What is driving the resurgence of centralization? Lessons from Bermuda’s effort to abolish municipal elections
Debates over decentralization date back to at least antiquity and remain some of the most contentious in urban politics. While a consensus favoring greater decentralization appeared to emerge in the late 20th century, centralizing tendencies are again on the rise. This has been observed in many contexts in both the Global North and South (Aksztejn et al. 2024), including in my home province of British Columbia, Canada. In BC, questions regarding how to effectively respond to a worsening housing crisis have led provincial officials to override municipal authorities around issues of zoning and land use. But the resurgence of centralization is perhaps most notably evidenced in Bermuda, where recent efforts have been made to entirely abolish municipal elected representation. Those efforts are the focus of my recent paper in Urban Affairs Review.
Invisible Armor: How Violence Affects Self-Censoring Behavior in Local Office in the United States
Like most current U.S. officeholders, mayors experience significant amounts of violence, both psychological and physical, and violent episodes are growing. From the most extreme examples, including the June 2025 murder of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her spouse to daily occurrences of psychological attacks such as harassment, many officeholders face some types of violence regularly. As well, conflict in local politics is on the rise and is especially intense when substantively engaging with racialized and gendered issues. Women, in particular, tend to experience more violence and more violence that is sexualized and identity-based than men in office.
More than enclaves: Rethinking the administrative logic of Chinese development zones
Development zones (kaifaqu), or bounded spaces with special economic policy privileges and streamlined administrative arrangements, have figured centrally in China’s urban and economic transformation over the past five decades. The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and dozens of smaller state-authorized development and trade zones led the way in economic reform and opening during the 1980s. The Pudong New Area and its imitators across the country piloted new models of land- and infrastructure-driven urbanization after the 1990s. High and New Technology Development Zones (HTDZs) and strategic industrial clusters established across major cities have played a starring role in China’s accelerating 21st century push for industrial upgrading and technological innovation. Development zones are where national policy visions such as Made in China 2025 have been translated into on-the-ground action.
Immigrants in Crisis
By Mara Sidney, UAR Co-Editor
Many immigrants and asylum seekers, authorized and unauthorized, currently experience acute dimensions of urban crisis in the U.S. and around the world. In the United States under the second Trump administration, enforcement of national policies by federal immigration and border control agencies has rapidly intensified, resulting in large-scale detention and deportation actions that often repress or infringe upon immigrants’ civil and human rights. These actions, frequently targeted at specific cities (e.g., sanctuary cities, Democratic party-led cities, among others), have sparked protests from advocates and social movement organizations, capturing international attention. Increasingly, U.S. citizens engaging in advocacy have met arrest and even violence. Yet local resistance to national policies governing immigration and asylum seeking is not new, in the U.S. or elsewhere. Because so many immigrants live in metropolitan areas, cities often are, and have been, at the center of the contention.
A failed land development project and its implications for urban governance in China
China’s urban development has been driven by local governments’ land-centered operations. Since land is the most valuable resource under local control, land development has been the central mechanism of China’s urban development model. Local governments, like entrepreneurs, lead the construction of new urban spaces for accumulation, including new towns, mega-urban projects, and eco-cities. Because the expansion of land development is associated with expected income from land sales, it serves as a guarantee for local borrowing. In doing so, local governments channel more investment into land projects, fueling a pervasive trend of building new cities and new areas across the country. The operation of land development depends largely on future land appreciation, from which local states can benefit. In an era of economic downturn and a stagnating property market, land value appreciation is not guaranteed. What are the outcomes of land development projects in contemporary China?
Why Chinese Cities Govern Differently Under the Same Centralized System
China’s cities are often portrayed as places where decisions made at the top simply move downward and translate into local action. That view is incomplete. Even within a vertically integrated party-state, municipal governments cannot govern by command alone. Urban development, renewal, service delivery, crisis response, and industrial upgrading all depend on sustained cooperation among government departments, state-owned enterprises, financing platforms, banks, developers, professional organizations, street-level institutions, property owners, and residents.
