Urban Democracy PDF
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Urban Democracy Reihe: SUidte und Regionen in Europa Herausgegeben von Jurgen Friedrichs, Kaln Oscar W. Gabriel, Stuttgart Herbert Schneider, Heidelberg Rudiger Voigt, Munchen Band 1 Oscar W. Gabriel Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot Hank V. Savitch (Hrsg.) Urban Democracy Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2000 Gedruckt auf săurefreiem und altersbestăndigem Papier. Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Ein Titeldatensatz fUr diese Publikation ist bei Der Deutschen Bibliothek erhăltlich ISBN 978-3-8100-1954-7 ISBN 978-3-322-99969-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-322-99969-6 © 2000 Leske + Budrich, Opladen Das Werk einschlieBlich aHer seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschUtzt. Jede Verwertung auBerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulăssig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere fUr Vervielfaltigungen, Ubersetzungen, Mi kroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Contents Preface ............................................................................................................. 7 Oscar W Gabriel Introduction ..................................................................................................... 9 I. Europe Henry Back/Folke JohanssonlHelge 0. Larsen Local government in Nordic big cities .......................................................... 31 SA.H. Denters Urban democracies in the Netherlands: social and political change, institutional continuities? .............................................................................. 73 Elinor Scarbrough The two faces of urban democracy in Britain ............................................. 127 Oscar W Gabriel Democracy in big cities: the case of Germany ............................................ '187 Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot The fragmented democracy of French big cities ......................................... 261 II. North America Louise Quesnel Urban democracy in big cities in Canada .................................................... 315 Hank V. SavitchiKevin DuPont/Elysium Drumm The transformation of American cities ........................................................ 369 III. Asia Nobufomi Kawasaki Urban democracy in Japan .......................................................................... 397 IV. Summary Angelika Vetter Democracy in big cities: a comparative view ........ " .................................. 433 List of Contributors ..................................................................................... 453 Preface Among social scientists consensus exists on urbanization as an indispensable aspect of social modernization. During the last century, the process of industrialization was accompanied by a huge wave of migration from rural to urban areas. The formation of big cities, in tum, made up the base for an increase of mass education as well as the spread of mass media. The changes induced by urbanization did not only have a strong impact on the structure of the society, but also did deeply change the way of social life. By the end of the 21st century, again, a close link seems to exist between the socio-economic transformation of the Western world on the one hand, and a new stage in the process of urbanization on the other hand. The service economy having replaced industrial production as the most important domain of economic life essentially needs the social and cultural infrastructure provided by urban or even metropolitan areas. Due to the development of fast and highly efficient systems of mass transportation, processes of social, cultural, and economic exchanges between the different parts of the world, but primarily between metropolitan areas. The development of new media of communication has facilitated the exchange of information of any kind, not only within a society, but, moreover, between societies separated by a large territorial distance from each other. When men are said to live in a global village today, this notion is highly misleading insofar as the processes at work really are an essential part of a new world-wide process of urbanization. From a Political Science perspective, the impact of the formation of a new type of urban society on political life in big cities is far from being clear. In order to find out how cities in some Western democracies are coping with the political problems typical of a new era of urban development, a research conference was organized by the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux and the (former) Department of Political Science of the University of Stuttgart in summer 1997 in the University of Stuttgart. The papers presented in this conference regarding the development of "Democracy in Big Cities" built the stuff of the country reports included in this volume. The conference wouldn't have been held in the way it was without the generous support of the CNRS Paris, the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung, and the DaimlerChrysler AG. We appreciated very much the efficient and non bureaucratic way the cooperation with these institutions was working. We would also give our thanks to the Stuttgart team, Alexandra MoBner, Daniel 8 Preface Rolle, Kerstin Volkl, Kristina Fabijancic, Katja Neller, and Mechthildis Schamagel, who organized the conference and were in charge of producing a nice manuscript out of a number of differently styled papers. Elysium Drumm deserves to be mentioned for her help in proof-reading the manuscripts of the authors for whom English is not their native language. Last, but not least, we would like thanking the contributors to this volume for their patience in the process of production of this book. Although modem technologies of communication were extremely helpful in performing this work, coordination remains a technical problem in a process of scientific cooperation bringing together researchers from North America, Asia, and Europe as well as book editors from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Stuttgart, Bordeaux, and Louisville, July 1999 Oscar W. Gabriel, Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot, and Hank V. Savitch Introduction Oscar W. Gabriel 1. Democracy in big cities as a research topic Analyses of the state of urban democracy are by no means a new topic in research on local politics. Almost a century ago, community power studies started by critical analyses of the practices of corruption and abuse of politi cal power by bosses and the political machines controlled by them. The in tense debate on the most appropriate approach to the study of community power was not only pure scientific in its nature but also reflected varying political attitudes towards the reality of urban life in the United States and elsewhere in the world. While elitists took a very critical stance towards the control