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Urbanization can create rapid demand for [[water resources management]], as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of [[sewage]] begins to exceed manageable levels.<ref name="Bakker2003" /> | Urbanization can create rapid demand for [[water resources management]], as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of [[sewage]] begins to exceed manageable levels.<ref name="Bakker2003" /> | ||
== Government == | |||
{{Further|Local government}} | |||
[[File:City Council of Tehran, 17 September 2015.jpg|thumb|The [[city council]] of [[Tehran]] meets in September 2015.]] | |||
[[Local government]] of cities takes different forms including prominently the [[municipality]] (especially [[local government in England|in England]], [[local government in the United States|in the United States]], [[municipal governance in India|in India]], and in other [[crown colonies|British colonies]]; legally, the [[municipal corporation]];<ref>Joan C. Williams, "[http://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/809/ The Invention of the Municipal Corporation: A Case Study in Legal Change]"; ''American University Law Review'' 34, 1985; pp. 369–438.</ref> ''[[municipio]]'' in [[Municipalities of Spain|Spain]] and [[Municipalities of Portugal|in Portugal]], and, along with ''[[municipalidad]]'', in most former parts of the [[Spanish Empire|Spanish]] and [[Portuguese Empire|Portuguese]] empires) and the ''commune'' ([[communes in France|in France]] and [[Communes of Chile|in Chile]]; or ''[[comune]]'' in Italy). | |||
The chief official of the city has the title of [[mayor]]. Whatever their true degree of political authority, the mayor typically acts as the [[figurehead]] or personification of their city.<ref>Latham et al. (2009), p. 146. "The figurehead of city leadership is, of course, the mayor. As 'first citizen', mayors are often associated with political parties, yet many of the most successful mayors are often those whoare able to speak 'for' their city. Rudy Giuliani, for example, while pursuing a neo-liberal political agenda, was often seen as being outside the mainstream of the national Republican party. Furthermore, mayors are often crucial in articulating the interests of their cities to external agents, be they national governments or major public and private investors."</ref> | |||
[[File:Penang City Hall.jpg|thumb|left|[[City Hall, Penang|The city hall]] in [[George Town, Penang|George Town]], Malaysia, today serves as the [[seat of local government|seat]] of the [[City Council of Penang Island]].<ref>[[Penang Island]] was incorporated as a single municipality in 1976 and gained [[city status]] in 2015. See: Royce Tan, "[http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2014/12/18/penang-island-gets-city-status-mbpp-set-to-take-over-as-new-city-council/ Penang island gets city status]", ''The Star'', 18 December 2014.</ref>]] | |||
City governments have authority to make [[law]]s governing activity within cities, while its [[jurisdiction]] is generally considered [[conflict of laws|subordinate]] (in ascending order) to [[State government|state/provincial]], [[central government|national]], and perhaps [[international law]]. This hierarchy of law is not enforced rigidly in practice—for example in conflicts between municipal regulations and national principles such as [[constitutional right]]s and [[property rights]].<ref name="Blomley2013">[[Nicholas Blomley]], "What Sort of a Legal Space is a City?" in Brighenti (2013), pp. 1–20. "Municipalities, within this frame, are understood as nested within the jurisdictional space of the provinces. Indeed, rather than freestanding legal sites, they are imagined as products (or 'creatures') of the provinces who may bring them into being or dissolve them as they choose. As with the provinces their powers are of a delegated form: they may only exercise jurisdiction over areas that have been expressly identified by enabling legislation. Municipal law may not conflict with provincial law, and may only be exercised within its defined territory. […] <br> Yet we are [in] danger [of] missing the reach of municipal law: '[e]ven in highly constitutionalized regimes, it has remained possible for municipalities to micro-manage space, time, and activities through police regulations that infringe both on constitutional rights and private property in often extreme ways' (Vaverde 2009: 150). While liberalism fears the encroachments of the state, it seems less worried about those of the municipality. Thus if a national government proposed a statute forbidding public gatherings or sporting events, a revolution would occur. Yet municipalities routinely enact sweeping by-laws directed at open ended (and ill-defined) offences such as loitering and obstruction, requiring permits for protests or requiring residents and homeowners to remove snow from the city's sidewalks."