Whose Voice Counts? Uncovering Municipal Issue Publics
I recently interviewed a man I’ll call Henry. Henry cares deeply about road safety after his son died in a car accident. He sits on three local committees dedicated to improving road safety in his community, and road safety informs how Henry participates in politics and who he votes for. But is Henry unique? Are other citizens highly informed and engaged on one (or more) specific policy issues?
Want to Pay for Climate Policy Right Now? Look to Cities
Over the last year, the Federal government has waged a war on climate policy: from repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, to paying companies to kill offshore wind leases. At the same time, over the last few years, political scientists have pointed to local politics as a potential venue for progress on a number of policy issues, climate among them. The goal of my paper “Voters Support and are Willing to Pay for Local Climate Adaptation Policies” is to measure the degree to which Americans are willing to pay for climate policy at the local level, with a particular distinction between mitigation policy (reducing emissions) and adaptation policy (reducing the effects of climate change). Voters have reasons why they might wish to make progress on climate change, including implementing their green values, and lessening the impacts of flooding and heat. However, they also may have reasons why they might not wish to do so, including already high tax burdens, and the geographically diffuse benefits of climate mitigation policies in particular. The question of the extent to which individuals are willing to pay for local climate policies is an open one, and one with important policy stakes.
Housing First or Treatment First Interventions for Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorders among the Chronically Homeless?
After a decade of steady declines, since 2016 the number of chronically homeless individuals—both sheltered and unsheltered—has been inexorably and dramatically increasing. Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that unsheltered chronic homelessness is rising most rapidly, now registering almost 100 thousand individuals, almost twice the number as those in shelters. A nontrivial number of our chronically homeless population manifest substance use disorders and/or unresolved mental illnesses. This population is likely most disruptive of the civic spaces and neighborhoods that they frequent, challenging to house stably over the long term, and costly to the nation through high use of publicly funded health and criminal justice systems resources.
Goodbye to All That: The Rise, Dominance, and Decline of Machine Politics in Chicago
Dominic Pacyga is a distinguished urban historian whose books include American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago and Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. The publication of Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine, even had the book represented a synthesis of existing Chicago scholarship, would have been an important addition to the literature on Chicago politics. In fact, with Clout City Pacyga offers a distinctive, culturally grounded explanation of how the Cook County Democratic Party came to dominate Chicago politics. In a nutshell, Pacyga’s argument is that Catholic, working-class neighborhood culture was the magic sauce producing the sequence of Cermak, Kelly/Nash, and Daley machines that ruled Chicago from the 1930s into the 1970s. In Pacyga’s view, that Catholic, working-class neighborhood culture persisted in Chicago for a long century running from the post-Civil War era into the 1970s or 1980s, but it no longer represents a crucial shaper of the city’s political elites and governmental institutions. And as Catholic, working-class neighborhoodism waned (not least due to suburbanization), so too did the dominant Democratic Party organization.
Who Should Social Housing Be For? Towards a Redistributive Majoritarianism
When designing social policy, a central question is: who is this for? In figuring out who should benefit from social welfare policy, there are broadly two schools of thought. First, you have a targeted perspective, which argues that we social programs should only be for the neediest. There are many good reasons for targeted policy. It could be because you want to prioritize scarce public money, or you want to redistribute to the have-nots. The second perspective is the universalist one, which instead tries to make policy for everyone – or at least an extremely broad constituency. The rationale for universalism is that it reduces the stigma that often gets attached to policies for low-income beneficiaries, and it also broadens the coalition, making it harder to cut when political winds change. In our paper, we argue for a hybrid—redistributive majoritarianism—which attempts to create a majoritarian constituency while also creating explicit targets for the neediest.
Crisis, Violence, and Crime
By Tim Weaver, UAR Co-Editor
The “urban crisis” concept has been deployed by scholars, commentators, and politicians alike to interpret all manner of urban problems and, critically, to establish warrants for action (Weaver 2017). Though early academic work on the topic dealt principally with mundane issues, such as traffic problems (Vigman 1955), the upheavals of the 1960s soon gave rise to analyses of crises that focused on economic change, racial conflict, disorder, and crime. All these themes enjoy close attention in the four essays highlighted here that span the past half century.
