Pierre Clavel

The community option in urban policy

There is a plausible community option in local and national urban policy, an alternative to growth-oriented and top-down approaches that represents a possible new reality to be considered by urban scholars and professionals. The authors present evidence from interviews with the staffs of community development corporations and allied organizations and draw implications for professional schools in outreach work and in research.

Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Response to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago

Presented on January 26, 2011 from 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm in the Georgia Tech Architecture Library.

Planners and Citizen Boards: Some Applications of Social Theory to the Problem of Plan Implementation

Abstract This article reports on a study of planning as expert advice to nonpartisan citizen boards,—and the means by which this advice is implemented or blocked m a semirural county. The major thesis is that in an area of relatively scarce economic resources, administrative resources in the form of individuals with the time, training and experience to use expert advice are also scarce. The result is a state of inequality between experts and boards that limits the extent to which experts can be used. Among other consequences, local boards dealing with experts seem to sense this inequality. Their major defense is rejection of the expert and reaffirmation of traditional rural institutions. This phenomenon seems most lively to occur with a high proportion of locally oriented board members of generalist status, and less lively when board members have specialist status and cosmopolitan orientations. It also seems related to the technical difficulty of the issue, the relative investments of time in the issue by...

ON BEING UNREASONABLE : PROGRESSIVE PLANNING IN SHEFFIELD AND CHICAGO

Abstract This paper gives an account of ‘left’ and ‘progressive’ economic development politics and policy in Sheffield and Chicago in the early 1980s. The origins of these policies in activist work and grassroots organizing, and the leadership of John Benington and David Blunkett in Sheffield and of Robert Mier and Harold Washington in Chicago are characterized and briefly compared.

Planning for Manufacturing Chicago After 1983

Traces the evolution of Chicago economic development planning from the Central Business District (loop) -serving orientation under the Richard J. Daley “machine” regime to a neighborhood oriented “local producer strategy” established under progressive mayor Harold Washington. Shows institutionalization as Washington’s planners cultivated a neighborhood movement and neighborhood serving local development organizations to enhance the prospects of small manufacturing operations and the retention of industrial jobs for residents. These continued and elaborated into the successor regime of mayor Richard M. Daley, but eventually lost force as the city turned toward neighborhood beautification and other improvements aimed at attracting upscale residential development.

Peter Hall. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982. 329pp.

This is a set of bnef case studies followed by analysis. The cases descnbe &dquo;great planning disasters&dquo; (and two neardisasters) : where a lot of money was spent on planning, and the consensus afterwards was that things had gone wrong. Planning here is the forethought applied to providing a public good, and is limited to physical development issues. The cases are the planning for London’s third airport, London’s motorways, the Anglo-French Concorde, San Francisco’s BART System, Sydney’s Opera House, and (the two near-disasters) California’s new campuses and Britain’s National Library.

29.95(Cloth),

Harold Washingtons period as mayor of Chicago in 1983-1987 will be remarked as one of the high points of American city history. Not only was the the citys first black mayor, he put together the first successful rainbow coalition and introduced reforms that signaled the end of the Richard Daley machine. This book documents another, less-noted but equally important aspect of Washingtons mayoralty: a progressive neighborhood and economic development agenda, pursued by a network of neighborhood-oriented organizers and professionals, which played a crucial role in legitimating the adminstration generally and institutionalizing major reforms.Neighborhood organizers found themselves in city government after Washington took office. In this book they discuss the roles they played, the experience of being on the inside, and the frustrations of government. Members of the administration pursued such policies as the reallocation of city investments from downtown to the outlying neighborhoods, the redefinition of city economic policy toward providing good jobs rather than developing real estate projects, use of community based organizations to implement city policy, and a committment to broad-based participation.At a time when national policy had withdrawn from urban affairs, such initiatives were remarkable. They also confounded mainstream academic and public opinion. Perhaps it was not impossible, as many claimed, to develop redistributive policies, explore public ownership, address racial discrimination. It is important to examine Harold Washingtons policies for what they set out to accomplish and for what they showed about the potential for redistributive policies in American cities.

7.79(paper

AbstractTo deal with poverty in non-metropolitan America we nlust see the problem differently and use research syles and programs distinct from those appropriate to metropolitan areas. This article focuses on an institutional approach to non-metropolitan poverty. The effects of regional economic shifts and of the intrusion of metropolitan decision centers into rural areas call for efforts at strengthening local political and social institutions. Major policies should be directed at the development of middle class activism locally and toward research and action supporting institutional development at both state and local levels.