Why Good Governance Goes Wrong: Government and Village in the Supply of Public Goods in Rural China

Following the rural tax-for-fee reform and the abolition of agricultural taxes in the early 2000s, the overall supply of rural public goods has improved, but its performance is still deficient. During a field study of ecological migrants in rural Ningxia, the authors witnessed the problems encountered in the implementation of a public housing project. This episode demonstrates how the provision of rural public goods depends on rural governance that responds to the tension between modern development and the values of rural society. The failure of the project stems from the clash between the logic of peasant actions and the performance indicators of cadres, producing an internal rupture between rural society and rural governance. In the process of modernization and urbanization, grassroots government is becoming more bureaucratic and technical, with the prevalence of e-government and especially with village committees turning increasingly administrativized and beholden to superior levels of government, and thus is failing to fully embed itself in rural society.

Project governance practices in urban public housing projects: a case study of public housing in Malaysia

The urban public housing project, especially for low-income people, is essential to cater to the increasing urbanisation rate in Malaysia. This study aimed to gain an understanding of the project governance practices in urban public housing projects in Malaysia, which will lead to better project delivery and the successful outcome of the projects. A single case study was conducted on a public housing project or known as Projek Perumahan Rakyat (PPR) in Kuala Lumpur, and data for this study was gathered using semi-structured interviews with six (6) public officials, document analysis, and observation. The findings of this study indicate the positive interplay between project actors guided by the elements of trust, stakeholder management, empowerment, and collective decision making, which create value for the project. Hence, this article contributes to the dynamic understanding of how public officials practice project governance in conducting their works related to urban public housing projects. The findings of the study will enable related public organisations to reinforce the underlying project governance elements towards the strengthening of urban public housing delivery system. Case study research in different models of urban public housing could extend the discovery of other project governance elements while validating the findings of this study from different perspectives. The findings of the study are limited due to the use of a single case study related to the urban public housing project and its contexts.

The Rise of Urban Renewal and the Connie Chambers Project

Chapters 8 and 9 consider the case of Tucson, which reveals a third possible approach to public housing governance and redevelopment, typifying the Publica Major constellation. This shows what can happen when responsibility for public housing remains more wholly vested in a well-functioning public sector, subject neither to the whims of private developers, as in New Orleans, nor to the sway of empowered low-income tenants, as in Boston. Chapter 8 narrates the complex and reluctant emergence of Tucson’s two-hundred-unit Connie Chambers public housing project, completed in 1967 as a supplement to an earlier project known as La Reforma. Public housing growth remained inseparable from the deeply contested process of urban renewal that decimated eighty acres of the Mexican American downtown barrio and purged its residents. Those contemplating redevelopment of Connie Chambers, which was forged in lingering controversy, knew that they could not repeat the earlier ethnically motivated displacement.

The Rise of Orchard Park

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Boston’s version of community-centered HOPE VI practice. Chapter 6 narrates the rise and fall of the Orchard Park public housing project while also explaining the origins of Boston’s Plebs governance constellation that brought such deeply felt resident engagement to the cause of public housing preservation. Boston’s city leaders created Orchard Park in 1942 to house upwardly mobile workers. As in other cities, public housing conditions deteriorating after the 1960s, but in Boston—partly in response to overzealous urban renewal and highway projects surrounding Orchard Park—community-driven movements such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative emerged to protect low-income residents. The Boston Housing Authority’s board gained a “tenant-oriented majority” in 1970, and, in the 1980s, a receiver-led BHA completed major public housing redevelopment efforts that remained 100 percent public housing. Elected officials increasingly found it politically imperative to support residential neighborhoods rather than just downtown business interests.

“40-Acre Smudge”

This article develops the concept of erasure to understand the contemporary memory of Yesler Terrace, a New Deal–era public housing project in Seattle, and why this memory diverges so sharply from the history revealed in the archives. Though celebrated today for its early commitment to racial integration, the goal of Yesler Terrace was to demolish a multiracial slum and replace it with a model community of predominately white families. Examining the visual materials created at the time to promote the project, this article argues that the physical displacement of people and homes was made possible only through a prior symbolic displacement, a representation of the neighborhood that served to erase the existing community and justify its removal. The production of invisibility through mapping and photography mattered just as much as the bulldozers and construction crews that cleared and rebuilt the actual site. An attention to the symbolic dimension of the clearance process can illuminate not only the forced displacement of a marginalized community, but also their continued erasure in the present-day memory of the city.

From SuperOther to SuperMother: The Journey toward Liberty

In “From SuperOther to SuperMother: The Journey toward Liberty,” Nicola Mann studies the character Martha Washington from Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’ limited series comic Give Me Liberty (1990). A single mother from Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project here rises to the status of lauded war hero. As an African-American woman, argues Mann, Washington not only re-scripts the familiar trope of the white male superhero, but also offers an alternate vision of the children of urban single mothers. Her success story speaks to contemporary real-world political claims-to-agency for young black women. In particular, the chapter explores the formal voyeurism implicit in Give Me Liberty’s panel sequences. Through the “gutter”—the blank white space between comic book panels—the reader becomes a silent accomplice in deciphering and linking the singular moments described in the panels into a series of topological connections, and, eventually, a continuous unified whole.