Robert A. Beauregard

Representing Urban Decline: Postwar Cities as Narrative Objects

Throughout the postwar period, urban theorists and popular commentators in the United States developed a perspective on older industrial cities that emphasized their decline. Almost any student of U.S. urbanization now can easily recount the historical events that explain why these cities became less and less desirable to households and businesses. Such explanations, though, frequently lack a consideration of the instability of the language of urban decline and the narratives through which interpretations of decline are conveyed. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the disorderly nature of the concept of urban decline through a presentation and analysis of various narrative frameworks in which it is commonly presented.

Tenacious Inequalities Politics and Race in Philadelphia

Inequalities of race and class in American society persist despite numerous redistributive policies instituted by the government. A proposal to attack racial disadvantages at the local level—a hiring preference ordinance—is used to explore how the material manifestations of race and class, local political activity, and the structural requirements of local government subverted its adoption. The cleavages of class and race eroded widespread political support for the proposal and weakened its potential for effective implementation; the demands on the local government undermined the mayors relationship with the city council and divided minority elected officials from their grass-roots constituencies. The setting is Philadelphia in the 1980s.

Book Review: New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood

For the last few years, Neil Brenner has been elaborating a very simple observation: as governance regimes change, and they do so constantly, they renegotiate the geographical scales at which they operate. National, provincial, and municipal boundaries might remain legally fixed, but regulatory policy, intergovernmental relations, military intelligence, and tax policy, of the many other aspects of state behavior, reconstitute the meanings of territorial divisions. Two complaints launch Brenner’s argument. The first is the use of globalization to erase national boundaries and bolster the claim that nation-states have atrophied. The second is the conceptual encapsulation of social relations within tightly bound territorial containers, relegation of the state to the national scale, and neglect or undertheorization of the spatiality of state activity. This he labels state centrism. The greater permeability of national boundaries does not mean the “end” of the nation-state. Nation-states are simply changing the spatial scales at which they operate, a transformation that state-centric perspectives are unable to accommodate. Brenner argues that states are increasingly multiscalar, polycentric (that is, made up of multiple power centers), and nonisomorphic (that is, free to transcend their borders). Operating structurally, strategically, and spatially and incessantly rescaling, rebordering, and reterritorializing, states continually reorganize their institutions and intervene in socioeconomic processes. These activities, though, are only provisional solutions to a shifting landscape of opportunities and threats. Particularly unsettling are capitalist regimes of accumulation that are ever susceptible to internal contradictions. Yet, state actions are path dependent, thereby leading to a sedimentation of policies, structures, and practices. Fixity returns. Brenner moves to the mesolevel, and to uneven spatial development, where he can explore empirically the historically specific dimensions of these processes. His empirical argument contrasts the spatial Keynesianism of the Western European states that ruled from the end of World War II to the early 1970s with the post-Keynesian competitive states that followed. In the earlier period, state projects were centralized at the national scale and substate structures were administered by the central

Resident Hiring Preference Ordinances: A Comparative Analysis

Not all economic development tactics work in every city. The success of resident hiring preference ordinances, for example, depends upon a variety of factors. These conclusions emerge from a comparative, policy analysis of three cities in the United States—Boston; Camden, New Jersey; and Chicago—that have developed resident hiring preference ordinances, and another large city—Philadelphia—that has it under consideration. The ordinance attempts to increase local employment, reduce unemployment, and overcome job discrimination through hiring goals for residents, minorities, and, in some cases, women on governmentally aided construction projects. The theoretical rationale for such ordinances, the political background to their consideration and adoption, the ordinances design, and the consequences that ensue in both the local labor market and the courts are analyzed.