HISTORY,INSTITUTIONS, AND CITIES: A VIEW FROM THE AMERICAS*

ABSTRACT Every nation, formally or informally, defines and establishes the lines of political and fiscal authority among its national, regional, and local governments. Historically, centralized governments tend to restrict the power and autonomy of provincial and local governments. In this paper, we exploit the quasi‐experimental distribution of political institutions in the Americas caused by variation in European colonial experience to examine the impact of institutions on urban and local development, specifically on the degree of urban primacy, the size distribution of cities, the number and density of local government units, and the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. We argue that centralization of political power at the national level, as experienced in many countries in Latin America, contributes to urban primacy and a size distribution of cities favoring large cities. Additionally, even in more politically decentralized countries such as Canada and the U.S., variance in political centralization at the provincial (state) level over local governments led to significant divergences in urban primacy, the distribution of city sizes, as well as the form, number, and density of local governments. While we cannot rule out the importance of other factors, our findings suggest that political centralization affects spatial economic development.     

“借口”:中国城市资本高度集聚的政治经济学分析框架

面对改革开放以来中国快速城市化现象,本文从中国投资拉动的经济增长模式出发,发现中国城市存在着高度积累,特别是行政级别高的城市持续投资增长的现象,在分析投资、投资效率与大型事件关系的基础上,提出了官员晋升竞标赛和财政分权预算约束条件下的制度机会主义行为假设,认为大型事件不过是政府构建的一个有利于在城市体系下,通过打破传统的政府预算约束,实现资本高度集中促进经济持续增长的制度机会主义行为。"借口"模式旨在揭示大型事件现象背后的政治与经济激励,并以2010年广州举办亚运会为例,按政府构建—突破约束—官员晋升的结构,分析了广州市政府构建全社会共识,举办亚运会带来巨额投资促进城市发展实现政治与经济激励的事实,为"借口"模式提供了实证的案例。最后,对"借口"模式的未来趋势进行了探讨。     

试论营销型城市增长策略及其效应反思——基于城市增长机器理论的分析

面对全球化所营造的激烈竞争环境,1990年代以来西方城市治理发生了重大转型,普遍从福利型政府向企业型政府转向,大力实施了营销型城市增长策略。在国内、国际环境转变的双重压力下,以土地储备为重点的城市经营和以大事件为载体的城市营销正被中国诸多城市政府所积极采用,因而城市治理表现出显著的企业化倾向。在实施营销型城市增长策略的过程中,官商利益联盟共同推进了城市的增长,并各自产生了明显的利益寻租行为。文章基于制度经济学的分析方法,透过城市增长机器理论的视角,剖析了营销型城市增长策略的形成机制和利益格局,并以南京市土地储备和奥体新城建设的案例,揭示了其所导致的经济、社会与空间负效应。文章认为,城市内生竞争力的提高必须摈弃营销型增长策略的功利模式,推进城市政府从单一目标的"增长型政府"向综合目标的"发展型政府"的转变。     

Policy of Delay: Evidence from a Bayesian Analysis of Metropolitan Land‐Use Choices

Do local policymakers strategically use delay in permitting development to forestall the growth machine? The mantras of smart growth and sustainable development assume local governments can balance the competing values of economic development, ecology, and equity interests in a community. We employ a political market framework to explain differences in local government land use decisions. This framework conceptualizes policy choices as resulting from the interplay between the aggregate policy demand by residents, developers, and environmental interests and the aggregate supply by government authorities. Delays can be imposed strategically through processes of development approval by city governments where industry strength and form of government vary within county‐level service‐delivery fragmentation. We utilize novel Bayesian multilevel modelling of data collected from 2007 and 2015 surveys of Florida city planners and find strong institutional effects and multilevel relationships.     

中国收缩城市土地利用效率及其影响因素研究

依据人口统计数据与NPP-VIIR夜间灯光影像识别出2013-2017年中国收缩城市,运用超效率SBM模型测算收缩城市土地利用效率,并构建Tobit模型分析其影响因素.结果发现:①2013-2017年,收缩城市土地利用效率均值降低了1.44％,且各年份均低于增长城市与全部城市.实现土地有效利用的收缩城市占比较小,大多数...     

