Summary
Contents
Subject index
Urban regime theory has gained a dominant position in the literature on local politics in the United States and its use in comparative cross-national research despite its cited shortcomings. In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory, editor Mickey Lauria presents a challenging argument for the need to reconceptualize urban regime's middle-level abstraction by interpreting it through the lens of the higher-level abstraction of regulationist theory. The noted contributors to this volume propose stronger conceptual linkages between local agents and institutions, regime transformation, and the restructuring of urban space. The blend of empirical and case-study chapters provide an excellent mix of theory and practice that makes Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory well suited to a broad spectrum of upper-level undergraduate courses covering urban studies, political science, sociology, and geography as well as a rich resource for academics and researchers in these fields.
Introduction: Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory
Introduction: Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory
Urban regime theory appears to have gained the dominant position in the literature on local politics precisely because it dispenses with the stalled debates between elite hegemony and pluralist interest group politics, between economic determinism and political machination and between external or structural determinants and local or social construction. Rather, urban regime theory provides a robust conceptual framework that views these as false dualisms and, alternatively, as theoretically driven historical or empirical questions. Urban growth coalitions are viewed as only one of the political coalitions that may arise in cities and need to be hegemonic for an extended period to be considered a corporate controlled regime. At the same time, entrepreneurialism is viewed as only one ...
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