The City as a Fiscal Derivative: Financialization, Urban Development, and the Politics of Earmarking

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Pacewicz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Tax Increment Financing ◽  
Development Patterns ◽  
Regulatory Constraints ◽  
Fund Development ◽  
Financing Mechanism ◽  
Growth Coalitions ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
Financing Schemes

Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs’ speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes’ reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmarking perspective. Urban leaders are akin to local state builders whose superordinate concern is establishing priority over revenues earmarked for noncity functions, a goal they pursue by pairing financing schemes with developments that maximize discretionary revenue under unique geographic, fiscal, and regulatory constraints. I illustrate this perspective's utility by comparing scholarship on California's municipal fiscal crises with an ethnography of development in two Iowa cities. Although reliant on the same financing mechanism—tax increment financing—California's municipal leaders pursued discretionary revenue by incentivizing extravagant commercial developments, whereas Iowa's directed industries to outlying business parks.

Urban Development Strategies of City Centers: The Case of Rafah City, Palestinian Territories

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
Omar S. Asfour ◽  
Samar Abu Ghali
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
City Center ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
The Gaza Strip ◽  
The City ◽  
Commercial Center

City centers worldwide are perceived as essential parts of the city, where city memories are preserved and its identity is expressed. They are planned to satisfy the functional requirements and pleasurable qualities of the city. Under the accelerating urbanization of the modern city, several challenges face these centers including demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. This requires a continuous and incremental urban development process based on clear strategy and action plans. Thus, this study focuses on urban development strategies of city centers, with a focus on Rafah city located in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories. The geographic location of this city near the Palestinian-Egyptian borders makes it a promising commercial city at local and regional levels. Thus, the current situation of Rafah city center has been analyzed, and several development strategies have been proposed. This has been done through a field survey based on observation and a questionnaire directed to city center users. It has been found that there is a great potential of Rafah city center to be developed as a commercial center. In this regard, several strategies and required actions have been proposed in the fields of transportation, environmental quality, shopping activities, investment opportunities, and visual perception.

Optimal Land Use Analysis Using Lindenmayer Grammars

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-175
Author(s):  
Urszula Żukowska ◽  
Grażyna Kalewska
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Computer Program ◽  
L System ◽  
L Systems ◽  
The City

In today's world, when it is so important to use every piece of land for a particular purpose, both economically and ecologically, identifying optimal land use is a key issue. For this reason, an analysis of the optimal land use in a section of the city of Olsztyn, using the L-system Urban Development computer program, was chosen as the aim of this paper. The program uses the theories of L-systems and the cartographic method to obtain results in the form of sequences of productions or maps. For this reason, the first chapters outline both theories, i.e. the cartographic method to identify optimal land use and Lindenmayer grammars (called L-systems). An analysis based on a fragment of the map of Olsztyn was then carried out. Two functions were selected for the analysis: agricultural and forest-industrial. The results are presented as maps and sequences in individual steps.

Smart Urban Profiling And Management – New Insights For Enhancing Innovative And Sustainable City Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-46
Author(s):  
Rebecca Oberreiter
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Sustainable Urban Development ◽  
Management Model ◽  
City Management ◽  
City Marketing ◽  
City Development ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Framework Conditions ◽  
Fresh Impetus ◽  
The City

Rapidly changing framework conditions for city development such as globalization, demographic trends, deindustrialization, technological developments or the increasing urbanization as well as the economic, social and political changes are profound and change our urban life. This leads, that the cities of tomorrow will differ essentially from today´s city principles. Therefore innovative, strategically wise and quick action becomes a criterion for success. Here, more than ever, local conditions and requirements must be taken into account as well as global framework conditions. The responsible parties have to set the course so that the “City” remains competitive and sustainable in the future. Therefore, innovation processes and sustainable strategies for dealing with the diverse and complex agendas of a city in dialogue with those who are responsible for it must be initiated and management systems established so that new things can develop continuously and systematically. This work illustrates how the boundaries created to manage and market future liveable and sustainable city destinations are the root of the practical and academic problems that trouble city management these days.  This paper aims to develop the new integrated Smart Urban Profiling and Management model, which presents a new integrated approach for city marketing as an instrument of sustainable urban development. In this way, comprehensive research was conducted to evaluate if the holistic city marketing concept that integrates elements of smart city strategies and adaptive management is a more suitable instrument and integrative process than conventional city marketing in order to improve the sustainable urban development. Therefore, in this work, the designed “Smart Urban Profiling and Management model” for city management introduces an alternative and holistic perspective that allows transcending past boundaries and thus getting closer to the real complexities of managing city development in dynamic systems. The results offer the opportunity to recognize the city and consequently allow to developing successful strategies and implementation measures. This study targets to contribute to this endeavor in order to produce new impulses and incitements in the city management field and shall provide a fresh impetus for a new understanding of city marketing as the initiator of development processes, mobilization and moderator in concerning communication and participation processes. This paper is written from a perspective addressing those responsible for the city- management, city- & urban marketing and development.