</ref> Legal conflicts and issues arise more frequently in cities than elsewhere due to the bare fact of their greater density.<ref>McQuillan (1937/1987), §1.63. "The problem of achieving equitable balance between the two freedoms is infinitely greater in urban, metropolitan and megalopolitan situations than in sparsely settled districts and rural areas. / In the latter, sheer intervening space acts as a buffer between the privacy and well-being of one resident and the potential encroachments thereon by his neighbors in the form of noise, air or water pollution, absence of sanitation, or whatever. In a congested urban situation, the individual is powerless to protect himself from the "free" (i.e., inconsiderate or invasionary) acts of others without himself being guilty of a form of encroachment."</ref> Modern city governments thoroughly [[regulation|regulate]] [[everyday life]] in many dimensions, including [[public health|public]] and personal [[health]], [[transport]], [[burial]], [[resource]] use and [[resource extraction|extraction]], [[recreation]], and the nature and use of [[building]]s. Technologies, techniques, and laws governing these areas—developed in cities—have become ubiquitous in many areas.<ref>McQuillan (1937/1987), §1.08.</ref> | |||
Municipal officials may be appointed from a higher level of government or elected locally.<ref>McQuillan (1937/1987), §1.33.</ref> | |||
=== Municipal services === | |||
[[File:Aftermath of a huge fire at Thomas McKenzie & Sons Ltd. on Pearse Street, Dublin.jpg|thumb|The [[Dublin Fire Brigade]] in Dublin, Ireland, quenching a severe fire at a hardware store in 1970]] | |||
Cities typically provide [[municipal services]] such as [[education]], through [[school system]]s; [[police|policing]], through police departments; and [[firefighting]], through [[fire department]]s; as well as the city's basic infrastructure. These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion.<ref name="JonesEtAl1980">Bryan D. Jones, Saadia R. Greenbeg, Clifford Kaufman, & Joseph Drew, "Service Delivery Rules and the Distribution of Local Government Services: Three Detroit Bureaucracies"; in Hahn & Levine (1980). "Local government bureaucracies more or less explicitly accept the goal of implementing rational criteria for the delivery of services to citizens, even though compromises may have to be made in the establishment of these criteria. These production oriented criteria often give rise to "service deliver rules", regularized procedures for the delivery of services, which are attempts to codify the productivity goals of urban service bureaucracies. These rules have distinct, definable distributional consequences which often go unrecognized. That is, the decisions of governments to adopt rational service delivery rules can (and usually do) differentially benefit citizens."</ref><ref name="Lineberry">Robert L. Lineberry, "Mandating Urban Equality: The Distribution of Municipal Public Services"; in Hahn & Levine (1980). See: [[Shaw, Mississippi|Hawkins v. Town of Shaw]] (1971).</ref> Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, though some services may be operated by a higher level of government,<ref>George Nilson, "[http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-state-control-police-20170228-story.html Baltimore police under state control for good reason]", ''Baltimore Sun'' 28 February 2017.</ref> while others may be privately run.<ref>Robert Jay Dilger, Randolph R. Moffett, & Linda Stuyk, "Privatization of Municipal Services in America's Largest Cities", ''Public Administration Review'' 57(1), 1997; {{doi|10.2307/976688}}.</ref> Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America's [[King assassination riots]] of 1968. | |||
=== Finance === | |||
The traditional basis for municipal finance is local [[property tax]] levied on [[real estate]] within the city. Local government can also collect revenue for services, or by leasing land that it owns.<ref name="Gwilliam2013" /> However, financing municipal services, as well as [[urban renewal]] and other development projects, is a perennial problem, which cities address through appeals to higher governments, arrangements with the private sector, and techniques such as [[privatization]] (selling services into the [[private sector]]), [[corporatization]] (formation of quasi-private municipally-owned corporations), and [[financialization]] (packaging city assets into tradable financial public contracts and other related rights. This situation has become acute in deindustrialized cities and in cases where businesses and wealthier citizens have moved outside of [[city limits]] and therefore beyond the reach of taxation.