GOVERNMENT QUALITY AND THE ECONOMIC RETURNS OF TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT IN EUROPEAN REGIONS

Transport infrastructure investment is a cornerstone of growth‐promoting strategies. However, the link between infrastructure investment and economic performance remains unclear. This may be a consequence of overlooking the role of government institutions. This paper assesses the connection between regional quality of government and the returns of different types of road infrastructure in the regions of the European Union. The results unveil the influence of regional quality of government on the economic returns of transport infrastructure. In weak institutional contexts, investment in motorways—the preferred option by governments—yields significantly lower returns than the more humble secondary road. Government institutions also affect the returns of transport maintenance investment.     

企业主义视角下大城市保障房建设的策略选择及其社会空间后果

城市企业主义是理解地方政府行为与城市空间变迁的重要政治经济视角,在中国推进经济全球化和住房市场化的背景下,企业化的地方政府,特别是大城市政府,在保障房的建设实践中往往采取偏向性的策略选择。本文着重讨论企业主义视角下大城市政府保障房建设的策略选择及其社会空间后果。研究发现,大城市政府主要通过实施保障房政策的异化和保障房住区的边远化策略,来履行其住房保障职责。然而,这种选择性策略带来的直接的社会空间后果是低收入群体的边缘化,具体表现为外来务工人员等在保障政策上的边缘化,以及保障房居民在社会空间上的边缘化。文章进一步指出,保障房应回归其保障本位,以满足低收入群体的真实需求。     

经济学视野下的中国城市空间扩展

城市空间扩展是城市经济学和城市地理学研究领域的重要课题。改革开放之后,随着经济的快速发展和城市化进程的推进,中国城市的空间范围也迅速扩展。近年来关于中国城市空间对外扩展的研究成果日益增多,但现有的实证分析和理论模型,并没有揭示中国城市空间快速扩展的独特因素及其根本动力,特别是忽略了地方政府在其中发挥的关键性作用。本文以城市经济学相关理论模型为基础,结合中国体制背景,构建一个以地方政府为核心的城市经济模型,并运用该模型对中国城市空间扩展及其相关问题进行分析,认为地方政府在中国农地非农化及其土地开发中发挥决定性的作用,现实农业土地租金较低推动了城市空间的额外扩展,外部性收益使得地方政府零地价出让土地仍然有利可图,诸如铁路及其站点建设等外部条件冲击推动城市以蛙跳(飞地)方式对外扩展。     

URBAN NETWORKS AND GOVERNANCE IN CITY‐REGION PLANNING: STATE‐LED REGION BUILDING IN NANJING CITY‐REGION,CHINA

During the transition towards a more market‐oriented economy and entrepreneurial governance, local authorities have attempted to create new cross‐jurisdiction regional entities to enhance their competitiveness through making city‐region plans or regional strategic plans in China. This article analyses the process of region building in China through a case study of Nanjing city‐region. We argue that region building is a state‐led regional project in China, not a spontaneous process. City‐region planning has played a legitimacy‐seeking role in the construction of new regions. Based on the discourse provided by the city‐region plan, associated city networks are being created as a mechanism for plan implementation and regional coordination. This signals that regional planning is entering the stage of regional institution building. By assessing the capacity of regional institutions, we argue that the newly‐emerged regional institutions or urban networks have facilitated regionalization in terms of the increasing involvement of non‐state actors, the formation of regional coherence and identity and the enhanced inter‐city co‐operation. However, it is still difficult to establish effective regional governance due to competing local governments, the arbitrary political leadership and the fragmented planning functions.     

Unpacking administrative rank: Intercity competition and the remaking of local state space in China

The literature on interurban competition emphasizes that market rules as an external coercive power dominate local state space conductive to economic growth. Is there another external coercive power, other than the market as a hidden hand, to promote and mitigate interurban competition? Addressing this question, this paper specifies that the Chinese state's political efforts to downplay the role of the market in, and remake the rule of, interurban competition could have far reaching implications for urban political economy. The two cases are Ruili and Wanding, two border cities located on the edge of China's southwestern borderland adjacent to Myanmar. While reranking is supposed to balance out the inefficiencies of market principles in interurban competition, multiple rounds of reranking in Ruili and Wanding in the past seven decades indicate that this political orchestration can accelerate interurban competition into a cutthroat game for economic growth and thus create problems for macro economic management. Nevertheless, it can become a political tool to revamp the game by strategically selecting some cities as nodes of development at the sacrifice of urban fortunes of other cities. In this process, market rules operate in parallel with, and sometimes succumb to, the principle of political order from above. This finding expands the geographies of the state: the co-constitution of the local and the national becomes necessary and pragmatic since interurban competition is not a territorially-conditioned endeavor, but remains open to extralocal stakeholders—upper-level governments in this case—who can remake local state space.     

