Robert Warren

The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry

Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government†are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions†and “overlapping jurisdictions.†Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern†and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.†The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework†for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua†is one name for it.

Scale and Monopoly Problems in Urban Government Services

Few issues have been the subject of more sustained concern and intense civic activity in the United States than the proper organization of local government in metropolitan areas. One view, until recently, has dominated the discussions about what should be done. For over a century, civic leaders and many academics have been in the forefront of those urging that the problems of an urban area can best be solved by combining central cities and the surrounding urbanized territory into some form of regional government. This recommendation has been based on the assumption that fragmented governmental structure not only prevents solutions but in itself causes local government problems (for a historical summary, see Govern-

National Urban Policy and the Local State: Paradoxes of Meaning, Action, and Consequences

There has been a failure in the mainstream discussion of national urban policy to recognize that policy ends and means are derived from political choices (not economic laws); that federal policy has been contradictory in rhetoric and effect but consistent in favoring capital over place and people; and that proposed national solutions tend to be top-down and limited, particularly in relation to class and race. To confront these issues, the terms of discourse must be reconstituted to reflect the social, economic, and political value of place and the legitimacy of community-level democratic participation in the local state and control of production.

The Future of the Future in Planning: Appropriating Cyberpunk Visions of the City

Plannings vision of life in the 21st century tends to be more-of-the-same or the adoption, often implicit, of a market-based information society in which telecommunications advances will restructure time and space in ways that are beneficial in the long run. The future of the future, however, deserves more attention in urban planning. Utopian constructs have largely been abandoned and traditional methods of projection and modeling are poor techniques for anticipating qualitative and nonlinear change. An exploration of cyberpunk writings, a genre of science fiction, offers the opportunity to critically examine and assess the hegemonic model of the information society as well as more dystopian pictures of how evolving social, economic, cultural, and technological patterns could combine in the next century. Attending to the urban dimensions of these fictional works and discourses about them can contribute to more realistic and ethical planning scenarios of the future.

Information utilization and self‐evaluating capacities for coastal zone management agencies

Abstract A consensus appears to exist in the nation that greater public control over coastal development is desirable. One result of this has been the development of a need for data and knowledge which will assist in designing coastal management systems. This article attempts to respond to this need in two ways. One is informational, to provide an empirical record of the initial experience of a regional coastal commission in California. The other is to consider the deliberate strategy of building an evaluative capacity into coastal management agencies. An experimental data system proposed as the basis of this evaluative capacity is studied to demonstrate its ability to measure the performance of a commissions organizational structures, decision‐making rules, and administrative procedures.

Local‐regional interaction in the development of coastal land‐use policies: A case study of Metropolitan Los Angeles

Abstract Current efforts to create coastal management systems have emphasized the need to preserve rural and less developed areas. Because of this, too little attention has been given to problems of coastal resource management in large metropolitan regions. This study examines the coastal policies of local governments in the Los Angeles area before and after the passage of the California Coastal Conservation Act of 1972. The Act transferred control over coastal development from the city and county to the regional and state levels. It is argued that the very large socioeconomic and political scale of a metropolitan region requires that local governments have a more direct role in planning and permit‐granting processes than was possible under the 1972 Act. Nevertheless, it is concluded that the elimination of regional agencies and their dual function of focusing discussion and acting on certain aspects of coastal policy—as was done in the California Coastal Act of 1976—may produce yet another set of problem...

Metropolitan Computer Services Infrastructure and Economic Development Capacity in the Information Society

This article focuses on the capacity of metropolitan areas to use information technology, based on the assumption that the combined telecommunications and computer infrastructure relies on the presence of a computer-literate population with computers as much as on phones, fiber optics, microwave, and digital switches. A computer services infrastructure is assumed robust if there is an adequate number of computer workers and sales of computer equipment and software. Neither factor has received much attention in debates about the information highway. We find that computer service workers are intensively metropolitan. Computer employment is concentrated in large metropolitan areas, but the ratio of computer workers per 1,000 employees is higher in middle-sized and smaller metropolitan areas. Computer and software sales are metropolitan, with downward filtering to smaller regions. Large metropolitan regions have advanced computer infrastructures, but middle and lower ranks of the metropolitan hierarchy are demonstrating robust computer infrastructures.

Software jobs go begging, threatening technology boom Computer services employment in U.S. metropolitan areas, 1982 and 1993

The campaign to promote the networking of America underscores the importance of information infrastructures that can support regional competitiveness. One crucial element of a regional information infrastructure is a computer services (CS) industry that supports computer systems, provides backward and forward linkages among all sectors of the economy, serves as engines for economic growth, enhances production efficiency, and encourages innovation. But research on metropolitan CS has been limited, and where CS are analyzed directly, spatial units of analysis vary and CS are rarely disaggregated. This paper situates CS employment within spatial analyses of producer services, outlines infrastructural characteristics, analyzes CS distribution across metropolitan areas in 1982 and 1993, and considers the implications of the findings. The data suggest that while large metropolitan areas are most likely to have a diverse base of specializations in multiple CS types, many smaller metropolitan areas possess CS specializations. We conclude that ranking in the urban CS hierarchy is more likely to be a function of local economic structure than metropolitan population. The uneven dispersion of CS capacity across metropolitan areas potentially has negative ramifications for implementation of national policy and development of underserved regional economies.

Information, Development and the Urban University: Redistributive Power in a Developed Nation

Economic and political underdevelopment are not conditions limited to the Third World. There can be significant differences in the economic resources, political influence and social status among groups and places in advanced industrial countries. The problem is not that these nations lack the economic base, technology, production capacity, social infrastructure, or the collective political power for the development of all segments of society. Rather, regions and subsets of the population in developed nations do not receive the opportunities for economic advancement or participate in making decisions about the type, rate and distribution of development.

Public policy towards optimizing multimodal connectivity with high speed railway stations

Interest in high speed railways (HSRs) is increasing throughout the world and China is becoming a leader in this mode of transportation. The concern of this paper is the functionality of multimodal transportation connectivity services at HSR line stations in terms of passengers served and the development of the areas around the stations. In addition, it discusses possible ways to optimize multimodal transfer systems at HSR stations for the rapidly growing and extensive HSR lines in China. Data concerning stations is utilized from the well-established HSR systems in Japan and France.