The Political Culture Of Planning

Provides a succinct account of the American system of land use planning from both an historical and contemporary perspective. Written for two distinct readerships, this provides a general overview and also the opportunity for more in-depth study.

The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy brings together a range of international experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities for building effective cultural policy coalitions. The volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the political process of urban cultural policy and urban development studies around the world. It will be of interest to students and researchers interested in urban planning, urban studies and cultural studies.

The essays in this collection cover the practical and theoretical issues that surround integrating considerations of diversity in all its forms and guises into planning practice and theory.

This book focuses on transformations of political culture from times past to future-present. It defines the meaning of political culture and explores the cultural values and institutions of kinship communities and dynastic intermediaries, including chiefdoms and early states. It systematically examines the rise and gradual universalization of modern sovereign nation-states. Contemporary debates concerning nationality, nationalism, citizenship, and hyphenated identities are engaged. The authors recount the making of political culture in the American nation-state and look at the processes of internal colonialism in the American experience, examining how major ethnic, sectarian, racial, and other distinctions arose and congealed into social and cultural categories. The book concludes with a study of the Holocaust, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the political cultures of violation in post-colonial Rwanda and in racialized ethno-political conflicts in various parts of the world. Struggles over legitimacy in nation-building and state-building are at the heart of this new take on the important role of political culture.

American cities experienced an extraordinary surge in downtown development during the 1970s and 1980s. Pro-growth advocates in urban government and the business community believed that the construction of office buildings, hotels, convention centers, and sports complexes would generate jobs and tax revenue while revitalizing stagnant local economies. But neighborhood groups soon became disgruntled with the unanticipated costs and unfulfilled promises of rapid expansion, and grassroots opposition erupted in cities throughout the United States. Through an insightful comparison of effective protest in San Francisco and ineffective protest in Washington, D.C., Stephen McGovern examines how citizens -- even those lacking financial resources -- have sought to control their own urban environments. McGovern interviews nearly one hundred business activists, government officials, and business leaders, exploring the influence of political culture and individual citizens' perceptions of a particular development issue. McGovern offers a compelling explanation of why some battles against city hall succeed while so many others fail.

The idea of `economic planning' was a central theme of the radical economic policy debate in the 1930s. Born of the inter-war economic crisis, the call for the reconstruction of the economy according to a `plan' of one kind or another spanned practically the entire spectrum of the politics ofthe day. The fashion for planning is often seen as the seedbed of the Keynesian revolution and the `Butskellite' consensus of thenext decade. Yet `planning' was neither uniformly Keynesian nor, in fact, indicative of political agreement over economic policy. Beneath the shared language ofplanning, the radical economic debate was riven by the same ideological rifts which dominated the more conventional political scene. Dr Ritschel traces the many interpretations of planning, and examines the process of ideological construction and dissemination of the new economic ideas. He finisheswith an explanation of the planners' retreat, late in the decade, from the divisive economics of planning towards the less ambitious but also far less contentious alternative - the `middle way' of Keynesian economics.

"In 'The Ashley Cooper Plan', Thomas Wilson connects Anthony Ashley Cooper (the First Earl of Shaftesbury) and John Locke's seventeenth-century vision of well-ordered society to the design of cities in the Province of Carolina to current debates about the relationship about climate change, sustainable development, urbanity, and the place of expertise in general. This important work focuses on the ways in which political culture, ideology, and governing structures have shaped political acts and public policy and illuminates one of the fundamental paradoxes of American history: although the Ashley Cooper Plan was a model of rational planning, its utopian qualities were soon undermined by the lure of profits to be had from slaveholding. Wilson argues that the "Gothic" framework of the Carolina "Fundamental Constitutions" was stripped of its original imperative of class reciprocity in the transition to slavery, which reverberates in American politics to this day"--