INEQUALITY IN CITIES*

ABSTRACT Much of the inequality literature has focused on national inequality, but local inequality is also important. Crime rates are higher in more unequal cities; people in unequal cities are more likely to say that they are unhappy. There is a negative association between local inequality and the growth of city‐level income and population, once we control for the initial distribution of skills. High levels of mobility across cities mean that city‐level inequality should not be studied with the same analytical tools used to understand national inequality, and policy approaches need to reflect the urban context. Urban inequality reflects the choices of more and less skilled people to live together in particular areas. City‐level skill inequality can explain about one‐third of the variation in city‐level income inequality, while skill inequality is itself explained by historical schooling patterns and immigration. Local income also reflects the substantial differences in the returns to skill across, which are related to local industrial patterns.     

Leveraging city officials’ professional and social Identities to facilitate affordable housing

Housing affordability is an acute problem in many developed economies. It is rooted, inter alia, in a conflict of interests across levels of government. Policies that seek to increase the supply of housing and lower their purchase price are popular among the general electorate, yet local governments deploy urban planning regulations to restrict densification and development of affordable housing within their jurisdictions. Moves to address this conflict would benefit from unpacking city officials' policy preferences and their variation. This paper compares the positions of local-government politicians vs. those of unelected bureaucrats in Israeli cities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our findings confirm the conflicts of interest between levels of government even within Israel's unitary, centralized context. However, we show that career bureaucrats, given their relative freedom from electoral pressures and commitment to professional values, are more amenable to citizens' and central government's shared interest in densification and affordable housing. We also highlight city officials' place of residence—within vs. outside the city—and their social identification with citizens and residents as antecedents of their urban-planning preferences. We draw on these findings to delineate directions for more effective central–local government collaboration in seeking affordable housing solutions.     

乌鲁木齐都市圈整合及其发展趋势研究

都市圈整合是在新形势下加强区域合作与协调,发挥都市圈整体竞争力的有效途径。随着西部大开发的深入,有效整合乌鲁木齐都市圈对新疆和西部地区经济的发展也是至关重要的。文章通过对乌鲁木齐都市圈整合的必要性的分析,提出了通过观念、产业、行政区划等具体整合措施,消除都市圈目前发展中的主要障碍,更好的促进乌鲁木齐都市圈的发展。文章的最后,结合现实状况指出了乌鲁木齐和昌吉将率先实现一体化发展,经济区将逐步形成以及圈内基础设施将日益完善等主要发展趋势。     

CITIES AND DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT This paper starts with a “primer” on what we know about the conceptual and empirical links between development and urbanization. While historical experience of developed countries is reviewed, today's rapid urbanization in developing countries offers an intense set of challenges. Rapid urbanization requires massive population movements and enormous local and inter‐city infrastructure investments in a modern context of heavy government interventions in economies. This context raises under‐researched issues, discussed in the second part of the paper. First concerns the spatial form of development. How much development should be focused in mega‐cities, or huge urban clusters, as opposed to being more spatially dispersed, a critical question facing China and India today? How do we conceptualize and measure both the benefits and costs of increased urban concentration; and how are they linked to a country's evolving national industrial composition? Second, what is the evolution of spatial income inequality under massive rural‐urban migration? Is inequality heightened today relative to the past by national government policies which “favor” certain cities and regions and by local government policies in those cities that may try to deflect migrants by offering them poor living conditions?     

