Cross-disciplinary reading workshop
Governing the city under constraints : Paul Peterson and City Limits

Session coordination and moderation: Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Cesare Mattina
For this session: texts selected and presented by Gilles Pinson (IEP Bordeaux)

We are continuing our reflection on 'Governing the city' based on classic American texts and on the debate between elitist and polyarchical theories of power in the city, by reading Clarence Stone's work on 'urban regimes'. His famous reference work (Regime politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, Kansas University Press, 1989) empirically studies the continuities and ruptures of Atlanta's government over a long period of time. In it, Stone demonstrates that despite a demographic and political change that saw the rise of black populations in urban society and in the municipality, urban policies remained unfavourable to the black working classes and focused on the logic of urban growth. It is by questioning this a priori paradoxical continuity that Stone develops his theory of 'urban regimes', showing why so-called 'development' urban policies (centred on the pursuit of economic development and land reclamation), while not automatic, are those most frequently found at the centre of cities' political agendas, driven by government coalitions made up of public and private players with 'preemptive power'. This power is built up by mobilising resources that enable them not only to gain access to power, but also to maintain it by developing the capacity to govern in the long term: a 'power to do' and not just a 'power to influence' (power over).

In this chapter, P. E. Peterson begins by challenging the tendency of urban studies to consider the city as a miniature state, and takes a position on the debates that have agitated urban studies: on 'community power', on the opposition between reform and machines, on 'comparative urban policy', and on studies of US federalism. These approaches focus on rivalries between social groups and the political organisations that represent them, in the belief that the resources that groups and organisations can mobilise are the same as at national level, which Peterson believes to be false.

In this chapter, Peterson proposes a point of view that structures the whole book, according to which it is possible to identify the objective interest of a city. This interest is not the product of the sum of the individual interests that make up the city, as utilitarians suggest; nor is it the product of the work of political institutions, as pluralists believe. It is the objective result of the city's positioning in a competitive territorial and institutional context. "Policies and programs can be said to be in the interest of cities whenever the policies maintains or enhances the economic position, social prestige, or political power of the city taken as a whole" (20). For Peterson, the city has an interest of its own as "a set of social interactions structured by their location in a particular territorial space" (20). Policies that improve the desirability or attractiveness of an area are in its interest because they benefit all its residents. In fact, for Peterson, cities have no choice but to behave like firms. They must be concerned above all with their economic prosperity, which generates resources to fund public services.

In this chapter, Peterson looks at the theories of federalism. For him, federalism based on the co-presence of 2 levels of sovereign powers died with the Civil War and the gradual expansion of federal powers. There can be no return to dual sovereignty; on the contrary, it is necessary to focus on what he considers to be an optimal distribution of powers and competences between levels. Local governments are part of an open system that forces them to focus primarily on their economic performance. This leaves little room for egalitarian concerns (69). National governments also have policies

but which are accompanied by redistributive policies. What enables them to combine the two? The ability of national governments to limit the impact of external economic flows on their territory.

Using schools as an example, the chapter illustrates the fundamentally competitive nature of the American territorial system and the resulting effects of inequality. "Ironically, schooling, the service-delivery system said to best exemplify America's commitment to equality, is largely provided by the level of government least able to engage in redistribution" (94). In metropolitan areas, a dual education system has emerged. In central areas, with "big city school systems" managing very large areas and cities unable to "choose" their residents, redistributive objectives dominate; rich people pay for poor households through inter-neighbourhood redistribution. "With uniformity comes redistribution, and with redistribution comes damage to the city's economic interests" (105). Conversely, in the peripheral municipalities, which are often economically homogenous and have a greater capacity to be socially exclusive, each municipality pursues development objectives above all else.