Varieties of Urbanism: A Comparative View of Inequality and the Dual Dimensions of Metropolitan Fragmentation

• Author: Kathleen Thelen,Justin Steil,Yonah Freemark
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220908966
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220908966

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(2) 235 –274

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220908966

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Article

Varieties of Urbanism:

A Comparative View of

Inequality and the Dual

Dimensions of Metropolitan

Fragmentation

Yonah Freemark, Justin Steil, and Kathleen Thelen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

A large literature on urban politics documents the connection between metropolitan

fragmentation and inequality. This article situates the United States comparatively to

explore the structural features of local governance that underpin this connection.

Examining five metropolitan areas in North America and Europe, the article identifies

two distinct dimensions of fragmentation: (a) fragmentation through jurisdictional

proliferation (dividing regions into increasing numbers of governments) and (b)

fragmentation through resource hoarding (via exclusion, municipal parochialism, and

fiscal competition). This research reveals how distinctive the United States is in the

ways it combines institutional arrangements that facilitate metropolitan fragmentation

(through jurisdictional proliferation) and those that reward such fragmentation

(through resource-hoarding opportunities). Non-US cases furnish examples of policies

that reduce jurisdictional proliferation or remove resource-hoarding opportunities.

Mitigating the inequality-inducing effects of fragmentation is possible, but policies

must be designed with an identification of the specific aspects of local governance

structures that fuel inequality in the first place.

Keywords

inequality, fragmentation, metropolitan governance, local politics, resource hoarding

Corresponding Author:

Yonah Freemark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA

02139, USA.

Email: freemark@mit.edu

908966PASXXX10.1177/0032329220908966Politics & SocietyFreemark et al.

research-article2020

236 Politics & Society 48(2)

Between 2002 and 2017, the number of local government units in the United States

increased by more than 2,500.1 Some of these local governments incorporated as new

municipalities or seceded from larger school districts to form wealthier, whiter districts.

These events are part of a long-standing trend toward jurisdictional proliferation in

many metropolitan areas. The trend accelerated in the late nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, and especially since the 1970s, as suburbs incorporated to avoid being sub-

sumed within larger cities that featured more socially heterogeneous populations and

lower-income households.2 Thus, for instance, the wealthy Brookline suburb is sur-

rounded on three sides by the city of Boston, having successfully resisted annexation

since 1873; University Park, with one of Texas’s best-performing school districts, is

entirely encircled by Dallas and has tenaciously defended its autonomy since 1945; in

the San Francisco Bay Area, Piedmont, once known as the “City of Millionaires,”

resisted annexation by Oakland in 1897 and in 2013 installed cameras with license plate

readers at city entry points, purportedly to combat “spillover” crime.3 The power to

construct and maintain jurisdictional boundaries is frequently deployed by affluent

communities to hoard resources at the expense of their less affluent neighbors. In the

words of a leader in an effort to detach three of the highest-performing schools from the

county school district that includes Chattanooga, Tennessee, “local control is power.”4

Major metropolitan areas throughout the rich democracies exhibit patterns of spa-

tial inequality, but the politics of metropolitan fragmentation and the extent to which

they entrench or mitigate these inequalities vary widely. Like Boston and San

Francisco, the London and Paris metropolitan areas contain a large number of separate

jurisdictions. Moreover, a wave of reforms beginning in the 1980s delegated signifi-

cant new powers and responsibilities to those European localities. Sometimes intro-

duced under the banner of “new public management,” the British and French

governments designed those reforms to increase administrative efficiency and enhance

local control over service delivery.5 The devolution of powers, however, did not

unleash the same intense resource-hoarding dynamics that are commonplace in the

United States. Indeed, in some cases they inspired actions such as municipal mergers.

The words of a French mayor who agreed to join a neighboring city in a new munici-

pality stand in striking contrast to those of the Chattanooga leader quoted above: “We

are stronger when we are together.”6

Across the rich democracies, cities are important sites of political contestation over

crucial issues of economic redistribution and social opportunity. The contributions of

local politics to national-level differences in inequality and poverty are undisputed.

Yet the literature on cities in comparative political economy remains underdeveloped

as a result of a continued emphasis on national-level institutions and political dynam-

ics. Meanwhile, although there is a large and rich literature on US urban politics,

comparisons to other rich democracies are rare.7

This article situates the US case in a comparative perspective to isolate the features

of local governance that support the resource-hoarding dynamics that are so character-

istic of its local politics—and to identify some of the institutions and the mechanisms

through which other rich democracies reduce those dynamics. No rich democracy

escapes the problems of spatial inequality that characterize metropolitan life, and yet

Freemark et al. 237

the degree to which municipal boundaries are associated with highly unequal policy

packages and public services is particularly pronounced in the United States. Indeed,

the strategies commonly deployed by affluent US communities to separate them-

selves—administratively and fiscally—from their less affluent neighbors are virtually

unthinkable in many other industrialized democracies. A comparative perspective thus

offers a fresh angle on the possibilities and pitfalls of local control, providing new

insights by allowing us to consider variation in the structure of local governance—

varieties of urbanism—and the relationship of that variation to metropolitan growth

and its inequality-generating effects.8

We argue that to understand the relationship between local government structure

and economic inequality, metropolitan “fragmentation” must be understood in at least

two dimensions and considered separately across multiple policy arenas.9 The first

dimension of fragmentation (and the common understanding of the term) is the divi-

sion of a metropolitan area into many municipalities surrounding a central city; we

refer to this as jurisdictional proliferation. The ability to form and maintain small

jurisdictions is determined by legally defined capacities to incorporate, annex, and

secede, as well as by the ability to create so-called special purpose authorities. Such

capacities already distinguish the United States from many of its peers.

Evidence from other advanced industrial countries, however, demonstrates that the

number of separate local governments does not in itself produce inequality. Moreover,

examples from abroad suggest that institutional structures can either incentivize juris-

dictional proliferation or discourage such municipal boundary drawing. We show that

the returns to jurisdictional proliferation depend crucially on the availability of oppor-

tunities for resource hoarding—the second dimension of metropolitan fragmentation.

Comparative analysis thus reveals how distinctive the United States is in the way it

combines institutional arrangements that facilitate metropolitan fragmentation

(through jurisdictional proliferation) and those that reward such fragmentation

(through opportunities for resource hoarding).

Comparative analysis also yields new insights into the dynamics through which

jurisdictional proliferation and resource hoarding become entrenched—but also how

they can be reversed. The US experience suggests that inequality-promoting features

of metropolitan institutions often deepen gradually through largely hidden processes

of change—drift and conversion—when, for example, municipal boundaries are held

in place even as populations shift (drift) or when the redrawing of boundaries turns

otherwise progressive property taxes into regressive revenue structures (conversion).10

Other countries provide examples of measures designed to reverse jurisdictional pro-

liferation or limit its negative impacts. In the cases we consider here, changes to either

of the dual dimensions of metropolitan fragmentation have required overt political

reforms, in some cases following a transition in political power or in other cases rep-

resenting a technocratic response to perceived inefficiencies or inequality.

In addressing these issues through a comparative lens, our analysis engages a long-

standing debate on the merits of local control. Some scholars take a sanguine view of

local governance as promoting responsiveness by bringing the state “closer” to its

constituents, thus improving service delivery and tailoring policy to local conditions.