Popular Economies In,Against, and Through the Platform

Behind the conjunctural growth of popular economies in Brazilian cities lies a set of entangled disputes over urban density with important political consequences. While popular economic agents are repressed by local governments, informal work hired through digital platforms grows exponentially and engenders new precarious forms of assembling labour relations in, and extracting value from, global South cities. The contrasts and indirect relations between digital platforms and popular economic agents are important in understanding the growth of platforms, which hinges on accessing low-wage workers whose attempts to make an independent living are otherwise prohibited. This dynamic has resulted in the political mobilisation of popular economy agents and their alliances with urban social movements. Through this paper, I examine how their networking and particular disputes for a right to the city hold potential for the emergence of other economies.     

Public works and municipal government in two Italian capital cities: Comparing technical bureaucracies in Turin and Rome, 1848-88

The article draws a comparison between nineteenth-century Turin and Rome, linking the growth of technical bureaucracies in the municipal institutions of both cities to the local struggles for control over urban space. In both post-1848 Turin and post-1870 Rome, the implementation of new institutional reforms offered local city councils an opportunity to gain more power and autonomy than they had enjoyed in the recent past. The organization and the role of municipal technical services were therefore affected, with quite opposite results, by the conflicts opened with the state about the redefinition of the province of local government     

Equitable Approaches to Local Economic Development

Central city economic development during the 1980s and 1990s resounded with the theme of "public-private partnerships" putting together new downtown hotels, sports stadiums, and festival marketplaces. Yet, as city after city proclaimed its "renaissance" and "rebirth," poverty and unemployment increased in many of the same cities. Economic disparities also increased between central cities and their suburbs. These contrasting patterns of growth and decline were often reflected in local economic development struggles over downtown versus neighborhoods, economic development as job generation versus real estate development, and the rich and powerful versus the poor and marginalized. In some cities, these concerns often were articulated by African-American, Latino, and blue-collar communities and their activist supporters. They led to new development strategies designed to balance more equitably the costs and benefits of local economic development. The new strategies included opening government to previously excluded constituencies, linking downtown development to neighborhood development managed by community development corporations, and balancing development across economic sectors. This article reviews efforts in several cities to implement redistributive urban planning and local economic development policies. It concludes with three possibilities for improving broader equity outcomes in future local economic development.     

Understanding Spatial Differentiation in Urban Decline Levels

The economic and demographic changes currently manifest in many Western cities—referred to as urban decline or urban shrinkage—are receiving increased attention in public and academic debates. Although the general processes driving these changes have been identified, such processes cannot explain why regions and cities which have been exposed to similar processes still differ in their economic and demographic developments. This Western European and US-based literature review attempts to answer the question of how this interregional and intraregional variation in levels of economic and demographic decline can be understood. It is argued that the degree to which wider societal forces (such as deindustrialization, changes in international and domestic migration and changing fertility levels) impact on a particular area depends on how these forces are filtered, first, through the institutional and, second, the spatial context that the region or city is located in. To understand the differences between the cities within one region (being part of the same institutional and spatial contexts), we need to descend to the city level and take account of the local (dis)amenities, comprising its physical, social and economic assets, and the influence of (the place characteristics of) other cities in the vicinity and the socio-political framework.     

城市发展战略规划:透视激烈竞争环境中的地方政府管治

经济全球化和市场化给中国城市的发展营造了一个激烈竞争的环境,地方政府的企业化倾向更加明显,并对外界环境变化做出了种种反应。发展战略规划就是地方政府力图突破传统城市规划的制约,以增强城市竞争力为目标、强化地方发展利益的一种新城市管治方式。章通过城市发展战略规划的研究,分析了其作用以及地方政府在其中的主导角色,透视了在中国经济社会转型期地方政府管治的变化。     

城市企业主义视角下的中国城市增长机制研究

我国城市发展自本世纪以来呈现出加快发展的趋势。然而,这一进程尚不均衡和协调。本文通过城市企业主义这一视角,分析中国城市实现空间与经济迅速增长的机制及其所面临的问题。文章首先考察了2001-2009年间的公共财政结构,揭示出中国地方政府治理模式,并对其背后的制度原因进行了分析,以体现出城市企业主义是如何受到高度集中的行政考评体系和分税制这一转型期财政体制的影响。文章接着对地方政府为实现其城市企业主义战略而采用的土地驱动型发展模式进行了研究,最后提出了中国城市发展亟待转型的呼吁。