<ref>McQuillan (1937/1987), §§1.65–1.66.</ref><ref>David Walker, "The New System of Intergovernmental Relations: Fiscal Relief and More Governmental Intrusions"; in Hahn & Levine (1980).</ref><ref>Bart Voorn, Marieke L. van Genugten, & Sandra van Thiel, "[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03003930.2017.1319360 The efficiency and effectiveness of municipally owned corporations: a systematic review]", ''Local Government Studies'', 2017.</ref><ref name="Weber2010" /> Cities in search of [[cash and cash equivalents|ready cash]] increasingly resort to the [[municipal bond]], essentially a loan with [[Maturity (finance)|interest]] and a [[Maturity (finance)|repayment date]].<ref>Rachel Weber, "[https://www.academia.edu/download/33030948/09-Weber-Extracting-Value-from-the-City.pdf Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment]",{{dead link|date=October 2017}} ''Antipode'', July 2002; {{doi|10.1111/1467-8330.00253}}.</ref> City governments have also begun to use [[tax increment financing]], in which a development project is financed by loans based on future tax revenues which it is expected to yield.<ref name="Weber2010">Rachel Weber, "Selling City Futures: The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy"; ''Economic Geography'' 86(3), 2010; {{doi|10.1111/j.1944-8287.2010.01077.x}}. "TIF is an increasingly popular local redevelopment policy that allows municipalities to designate a 'blighted' area for redevelopment and use the expected increase in property (and occasionally sales) taxes there to pay for initial and ongoing redevelopment expenditures, such as land acquisition, demolition, construction, and project financing. Because developers require cash up-front, cities transform promises of future tax revenues into securities that far-flung buyers and sellers exchange through local markets."</ref> Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city [[credit rating]]s.<ref>Josh Pacewicz, "Tax increment financing, economic development professionals and the financialization of urban politics"; ''Socio-Economic Review'' 11, 2013; {{doi|10.1093/ser/mws019}}. "A city's credit rating not only influences its ability to sell bonds, but has become a general signal of fiscal health. Detroit's partial recovery in the early 1990s, for example, was reversed when Moody's downgraded the rating of the city's general obligation bonds, precipitating new rounds of capital flight (Hackworth, 2007). The need to maintain a high credit rating constrains municipal actors by making it difficult to finance discretionary projects in traditional ways."</ref> | |||
=== Governance === | |||
[[File:Ripon Building panorama.jpg|thumb|314x314px|The [[Ripon Building]], the headquarters of [[Greater Chennai Corporation]] in [[Chennai]]. It is one of the oldest city governing corporations in [[Asia]]. ]] | |||
[[Governance]] includes government but refers to a wider domain of [[social control]] functions implemented by many actors including [[nongovernmental organization]]s.<ref>Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 4, 29. "We thereby understand urban governance as the multiple ways through which city governments, businesses and residents interact in managing their urban space and life, nested within the context of other government levels and actors who are managing their space, resulting in a variety of urban governance configurations (Peyroux et al. 2014)."</ref> The impact of globalization and the role of [[multinational corporation]]s in local governments worldwide, has led to a shift in perspective on urban governance, away from the "urban regime theory" in which a coalition of local interests functionally govern, toward a theory of outside economic control, widely associated in academics with the philosophy of [[neoliberalism]].<ref>Latham et al. (2009), p. 142–143.</ref> In the neoliberal model of governance, public utilities are [[privatization|privatized]], industry is [[deregulation|deregulated]], and [[corporation]]s gain the status of governing actors—as indicated by the power they wield in [[public-private partnerships]] and over [[business improvement districts]], and in the expectation of self-regulation through [[corporate social responsibility]]. The biggest [[investor]]s and [[real estate developer]]s act as the city's [[de facto]] urban planners.<ref>Gupta, Verrest, and Jaffe, "Theorizing Governance", in Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 30–31.</ref> | |||
