Trends in the Study of Urban Politics

Abstract

Urban political study has experienced several critical junctures. Rather than following an incremental path of cumulative development, urban analysis has gone through phases of reframing akin to what Thomas Kuhn called paradigm shifts. The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) to examine paradigmatic frameworks as alterations in urban inquiry, (2) to address the issue of why such shifts come about, and (3) to remind readers that shifts are double-edged, not only bringing new perspective to inquiry but also risking that other significant considerations may be overlooked in the process. Urban paradigms compete for preeminence, and all are in need of ongoing critical reassessment. The hold of any given framework of analysis proves impermanent in part because the underlying urban situation it illuminates is never static. The risk of a lag in analysis is never low.

New urban governance: A review of current themes and future priorities

“…Still, it appears likely that institutional arrangements, the political management of different stakeholders, and policy innovation will continue to be critical. The most promising developments are in the area of actual practice, rather than transformative theoretical paradigms (Stone, 2017).…”

Analyzing Urban Politics: A Mobilization–Governance Framework

“…Clarence Stone (2017), the leading proponent of a political–economy approach that has dominated the study of urban politics over the past four decades, recently acknowledged that the long-time focus on economic forces has been “incomplete as a source of explanation for urban distress” (p. 4) and understanding urban power dynamics in cities. Indeed, he views the wave of scholarship on the carceral state as the centerpiece of a new paradigm of urban politics in which the imperative of order maintenance serves as a form of social and political control that constrains voices of discontent and fuels the demobilization of people of color.…”

“…Notwithstanding criticisms regarding various omissions in regime theory, and notwithstanding the recent momentum in favor of identifying new paradigms for the study of urban politics—a movement that even Clarence Stone (2017) has seemingly endorsed—much of regime theory’s focus on governance remains insightful and persuasive. So what I propose here is a new model of urban politics that retains the heart of regime theory, more specifically, Stone’s (2005) revised and somewhat condensed version that emphasizes the importance of resources, agendas, and mechanisms of cooperation in fashioning governing coalitions composed of actors from the public and private sectors, while adding elements that regime theory has overlooked, namely, political activity that takes place prior to and contemporaneous with the development of governing coalitions and an ideational/cultural realm that many urbanists see as critically formative (Bradford 2016; Sidney 2009; Weaver 2016).…”

“…Even the most prominent advocates of a political–economy approach have recognized that the carceral state scholarship has critically altered how we should think about who exercises power in cities. None other than Clarence Stone (2017) has commented that research revolving around the carceral state may represent a paradigm shift in the study of urban politics.…”

Urban Regimes in Small Russian Towns

“…Urban regime analysis, started by Stone () in the last decades, has become “a dominant paradigm in urban studies within the social sciences” (Keizer :504) and a favored way of explaining the power structure of urban communities (Davies and Imbroscio ; Dowding ; Stone ). It managed to overcome the shortcomings of the earlier approaches used in community power studies.…”