Compelled to Coordinate: Understanding local inter- and intra-governmental coordination on environmental sustainability issues
Environmental challenges have never been more pressing for local governments to address. Intensifying climate change, resource disputes, and ecosystem disruption are increasingly being scrutinized and through a patchwork of local policy action. The environmental problems facing us demand immediate attention. However, the current policy landscape is, in many ways, poorly organized to accomplish this task. Local governments will need to engage in coordination if we want to tackle these issues more effectively moving forward.
Cities Say They’re Planning for Climate Equity. Are They Actually Doing It?
Climate change doesn’t hit everyone equally. Socioeconomically disadvantaged groups—particularly low-income communities and communities of color, often termed “frontline communities”—face the greatest climate risks while possessing the fewest resources to adapt or recover (Schlosberg and Collins 2014). As local governments have become key players in U.S. climate action over the past decade, many cities have explicitly integrated equity into their Climate Action Plans (CAPs) as a stated priority alongside emissions reductions and resilience building.
Bring the Middle Back In? Election Timing and Political Polarization
With political polarization threatening American democracy at almost every level, scholars, policymakers, and pro-democracy advocates have invested considerable time and resources in efforts to mitigate polarization, prevent democratic decline, and avert violent conflict. Despite these efforts, polarization continues to deepen, extending beyond Congress and national politics to state and local governments.
Anti-Black Urban Politics in America’s Wakanda
In 2020, it seemed that the United States (and the world) might be on the verge of significant structural change regarding racial justice. And Atlanta, a city with a Black mayor and Black majorities on the City County, School Board, and among the Police Department appeared poised to make substantial change in its urban policies. Then-Mayor Keshia Lance-Bottoms supported a movement to “defund the police,” diverting $73 million from the APD budget to social services and then-City Council member Andre Dickens authored legislation to close and repurpose the City Jail as a community resource center. But quickly, the political tides turned and instead, Mayor Bottoms announced the construction of the $90 million dollar Atlanta Police training facility, colloquially known as “Cop City.” The resulting theatre of events included domestic terrorism charges, protests, and the trampling of democratic norms. Intrigued (and appalled), I decided to investigate why Atlanta’s Black-led municipal leadership would suppress sustained activism against police brutality, preferring instead to embrace an escalation in militarization.
Multiple Dimensions of Urban Inequality
By Yue Zhang, UAR Co-Editor
Inequality has been a central concern in urban politics, with multiple dimensions ranging from institutional and territorial to economic and social. The four articles selected here collectively show that urban inequality is not produced by a single mechanism, but emerges through the interaction of institutional design, economic restructuring, labor market transformation, and differentiated citizenship across global contexts.
Meta-governing the Co-creation of a Green and Just Transition in Urban Areas
The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas.
Invisible Debt and the New Urban Crisis
By Ang Liu (Rutgers University–Newark)
While urban crises are often understood through visible symptoms such as housing unaffordability, segregation, and infrastructure decline, the financial arrangements that sustain these conditions are easier to overlook. This paper explores the concept of invisible debt—debt displaced into separate entities, off-balance-sheet arrangements, and future revenue claims outside the core municipal budget. Drawing on comparative cases from Chicago, São Paulo, Dubai, and Chengdu, it shows that these arrangements differ across institutional settings but share a broader logic of fiscal displacement. Cities reorganize debt through quasi-public authorities, public-private partnerships, state-linked developers, and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Ultimately, the contemporary urban crisis is characterized by the extent to which fiscal strain is deferred and fragmented, keeping immediate financial pressure out of sight while allowing deeper, long-term vulnerabilities to accumulate. The true vulnerability of the city remains off the books until the moment of reckoning.
How do Americans perceive cities, and why does it matter?
Americans tend to have strong feelings about cities. For many Americans, cities are almost not even real places at all, but mystical, foreign realms that represent and confirm their fears about crime, poverty, race, immigration, terrorism, and dozens of other social ills. Cities are not where decent, upstanding citizens live; they are simply a concentration of problems. Social scientists have recently begun to focus on the resentment of urban spaces and populations, especially among white Americans, and how this resentment affects political behavior and state decision-making.