scholarly journals The Evolution of City-as-a-Platform: Smart Urban Development Governance with Collective Knowledge-Based Platform Urbanism

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Palmyra Repette ◽  
Jamile Sabatini-Marques ◽  
Tan Yigitcanlar ◽  
Denilson Sell ◽  
Eduardo Costa
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

Since the advent of the second digital revolution, the exponential advancement of technology is shaping a world with new social, economic, political, technological, and legal circumstances. The consequential disruptions force governments and societies to seek ways for their cities to become more humane, ethical, inclusive, intelligent, and sustainable. In recent years, the concept of City-as-a-Platform was coined with the hope of providing an innovative approach for addressing the aforementioned disruptions. Today, this concept is rapidly gaining popularity, as more and more platform thinking applications become available to the city context—so-called platform urbanism. These platforms used for identifying and addressing various urbanization problems with the assistance of open data, participatory innovation opportunity, and collective knowledge. With these developments in mind, this study aims to tackle the question of “How can platform urbanism support local governance efforts in the development of smarter cities?” Through an integrative review of journal articles published during the last decade, the evolution of City-as-a-Platform was analyzed. The findings revealed the prospects and constraints for the realization of transformative and disruptive impacts on the government and society through the platform urbanism, along with disclosing the opportunities and challenges for smarter urban development governance with collective knowledge through platform urbanism.

scholarly journals Imagining the smart city through smart grids? Urban energy futures between technological experimentation and the imagined low-carbon city

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110059
Author(s):  
Leslie Quitzow ◽  
Friederike Rohde
Keyword(s):  
Smart Grid ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Grids ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Energy Futures ◽  
Urban Energy ◽  
The City

Current imaginaries of urban smart grid technologies are painting attractive pictures of the kinds of energy futures that are desirable and attainable in cities. Making claims about the future city, the socio-technical imaginaries related to smart grid developments unfold the power to guide urban energy policymaking and implementation practices. This paper analyses how urban smart grid futures are being imagined and co-produced in the city of Berlin, Germany. It explores these imaginaries to show how the politics of Berlin’s urban energy transition are being driven by techno-optimistic visions of the city’s digital modernisation and its ambitions to become a ‘smart city’. The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of relevant urban policy and other documents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders from Berlin’s energy, ICT and urban development sectors, including key experts from three urban laboratories for smart grid development and implementation in the city. It identifies three dominant imaginaries that depict urban smart grid technologies as (a) environmental solution, (b) economic imperative and (c) exciting experimental challenge. The paper concludes that dominant imaginaries of smart grid technologies in the city are grounded in a techno-optimistic approach to urban development that are foreclosing more subtle alternatives or perhaps more radical change towards low-carbon energy systems.

scholarly journals Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Machines ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
First World ◽  
Urban Civilization

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.

Obstacles on the Path to Urban Greatness: Competing Plans for the Creation of Greater Lviv (“Wielki Lwów”)

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-671
Author(s):  
Nadja Weck
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
The Future ◽  
Imperial Capital ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The City

Like in many other provinces, during the Habsburg period, the main point of orientation for Galicia was Vienna. This also applies to architecture and urban development. Galicia’s technical elite applied the theoretical and practical experience it gathered in Vienna to the towns and cities of this northeastern Crown land. Ignacy Drexler, born in 1878 in the Austro-Hungarian Lemberg, was a representative of a new generation of engineers and architects who did not necessarily have to spend time in the imperial capital to earn their spurs. Increasingly, besides the more or less obligatory stay in Vienna, other European countries became points of reference. Drexler did not live to see the realization of important aspects of his comprehensive plan for the city, but his ideas and the data he compiled were indispensable for the future development of his hometown. They shape urban planning in Lviv to this day.

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