City Government

City governments are central and powerful institutions and actors across urban areas in the United States. They are the core administrative unit for more than 174 million people in America (76 million of whom live in cities with populations of at least 100,000 people). These 76 million[Page 40] people make up 62% of the country's population. States specify the administrative nature of city governments in America, with four forms of governance dominating: the mayor–council, council–manager, commission, and town meeting mechanisms. Each outlines proper procedures for cities to solicit citizen input into the constituting of programs and rules for local administrating. The five largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia—have mayor–council institutional arrangements.

Models to understand the operation of city government now increasingly depart from the “benevolent– passive” perspective. One prominent model is the Marxist–instrumentalist one. Here city governments are apparatuses to serve the interests of local economic and political elites. Such elites—amalgams of prominent builders, developers, realtors, speculators, utility companies, banks, and so on—push to drive profit accumulation via city growth that also enhances tax ratables for cities. But the accumulation process, ripe with conflicts and contradictions, requires the use of city governments (“the local state”) to adjudicate these dilemmas on behalf of these elites. Local governments, situating themselves in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, ultimately toil with this one constituency favored.

City governments are also widely understood through a Weberian–bureaucratic perspective. Here city governments historically have operated to help assist local urban elites but increasingly move away from this to advance their own interests and ambitions. It is contended that a critical moment is reached when city governments get sufficiently large and powerful to shift their “logic of operations” to benefit themselves. This shift means that they increasingly strike out (offer new programs, policies, regulatory procedures, etc.) to advance their sphere of power and influence as dominant social, political, and economic institutions that desire bolstering. Similar to the Marxist–instrumentalist perspective, this drive is performed under the cover of benevolent and constituent-neutral rhetoric.

City governments are widely seen to have changed their operations with the 1980s rise of the “neoliberal era” (beginning with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980). This new era, characterized by a deepened emphasis on private markets to determine social welfare and a reduced welfare state orientation, affects and is affected by local governments. Since 1980, local governments have more fervently privileged private markets to determine patterns of land use, amounts and types of subsidies allocated, and recipients of government largesse. In this context, the private sector (businesses and corporations) is widely identified as the positive engine of change in cities, the group that can progressively restructure cities socially and spatially. The result has been that people have needed to rely more thoroughly on private resources to live, travel to work, and physically upgrade homes and neighborhoods after public services, public funds, and access to public decision making have been slashed. City governments across America, it follows, are propelled by this neoliberal thrust that is simultaneously a vision of progressive politics, a policy experiment, and a new reality of landscape change.

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