The related concept of [[good governance]] places more emphasis on the state, with the purpose of assessing urban governments for their suitability for [[development assistance]].<ref name="Gupta2015p33">Gupta, Verrest, and Jaffe, "Theorizing Governance", in Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 31–33. "The concept of good governance itself was developed in the 1980s, primarily to guide donors in development aid (Doonbos 2001:93). It has been used both as a condition for aid and a development goal in its own right. Key terms in definitions of good governance include participation, accountability, transparency, equity, efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, and rule of law (e.g. Ginther and de Waart 1995; UNDP 1997; Woods 1999; Weiss 2000). […] At the urban level, this normative model has been articulated through the idea of good urban governance, promoted by agencies such as UN Habitat. The Colombian city of Bogotá has sometimes been presented as a model city, given its rapid improvements in fiscal responsibility, provision of public services and infrastructure, public behavior, honesty of the administration, and civic pride."</ref> The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in the emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations.<ref>Shipra Narang Suri & Günther Taube, "Governance in Megacities: Experiences, Challenges and Implications for International Cooperation"; in Kraas et al. (2014), pp. 197–198.</ref> | |||
=== Urban planning === | |||
{{Main|Urban planning|Urban design}} | |||
[[File:La Plata desde el aire.JPG|thumb|upright=1.35|[[La Plata]], Argentina, based on a perfect square with 5196-meter sides, was designed in the 1880s as the new capital of [[Buenos Aires Province]].<ref>Alain Garnier, "[https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lasur/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GARNIER.pdf La Plata: la visionnaire trahie]"; ''Architecture & Comportment'' 4(1), 1988, pp. 59–79.</ref>]][[Urban planning]], the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve [[Technical aspects of urban planning|certain objectives]]. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping [[theories of urban planning|theories]] as ideals for how plans should be formed. Planning tools, beyond the original design of the city itself, include [[public capital]] investment in infrastructure and [[Land-use planning|land-use controls]] such as [[zoning]]. The continuous process of [[comprehensive planning]] involves identifying general objectives as well as collecting data to evaluate progress and inform future decisions.<ref>Levy (2017), pp. 193–235.</ref><ref name="McQuillin1987planning" /> | |||
Government is legally the final authority on planning but in practice the process involves both public and private elements. The legal principle of [[eminent domain]] is used by government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project.<ref name="McQuillin1987planning">McQuillin (1937/1987), §§1.75–179. "Zoning, a relatively recent development in the administration of local governmental units, concerns itself with the control of the use of land and structures, the size of buildings, and the use-intensity of building sites. Zoning being an exercise of the police power, it must be justified by such considerations as the protection of public health and safety, the preservation of taxable property values, and the enhancement of community welfare. […] Municipal powers to implement and effectuate city plans are usually ample. Among these is the power of eminent domain, which has been used effectively in connection with slum clearance and the rehabilitation of blighted areas. Also available to cities in their implementation of planning objectives are municipal powers of zoning, subdivision control and the regulation of building, housing and sanitation principles."</ref> Planning often involves tradeoffs—decisions in which some stand to gain and some to lose—and thus is closely connected to the prevailing political situation.<ref>Levy (2017), p. 10. "Planning is a highly political activity. It is immersed in politics and inseparable from the law. [...] Planning decisions often involve large sums of money, both public and private. Even when little public expenditure is involved, planning decisions can deliver large benefits to some and large losses at others."</ref> | |||
The [[history of urban planning]] dates to some of the earliest known cities, especially in the Indus Valley and Mesoamerican civilizations, which built their cities on grids and apparently zoned different areas for different purposes.<ref name="Smith2002" /><ref>Jorge Hardoy, ''Urban Planning in Pre-Columbian America''; New York: George Braziller, 1968.</ref> The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of [[planned community|planned communities]], fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems. | |||