Richardson Dilworth

Privatization, the World Water Crisis, and the Social Contract

To deny someone the right to water is tantamount to denying them the right to life, and to set a price on water is to set a price on life. It comes as no surprise then to find a good amount of anxiety and contention over who gets to set the price of water and how much they charge. And over the past two decades, throughout both the developed and developing world, setting the price of water has fallen increasingly to private companies at the same time as various demographic changes have increased water scarcity. Thus we hear water described simultaneously in terms of both a humanitarian crisis of global proportions—one standard though very rough figure is that more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water (Davis 2005 , 146; Black 2004 , 28)—and as the “oil of the 21 st century” (Wessel 2005 ).

The Place of Planning in Sustainability Metrics for Public Works: Lessons From the Philadelphia Region

This article reports and analyzes survey and focus group data regarding baseline goals for public works administration, against which new metrics can be constructed that meaningfully reflect the ideals implied by the notion of sustainability, focusing in particular on four policy areas in the Philadelphia metropolitan region.We administered a survey to key informants, all of whom had also agreed to participate in focus groups.The major conclusion from the survey and focus group data is that land-use policies could most likely serve as a common matrix for sustainability baselines and measurements in water, energy, and transportation.

WHEN CITIES GET MARRIED Constructing Urban Space through Gender, Sexuality, and Municipal Consolidation

In this article, we examine the processes by which urban space became sexually coded through municipal consolidation in the nineteenth century. Our analysis covers the union of Van Vorst Township to Jersey City in 1851 and the absorption of the City of Brooklyn to “Greater New York” in 1898. In both cases, urban space was gendered and sexualized through courtship and marriage metaphors used by local newspapers. We argue that consolidation is represented in gendered and sexualized terms so that the question of municipal expansion became insulated frommoral, racialized, and environmental concerns about the “threats” of the big city. Our analysis has contemporary relevance because it suggests the sexist and heterosexist norms that may be embedded in the noblesse oblige of contemporary municipal consolidation. It also suggests a way of looking at contemporary municipal boundary changes through a normative lens that takes us beyond economic notions of self-interest.

Community-based organisations in city environmental policy regimes: lessons from Philadelphia

In this paper we examine the role of community-based organisations (CBOs) in the environmental policy regime of Philadelphia, through a citywide survey (N = 40) and interviews with leaders from three types of CBOs: community development corporations (CDCs), civic associations (CAs), and business-improvement organisations. We found that CBOs of all types have changed their organisational missions and identities in response to their pursuit of sustainability goals, but that CDCs more so than either CAs or business organisations have integrated sustainability into their governance structures. Second, we found that a growing number of CBOs have expanded their work to involve environmental policy and programming. Third, we found that the work of local non-profit organisations has become directly linked to the citys broader sustainability plan, Greenworks.

URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE POLITICS AND METROPOLITAN GROWTH: LESSONS FROM THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN REGION

In 1874, the towns of Kingsbridge, Morrisania, and West Farms were all annexed to New York City. A fourth town, Yonkers, was also considered for annexation but was insteadincorporatedas a city in 1872 andremainedindependent of its expanding neighbor to the south. The argument made here is that infrastructurural development reinforcedYonkers’s autonomy andthus limitedthe geographic expansion of New York City. Kingsbridge, Morrisania, and West Farms were relatively undevelopedby 1874, andannexation was thus a more viable strategy by which those towns couldbe suppliedwith infrastructurural andother urban services. The case of Yonkers thus suggests that local infrastructure development contributed to the proliferation of independent municipalities and the fragmentation of metropolitan regions. To the extent that metropolitan fragmentation creates an unequal distribution of resources across a metropolitan area, the case of Yonkers suggests further that infrastructurural development ultimately endangered municipalities’ future prosperity.

From Sewers to Suburbs Transforming the Policy-Making Context of American Cities

Central city infrastructure development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in areas such as sewerage, water works, street lighting, and street pavement, was an important cause of suburban municipal autonomy by the time of the Great Depression. Suburban autonomy was in turn an important factor in the racial and economic transformations that were visible in central cities by the 1950s. Thus, although central city infrastructure development was a classic developmental policy, it led to a central city politics that emphasized fiscal retrenchment and racialized poverty. This argument provides an important new perspective to the study of urban politics because it suggests that suburban autonomy was an intermediate process by which city policies transformed the context in which they were initially formulated. Evidence is provided for this argument through four OLS regression models that indicate a statistically significant relationship between central city infrastructure development in 1907 and suburban population growth in the 1930s and 1940s.