of urban life by a close alliance of political leaders and big business, the analyses presented by pluralist theorists should not only be read as purely academic, but, moreover, as a defense of the American creed in pluralism and broad popular participation in urban life (Ammon 1967; more recent contributions: Harding 1995; Judge 1995; Waste 1986). While the emphasis on the state of urban democracy was initially on the distribution of political power and the links between the governing and the governed, the focus of the discussion seems to have changed during the last few decades. About twenty years ago, the American political scientist Doug las Yates (1977) published an important work on 'The Ungovernable City' wherein he replaced the 'Who Governs?' research question of traditional community power studies by the more fundamental question: "Is governing a city really possible?" At the end of the twentieth century, the questions whether big cities are governable at all, how the task of governing big cities can be performed and how democratic principles may be applied in governing big cities has be come crucial in all highly developed Western nations. Even if the debate on the governability of democracies is by no means limited to big cities, but refers to all kinds of political systems in general, the state and prospect of urban democracy is a particularly important theme. As shown by survey data, the local level is the most important object of identification to the citizens of almost all Western democracies (DuchesnelFrognier 1995: 195-197) and the \0 Oscar W Gabriel local political system plays a crucial role as a point of access to the political process in general (Kaase 1982; 1990: 50-58; Parry/MoyserlDay 1993: 299- 411). The question remains open, however, whether these assumptions apply to all types of local political systems. According to Dahl and Tufte (1974), medium sized cities provide optimal preconditions for citizen participation in political life, because the problems to be dealt with are not trivial (as is the case in small local communities), and political participation can be organized in an efficient way (contrary to big cities). The problem of whether or not a tension exists between the scale or size of local units on one hand and the democratic performance on the other, is a crucial topic, at least if the concept of democracy is not reduced to the for mal-institutional arrangements, but is understood as a political system's char acterized active and meaningful citizen participation in political life. Al though a large number of publications have appeared during the last few years containing reports on the state of the local political systems of various countries (for instance: Batley/Stoker 1991; Hesse 1991; Sadran et ai. 1996; Wehling 1994), special emphasis was neither given to big cities nor to prob lems of democratic government in the respective publications. Moreover, a comparative perspective was not very well developed in most instances, if it was not completely missing. Focusing on the democratic quality of the structures and processes of city government by no means implies that other problems, like the relationship between local and national government, the linkages between cities and the encompassing regions, the reorganization and the efficiency of the system of service delivery, are considered as irrelevant. Nevertheless, the way democracy works in big cities, deserves more attention than it has received during the last years in comparative urban research. 2. Big cities as research objects Identifying big cities or urban communities, respectively, was a rather simple task in pre-modem times. Before the processes of industrialization and ur banization set on, the lifestyles and the socio-economic conditions prevailing in urban and rural settings were clearly different. The large bulk of the population lived in small, isolated rural communities and worked in the pri mary sector of production (agriculture, fishing). In Germany, for instance, 62% of the labor force were employed in the primary, 21% in the secondary, Introduction 11 and 17% in the tertiary sector of economic production in 1800 (GeiBler 1992: 22, Fig. 2.2). As comparative data presented by Zapf and Flora (1971: 64-66) show, this pattern of distribution was very similar in the United States, France, and Japan at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while England was the only exception with a proportion around 77% of employed in the non-agricultural sectors. Although the threshold towards an industrial society was passed by the countries mentioned above at different times, most showed a share of more than 50% employed outside the agricultural sector latest by 1900. The number of people living in the cities is used as another indicator of social modernization. Since cities were defined by Zapf and Flora as local units with a population of at least 20,000 inhabitants, a majority of English lived in urban settlements in 1850, in Germany and the United States by 1900, and in France and Japan not before 1930 and 1940, respectively. In the last decade of the twentieth century, all the societies under observation here are strongly urbanized and can be described as postindustrial, although they differ regarding the degree of modernization and postindustrialization. Not only regarding socio-economic and socio-cultural conditions, but also as far as the political status is concerned, the differences between cities and non-cities have faded away in most Western societies. In the Middle Ages, some big cities, for example the German Reichsstaedte (Frankfurt, Nuremberg) or the Hansestaedte (Hamburg, Bremen, Luebeck) as well as some big cities in the Netherlands and the City States in Northern Italy were not only centers of economic activity, but did already enjoy a considerable degree of political freedom. In Germany, the citizenry of big cities enjoyed a special constitutional status which was originally not granted to the people living in the countryside. In the United States, the rights attributed to cities and rural communities were also not the same all over the country. Norton (1991: 24) concludes: "The tradition of the free or chartered cities and boroughs, based on an acceptance by the state of the contribution they made to the shared wealth as free centers of wealth and commerce, is a common root in virtually all European systems." This situation does no longer apply to modem political systems. Despite some differences in the number and quality of administrative responsibilities between cities and rural communities, people living inside and outside big cities enjoy the same democratic rights: "In twentieth-century Western Europe the most outstanding political developments have been the universalization of electoral democracy linked with the maturation of the party system, both at national and at local levels" (Norton 1991: 26).
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