scholars from different disciplines and world regions who study a diversity of cities across time and space.

The following questions might spark thoughts:

• Which policy theories and concepts can generate insights about urban policy process, designs, implementation, effects? How can this application extend and strengthen understandings of policy at the level of theory? How can urban politics literature inform the adaptation of policy theories to the local level?
• What are distinctive characteristics of “the urban” for purposes of policy analysis? How might the multiple conceptualizations of “urban” drive approaches to urban policy analysis?
• What are relevant or prominent problems, solutions, institutions, and actor constellations in cities?
• How do urban policies travel both in time and space? What are the roles of experts, consultants, supranational organizations?
• Which frameworks are fruitful to study urban policies comparatively and cross-nationally?
• What are prospects for, and examples of, strengthening democracy and lessening inequality at the urban policy scale, as opposed to other scales?

We aim to prepare a joint publication of urban policy research in a special issue or edited volume. The publication format will be discussed during the workshop.

We propose to study urban policies and processes by linking public policy theories with urban politics literature. Public policy scholars analyze local policies often without reference to theoretical frameworks developed by urban politics scholars; likewise, urban politics research often examines urban policies, but without reference to public policy theories (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007). We propose to bridge this gap to explore what makes the “urban” dimension of urban policy distinctive, and how such an understanding can, in turn, deepen knowledge and theorizing of public policy more generally. Within the discipline of political science, the fields of public policy and urban politics manifest hardly any ties.

As Clarence Stone reminds us, “cities are not the nation state writ small” (2015, 117). Thus, urban policies differ from policies formulated nationally, subnationally, or in suburban or rural areas. Yet, there are multiple ways to conceptualize the “urban”, across social science disciplines, which can be explored in the workshop. For example, urban policies may be distinctive due to particular institutional, political, or socio-demographic contexts. Societal problems accentuate themselves in dense urban settings and thus policies and processes may differ because of this immediacy. Urban policy also features a global dimension, suggesting researchers consider urban policy beyond a particular geographic place. Cities no longer can be assumed to “nest” underneath and be represented by state/provincial, national, and supranational levels, but their residents and leaders engage directly at various levels. What does this mean for understanding urban policy?

We seek new policy approaches to urban policies and in revisions of policy process theories or concepts that incorporate the particularities of urban settings and the ascendancy of “the urban” on the world’s policy stage. We want to stimulate papers that study urban policy with a public policy lens or public policy studies that analyze urban policy issues. This may give rise to new frameworks allowing for systematic comparative urban policy analysis.

David Kaufmann, david.kaufmann@kpm.unibe.ch

David Kaufmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, at the KPM Center for Public Management. He specializes in policy analysis with a focus on urban policies as well as on migration and asylum policies. David Kaufmann studied political science (B.A. and M.A.) at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of Lund, Sweden. He obtained his PhD from the University of Bern in 2017. In his dissertation, he comparatively studied locational policies in secondary capital cities such as Bern, Ottawa, The Hague, and Washington, D.C.. During his PhD, he was a guest researcher at Leiden University, Netherlands, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, United States, and University of Ottawa, Canada.

Dr. Kaufmann is the author of the forthcoming book Varieties of Capital Cities: The Competitiveness Challenge for Secondary Capital Cities (Edward Elgar) and co-author of the book The Political Economy of Capital Cities (2017, Routledge). He received the Carl-Goerdeler-Preis for the best PhD thesis in local politics or local administration in German speaking countries, the Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award awarded by the APSA section “Urban and Local Politics”, and the Best Comparative Policy Paper Award (together with Prof. Dr. Fritz Sager) awarded by the “Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis” and the “IPSA Research Committee on Comparative Studies on Local Governments and Politics”.

Mara Sidney, msidney@rutgers.edu

Mara Sidney is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She co- directs Global Urban Studies, part of the Joint PhD Program in Urban Systems at Rutgers-Newark, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Rutgers School of Nursing. Her research areas include public policy, urban politics, race/ethnicity, and immigration. Much of her work focuses on advocacy organizations and NGOs. Theoretically, she engages social construction, institutionalist and multi-level governance approaches. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Colorado, and a Master’s degree in Housing from the University of Minnesota. She has held the Fulbright Research Chair in Governance at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Sidney serves on the editorial boards of Critical Policy Studies, and Policy Studies Journal.

Dr. Sidney’s books include Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action and Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education (with Susan E. Clarke, Rodney Hero, Luis Fraga, and Bari Anhalt Erlichson). She co-edited the Handbook of Public Policy Analysis with Frank Fischer and Gerald Miller. Recent published work includes a cross-national comparative study of local integration policies and programs, focused on NGOs in Newark, New Jersey, USA, and Ottawa, Canada. She now is engaged in a collaborative cross-national study of refugee settlement in cities in the United States, Switzerland, and South Africa.