Urban Managerialism

Urban managerialism originally was conceived as an analytical framework to consider the role of urban managers in the sociospatial processes of capitalist urbanization. It has also been used to denote a period in urban governance (usually seen as the 1970s and early 1980s) when the focus of urban governments was seen to be concerned predominantly with the provision of services or collective consumption. This entry focuses on the first of these meanings.

Urban managerialism emerged from housing research conducted in urban sociology in the United Kingdom. It rapidly became the focus of broader theoretical and empirical discussions in urban geography and urban studies. The term originally coalesced in the writings of British urban sociologist Ray Pahl. In distributional analyses of access to scarce urban resources and facilities, Pahl isolated the role of what he termed urban managers in both the public and private sectors. In this earliest formulation, the scarce resources and facilities often were in the housing sector with urban managers—or gatekeepers, as they sometimes were called—directly concerned with the development, marketing, management, and financing of both the rental and ownership sectors of the market. In Pahl's formulation, inequality in this consumption sector also influenced the life chances of individuals and groups who already were subjected to inequality in the production sector. It directly reflected a Weberian-style analysis of this particular facet of society. The focus on urban managers involved careful consideration of their individual value systems, the role of political and class ideology, and other facets of both individuals and organizations.

Research driven by the ideas of urban managerialism made its mark on research in urban geography during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A key facet in the evolution of urban managerialist ideas in urban geography, and for that matter in urban sociology itself, was the tension between so-called managerial autonomy in these distributional processes and the overarching power of broader political and economic structures. To be fair, this tension had been highlighted from the very inception of the managerialist thesis and had drawn critical words from the likes of David Harvey and Manuel Castells. One can detect all of the elements of the so-called structure–agency debates in such tension. Pahl himself had struggled with this broader tension and with more focused critiques that questioned which managers were worthy of study and for what reasons. In fact, he had reformulated his original thesis to move away from a direct causal role for managers. For many, these adaptations further weakened or marginalized the relevance of the urban managerialist thesis.

In urban geography, however, further attention was given to ways in which the core ideas of urban managerialism and other facets of organizational analysis could be explored to meet the structure–agency contradiction head-on and hence to synthesize the insights of urban political economy with institutional analyses. Key contributors to this resuscitated urban managerialism were Peter Williams and (later) David Wilson. In this milieu, Wilson and others explored the meaning of human agency in specific organizational contexts as they were created and re-created. Wilson's empirical work, which examined both urban revitalization and the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant program, revealed the potential of an examination of the constrained decisions of urban managers in the evolving processes of urbanization. Crucial to Wilson's analyses of the decision-making processes of managers, and their impact, was the recognition that although specific historic and material circumstances (including broader political and economic changes as well as programmatic structures and local conditions) constrain the behavior of “managers,” they do not determine them. In this decision-making space, the applicability of some of the original tenets of the managerialist thesis reemerged[Page 523] with a focus on the active and creative behavior of individuals. This analysis, however, was not restricted to distributional aspects of housing and other resources; rather, it was also applied to urban revitalization and commercial redevelopment.

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