Winds of Change: Controversies Underlying the Urban Policy Debate

Author(s):  
H.S. Geyer
Keyword(s):  
2015 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-131
Author(s):  
Lee Pugalis
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110426
Author(s):  
Dan Cohen

As municipal governments in the US struggle under austerity, philanthropic elites have seemingly come to the rescue. Their money has not come without strings attached, however. By leveraging political contributions and donations to non-profits, philanthropists have moved beyond funding services and into the promotion of their preferred policies to cash-strapped municipalities. This has meant that the super-wealthy can now set the terrain of urban policy debates in cities struggling under austerity, ignoring democratic processes and often working to actively co-opt or stifle dissent. Through a study of the politics surrounding an impending bankruptcy of the Detroit public school system in the mid-2010s, this article provides crucial insights into the nature of elite-led urban policymaking under conditions of racialized austerity. Specifically, it focuses on how competing coalitions of liberal and conservative philanthropists used their wealth and influence to define the parameters of the policy debate over the future of Detroit’s schools. In doing so, these coalitions constrained the ability of residents with alternative visions to participate in decision-making processes and promoted a market-based system of schooling that served Detroit students poorly. This result must be understood as facilitated by the city’s context of racialized austerity, as manifested both through the financial crisis facing Detroit’s schools and through the system of emergency management used to take over Michigan’s majority-Black municipal institutions. These findings highlight that as philanthropic funding and influence have grown under conditions of racialized austerity, we must critically examine their effects on policymaking and on systems of democratic accountability.


Author(s):  
Nasar Meer

The purpose of this chapter is to locate the discussion about Muslims in Scotland in relation to questions of national identity and multicultural citizenship. While the former has certainly been a prominent feature of public and policy debate, the latter has largely been overshadowed by constitutional questions raised by devolution and the referenda on independence. This means that, while we have undoubtedly progressed since MacEwen (1980) characterised the treatment of ‘race-relations’ in Scotland as a matter either of ‘ignorance or apathy’, the issue of where ethnic, racial and religious minorities rest in the contemporary landscape remains unsettled. One of the core arguments of this chapter is that these issues are all interrelated, and that the present and future status of Muslims in Scotland is tied up with wider debates about the ‘national question’. Hitherto, however, study of national identity in Scotland has often (though not always) been discussed in relation to the national identities of England, Wales and Britain as a whole.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moisés Rita Vasconcelos Júnior

The municipality of Marituba, Metropolitan Region of Belém - RMB, has suffered environmental impacts due to irregularities in the landfill operation implemented in 2015, which triggered social impacts perceived by all the population, including neighboring municipalities, such as Ananindeua and Belém Protests were carried out by the Movement Outside the Garbage that is constituted by the dwellings of the surrounding neighborhoods to the place where the embankment is located, of owners of commercial activities linked to the tourism and Non Governmental Organizations that interrupted several times the transit of the main route that interconnects the seven municipalities of the RMB and the entrance of the embankment, in order to draw the attention of the municipal public power to the problems that the population would have been facing ever since. From this, the following questions arose: What social impacts would people be making in these protests? Would such problems be directly related to the activities carried out in the landfill? And finally, what are the actions of the public authority and the company that manages the enterprise in the management of these social impacts? The relevance of this study concerns not only the identification of social impacts considering the fragility of this approach in the Environmental Impact Studies and concomitantly in the Reports of Environmental Impacts, but also, from the point of view of the debate about the licensing process of enterprises of this nature and employment and the need for the joint use of environmental and urban policy instruments, considering that RMB municipalities have not yet used sustainable alternatives for the reduction of solid waste produced in their territories, as well as the reduction of environmental impacts caused by dumps , and in the case of Marituba, of the landfill that operates outside the standards established by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards - ABNT, which is responsible for the management and treatment of solid waste and the National Policy on Solid Waste - PNRSN.


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