Examines the complex ecology of quasi-public and privatized
institutions that mobilize and administer many of the political,
administrative, and fiscal resources of today's metropolitan
regions In recent decades metropolitan regions in the United States
have witnessed the rise of multitudes of "shadow governments" that
often supersede or replace functions traditionally associated with
municipalities and other local governments inherited from the urban
past. Shadow governments take many forms, ranging from
billion-dollar special authorities that span entire urban regions,
to public-private partnerships and special districts created to
accomplish particular tasks, to privatized gated communities, to
neighborhood organizations empowered to receive private and public
funds. They finance and administer public services ranging from the
prosaic (garbage collection and water utilities) to the
transformative (economic development and infrastructure). Private
Metropolis demonstrates that this complex ecosystem of local
governance has compromised and even eclipsed democratic processes
by moving important policy decisions out of public sight. The
quasi-public institutions of urban governance generally escape the
budgetary and statutory restraints imposed on traditional local
governments and protect policy decisions from the limitations and
vagaries of electoral politics. Moving major policy decisions into
a privatized and corporatized realm facilitates efficiency and
speed, but at the cost of democratic oversight. Increasingly, the
urban electorate is left debating symbolic issues only tangentially
connected to the actual distribution of the resources that affect
people's lives. The essays in Private Metropolis grapple with the
difficult and timely questions that arise from this new ecology of
governance: What are the consequences of the proliferation of
special authorities, privatized governments, and public-private
arrangements? Is the trade-off between democratic accountability
and efficiency worth it? Has the public sector, with its messiness
and inefficiencies-but also its checks and balances-ceded too much
power to these new institutions? By examining such questions, this
book provokes a long-overdue debate about the future of urban
governance. Contributors: Douglas Cantor, California State U, Long
Beach; Ellen Dannin, Pennsylvania State U; Jameson W. Doig,
Princeton U; Mary Donoghue; Peter Eisinger, New School; Steven P.
Erie, U of California, San Diego; Rebecca Hendrick, U of Illinois
at Chicago; Sara Hinkley, U of California, Berkeley; Amanda Kass, U
of Illinois at Chicago; Scott A. MacKenzie, U of California, Davis;
David C. Perry, U of Illinois at Chicago; James M. Smith, U of
Indiana South Bend; Shu Wang, Michigan State U; Rachel Weber, U of
Illinois at Chicago.
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