Scott A. Bollens

State Growth Management: Intergovernmental Frameworks and Policy Objectives

Abstract This paper contrasts the intergovernmental structures and development goals of state growth programs initiated since 1970 in thirteen states. Many of these state and nonlocal growth management strategies seek to restrict growth having regionally detrimental effects; a growing number seek also to facilitate regionally beneficial growth often opposed by local governments. The evolution of state growth policy has shown a shift from state preemptive regulatory interventions to conjoint and cooperative state-local planning frameworks and the incorporation of growth-accommodating economic policies into programs previously environmentally oriented. Such evolution indicates the maturation of state growth management and the increasing convergence of the diverse policy paths taken by state government.

Urban Planners” Skills and Competencies Are We Different from Other Professions? Does Context Matter? Do We Evolve?

A survey asks 638 planning, planning-related, and nonplanning professionals in Southern California which job skills they value most. The authors want to know whether planners” perceptions of significant skills are different from other professions, whether the context within which planners operate makes a difference, and whether the perceived importance of skills evolves with career experience. They find communication skills to be valued more than technical and quantitative skills across all three groups. However, planners value certain types of communication—report writing and writing for the public—more than planning-related and non-planning professionals. Professional planning con-text matters; public-sector planners value written communication more than private-sector planners. And, planners” valuation of skills changes with length of planning experience, implying an evolutionary model. The authors discuss implications for graduate education and training curricula.

Urban Planning amidst Ethnic Conflict: Jerusalem and Johannesburg

This article investigates the role and influence of urban planning in ameliorating or intensifying deep ethnic conflict. It is based on more than 75 interviews with urban planners and officials in Jerusalem and Johannesburg. Partisan Israeli planners utilise territorial policies that penetrate and diminish Palestinian land control. Post-apartheid urban policy in Johannesburg has pursued both conflict resolution and socioeconomic equity and is seeking to restructure apartheid geography. Both policy strategies are problematic. It is likely that partisan Israeli planning is creating an urban landscape of heightened political contestability and increased Jewish vulnerability. Johannesburgs equity planning is likely to be insufficient as economic forces shape new spatial inequalities. Urban planning must be reconceptualised in polarised cities so that it can contribute meaningfully to the advancement of ethnic peace.

Constituencies for Limitation and Regionalism Approaches to Growth Management

Citizen responses to two successful growth-management referenda on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, are analyzed. A development moratorium and the creation of a regional land-use management agency represented contrasting strategies for managing growth problems; differences in support between the two approaches are examined. Individuals with direct links to the local economy provided the least support for a moratorium. Regionalism was supported by individuals with strong provincial attitudes because they were aware of the extra local impacts of development and anticipated tangible benefits from regional land-use planning. A two-tier approach was supported by a majority of the respondents, but generally, regionalism was given greater support than was the moratorium.

Restructuring Land Use Governance

Current restructuring of multi-tier (state, regional, local) land use governance in the United States invites discussion and reexamination of the origins, diversity, and effects of intergovernmental planning. This article surveysfour major aspects of the literature on land use governance reform: the rationales and political motivations underlying reform attempts since the 1960s, citizen support and constituencies for changes in land use governance, the institutional forms and techniques of restructured land use control, and the procedural outputs and development outcomes of multi-tier growth management. These studies and evaluations help to illuminate both the potential benefits and the possible conflicts of current state-level reform.

Urban Planning and Intergroup Conflict: Confronting a Fractured Public Interest

Abstract Cities across the world are confronted by a growing ethnic and racial diversity that challenges the traditional model of urban planning intervention focused on individual, not group, differences. This article examines urban planning in three ethnically polarized settings—Belfast, Jerusalem, and Jo-hannesburg—to ascertain how planners treat complex and emotional issues of ethnic identity and group-based claims. Four models of planning intervention—neutral, partisan, equity, and resolver—are examined through interviews with over 100 planners and policy officials. The article outlines the significant implications of these cases in terms of the limitations and potential contributions of American urban planning to effectively accommodate ethnic and cultural differences.