Can sustainability plans make sustainable cities? The ecological footprint implications of renewable energy within Philadelphia's Greenworks Plan

Abstract Municipal sustainability plans typically include laudable environmental goals, but they rarely explain the connection between these goals and a larger conception of sustainability. In this article, we examine one local sustainability plan, Philadelphia’s Greenworks, through a city-based, rather than per capita-based, ecological footprint (EF) analysis. Our objective is to theoretically establish the extent to which at least one of the items in Greenworks—to have 20% of the city’s electricity come from alternative energy sources—might reduce Philadelphia’s overall energy footprint if implemented within the municipal boundaries. By moving away from the idea that per capita energy footprints add up to a citywide energy footprint, we posit that a city can reduce its overall energy footprint by utilizing internal resources, even if the total land used for that respective energy were to increase. For many cities this will result in the use of renewables, such as solar, biogas, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and other creative solutions. By extending at least one component of Philadelphia’s sustainability plan through EF analysis, we provide a hypothetical example of how municipal sustainability goals might contribute to a larger goal of urban sustainability, at least in the limited sense that they become less reliant on outlying resources.

Teaching urban politics at an Albanian university: how do you make an American sub-discipline internationally relevant?

This article compares American and Albanian college students’ urban political experiences in order to understand the relevance of American models of urban politics to developing nations. Urban growth in Albania has created needs for teaching students about urban governance. The evidence presented here suggests that Albanians’ conceptions of urban problems probably lend themselves to political activism. The challenge is to create models for teaching urban politics that are more relevant to students in developing nations.

Grocery Cooperatives as Governing Institutions in Neighborhood Commercial Corridors

We explore cooperatives’ potential to play governing roles in neighborhood commercial corridors (NCCs) by examining one grocery cooperative in Philadelphia that has had stores on three NCCs in the city. We distinguish between an anchor institution role, where one organization provides collective goods for the corridor, and governance, where multiple corridor stakeholders collectively provide goods. We conclude that a cooperative will more likely play a governance role if it enters an NCC at a point when there are no other potential corridor-governing organizations, and when the NCC itself is at an early stage of development or redevelopment. What this suggests more generally about NCCs is that the organizations present at their founding or at a critical juncture have a large impact on their future developmental trajectories. We argue further that a cooperative is more likely to play a governance role when it was created by neighborhood stakeholders and it thus reflects the distinct social norms of the neighborhood.

Ethnic renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, place, and struggle, by Kathryn E. Wilson: Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 2015

neighborhood outcomes than others. As many community organizers and neighborhood leaders have learned through bitter experience, process is not its own reward. Moreover, by privileging community engagement as the seeming determinant of success or failure of neighborhood revitalization, the authors lose sight of the many other factors that affect neighborhood outcomes. A good example is the sad story of the failed 1990s effort to revitalize Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood (the locale of the Freddy Gray 2015 riots). Both in the Baltimore chapter and in the closing chapter by Stoker, Stone, and Horak, this is repeatedly characterized as a failure of community engagement, the authors neither recognizing nor acknowledging that the project was grounded in fundamentally flawed economic premises, which would most probably have led to its demise whatever the extent of community engagement. This is not to denigrate the importance of community engagement in neighborhood revitalization but to suggest that the lens the contributors use in this book to survey the scene is far too narrow to offer useful perspectives on why neighborhoods and their residents prosper or decline. Though it may seem unfair to criticize a book of political theory for its failure to look more than cursorily at economic issues, the fact is that in the urban polity, economics and politics are inextricably interwoven, and neighborhood and resident outcomes cannot be understood outside an economic context. Though some urban economists can be criticized for being too preoccupied with measurable outcomes and not enough with process, a greater effort by the authors to integrate economic issues into their analysis of neighborhood revitalization policies is likely to have yielded more productive results. In the final analysis, this book, though its case studies contain much intriguing description and valuable insights, fails to be convincing either as a guide to the complex realities of today’s urban polity or as an outline of a meaningful path for neighborhood change.