In Through the Back Door: Social Equity and Regional Governance

Abstract A leading impulse for new regionalism in the 1990s was the sense that suburban and central cities are economically interdependent and should work cooperatively toward common regional welfare in the face of globalized competition. If this is so, we should witness an emergence of regional policies that combat concentrated poverty, segregation, and place‐based inequalities that impose significant economic costs. This article assesses the extent and types of metropolitan equity efforts under new regionalism, the pathways through which they arise, and their prospects. Research finds that equity‐based regional policies are increasing; they take diverse forms and are commonly shaped by state or federal programs, but they are not explicit and primary parts of regional agendas. While regional entities have not advanced explicit discussions about equity, a confluence of intergovernmental programs and quality of life issues has added regional equity to the portfolio of metropolitan goals.

Municipal Decline and Inequality in American Suburban Rings, 1960–1980

BOLLENS S. A. (1988) Municipal decline and inequality in American suburban rings, 1960–1980, Reg. Studies 22, 277–285. The incidence of income-troubled suburbs in the United States has remained steady over the last two decades, with approximately one of seven suburban cities having lower median family income levels than the central city benchmark. Low suburban income levels are not simply due to spillover of low income residents from the central city, but also are a function of the filtering down of relatively older housing stock in outer fringe suburban municipalities. The Burgess model is inconsistent with the pattern of suburban income levels nationally, but the model has utility as a predictor of income level change. Income troubled suburbs in the outer fringe areas of older metropolitan areas are not significantly improving in status as selective suburbanization of high income residents bypasses these cities of industrial and minority concentrations. BOLLENS S. A. (1988) Le dceclin des municipalites ...

Urban Policy in Ethnically Polarized Societies

This article explores the role of public policy in contested cities and the effects urban strategies have on the magnitude and manifestations of ethnonational conflict. It is based on interviews in the polarized cities of Jerusalem, Belfast, and Johannesburg conducted in 1994 and 1995. An integrative analytic approach combining the perspectives of political science, urban planning, geography, and social psychology is utilized. The article explores the proposition that a city is a prism, not a mirror, through which conflict is ameliorated or intensified. A city introduces a set of characteristics—proximate ethnic neighborhoods, territoriality, economic interdependency, symbolism, and centrality—that can bend or distort the relationship between ideological disputes and the manifestations of ethnic conflict. Findings indicate that dialectics, contradictions, and unforeseen consequences are produced when nationalism intersects with an urban system. Israeli policy-making in Jerusalem paradoxically produces spatial conditions of urban and regional instability antithetical to Israels goal of political control. British policy-making in Belfast may achieve short-term abstinence from violence, but it is insufficient in a city of obstructive ethnic territoriality and differential Protestant-Catholic needs. In apartheid Johannesburg, implementation of racist ideology exposed the faultlines and limits of ordering urban space. Now, policy-makers seek to address distressing levels of unmet human needs amidst market-based “normalization” processes that threaten to reinforce apartheids racial geography.

Evaluating the effects of local floodplain management policies on property owner behavior

Floodplain management programs have been adopted by more than 85% of local governments in the nation with designated flood hazard areas. Yet, there has been little evaluation of the influence of floodplain policies on private sector decisions. This article examines the degree to which riverine floodplain management affects purchase and mitigation decisions made by owners of developed floodplain property in ten selected cities in the United States. We find that the stringency of such policies does not lessen floodplain property buying because of the overriding importance of site amenity factors. Indeed, flood protection measures incorporated into development projects appear to add to the attractiveness of floodplain location by increasing the perceived safety from the hazard. Property owner responses to the flood hazard after occupancy involve political action more often than individual on-site mitigation. Floodplain programs only minimally encourage on-site mitigation by the owner because most owners have not experienced a flood and many are unaware of the flood threat. It is suggested that floodplain programs will be more effective in meeting their objectives if they are directed at intervention points earlier in the land conversion process.