Here's the summary:

My proposed research will shed new light on a major, but much-neglected question: What can we learn from Europe and each other about how best to achieve sustainable growth in North American cities?

The priorities of land developers and consumers often fail to reflect these concerns. In North America, the job of balancing environmental considerations against the demands of land developers and consumers falls largely to municipal councils and most councils find it very difficult to achieve a balance that is favourable to the environment.

Many fail repeatedly because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests. Finding an approach to urban growth that more effectively balances the interests of development companies and immediate consumer demands against a wider, longer-term public interest in a sustainable environment will be a major policy challenge in the decades to come.

If local governments cannot control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Although economic and consumer pressures favouring urban sprawl are world-wide, Europe has, in general, been more successful in planning compact cities, well-served by public transportation, than North America. One of the reasons, as I learned in a previous study - the first one listed below - is that land development interests exercise a great deal of influence in local politics, but are relatively small players at the national level. The sustainability of European cities benefits from the fact that many urban development regulations are laid down by national governments.

Though planning scholars are aware that there are significant differences between European and North American urban planning practices, there have been few careful, comparative studies. Political scientists understand the value of such studies, as witness the large political science literature on comparative European, North American and developing-world national politics, and another significant literature embodying cross-national comparisons of other aspects of city politics.

Though the management of urban growth offers similar opportunities to learn by comparing and contrasting the planning and development practices of European and North American cities, scholars concerned with urban development politics and policy have done little to develop those fields of study. My research will address that gap, with a three-city comparative case study of the multilevel governance of urban growth in three jurisdictions that have tried, to some degree, to centralize the management of urban growth: Metropolitan Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Greater Hamburg.

I will focus my research on three questions: How is the development of new subdivisions managed? What is the overall condition of municipal infrastructure? How well served by public transit is the urban area? Answers to these seemingly simple questions will throw up a wealth of political and administrative complexities, but they are sufficiently focused to keep the overall comparison both meaningful and manageable.

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The study in which I pointed out the advantages of having more urban planning authority at higher levels of government was:

Christopher Leo, "City politics in an era of globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing urban regime theory: Regulating local government in a global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The study that focused my attention on the significance for urban planning of state government intervention was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

To look at the full proposal and the references click here and here.

All that has changed. Today, there's a very good chance that the government, instead of running a program, will negotiate an arrangement with a company, a community organization or a religious organization whereby the government doles out some money and the company or other organization runs the program. Such arrangements between governments and civil society or business organizations are one of the reasons why the word "governance" is increasingly being substituted for "government". More than ever in the past, government is not a single entity, but a mosaic of many different arrangements for getting government work done - governance.

There is some good news in these changes, especially when the organizations running the government programs are community-based. Given favourable circumstances, organizations tied closely to a local community may be better-placed than any government bureaucracy to determine how best to realize, in each local context, the good intentions of government programs. However, the delegation of part of the work of government to other organizations also raises troubling questions of accountability.

To be sure, the government does not give out blank cheques, but the means by which accountability is maintained, and its credibility, varies from case to case. An organization may be given a specific sum of money to carry out a specified project. In such a case, the organization's accountability may be much the same as that of a government department, so that, in essence, the names have changed, but the process remains largely the same.

But if a contract is negotiated with a company, the terms of the contract may be treated as commercial information, subject to trade secrecy, and neither voters nor most of their representatives may know exactly what money is being spent and for what. Or the government may simply invest in a project that is run by a company or other organization. In that case, the organization will make commitments in return for receiving government funding, but may after that be largely free to run the program as it sees fit.

Some of these arrangements may well be a good idea. Others should ring alarm bells, but we lack an alarm system. In a political system heavy with procedural rules and principles of action, we are short of principles to help us distinguish between good governance arrangements and bad ones. My attention was directed to this issue when the City of Winnipeg agreed last February to invest $3.4 million over 15 years to help an organization called Youth For Christ, build an $11.7 million youth centre on a vacant lot in an area of the city that has been struggling, with significant investment from the aboriginal community, and with partial success, to overcome its long-standing skid-row reputation. The federal government contributed $3.2 million in infrastructure funding.

Artist's conception of the centre

As I tried to work out a way to think about this issue, I remembered that there are at least two other religious organizations active in inner city neighbourhood issues in Winnipeg: The Westminster Housing Society, which receives an annual grant from the Westminster United Church Foundation, and New Life Ministries, an evangelical inner-city church. These organizations have drawn on government funding to carry out home renovation projects, which have helped improve the security and liveability of both neighbourhoods without turning either one into an upper-income enclave.

The projects of both organizations have been flying under the radar for years, but the Youth For Christ centre raised a storm of controversy, all of which had to do with the merits of that particular project. Is it a good idea to fund a Christian mission to an aboriginal community that has barely begun to come to terms with the legacy of Christian residential schools? What else is there to fill that empty lot? Who else will reach out to inner-city youth? Will the centre serve the inner city or will its state-of-the art facilities make it a commuter facility? Or - this from an evangelical Christian - how does a religious organization justify taking government money?

The debate was chaotic and inconclusive, until the city ended it by handing out the money. One of the things that made it confusing is that it was not guided by principles that would turn our thoughts beyond the particular case to the bigger question of how we are evolving the way we govern ourselves. Let me suggest three questions which, if asked of all such initiatives in governance, might provide a starting-point toward the development of some principles:

•Is the organization in question being funded to carry out a specific, defined project, or is the government investing in facilities that will operate on the organization's own terms and may evolve in a way not originally intended?

•Is the organization likely to be responsive to the community it's being funded to work in?

•What other agendas does the organization pursue, and how do these fit or clash with the character of the community in question?

For my money, Westminster Housing Society gets a thumbs-up, because it does socially useful work that seems largely uninfluenced by its religious foundations. New Life Ministries earns my praise for a lot of good work in its neighbourhood, together with some suspicion about how that work is influenced by its mission to the neighbourhood - on balance, a somewhat hesitant assent to funding. Youth For Christ gets thumbs-down, not only because it seems questionable to me how genuinely it will serve its new neighbourhood, but also because, as citizens, we are investing money in a permanent facility over which we will have little or no long-term control.

It's not important what I think. What matters is that we all wake up to the implications of the new age of governance and start thinking seriously about the principles that should underlie it.

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For more on community-based governance, look up:

Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240

Neil Bradford, Place-based public policy: Towards a new urban and community agenda for Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks, 2005.

There is much to worry about in this trend, but most worrisome of all is the social isolation of the poor - the formation of neighbourhoods largely or wholly populated by people who live there only because they cannot afford to live elsewhere; ghettos, defined by poverty and often race, and marked by deteriorating public services and facilities, as well as limited opportunities for jobs, recreation and education.

Small wonder then that policy-makers have devoted thought and effort to attempts to recapture the social diversity that once was an essential feature of cities and that, even today, is a big part of what we mean by the word "urbanity". In part this has been done by dispersal programs whereby residents of low-income neighbourhoods are offered an opportunity to collect rent subsidies and use them to move to other neighbourhoods.

These programs have met with widespread opposition. Dispersal schemes have been criticized for depriving already distressed neighbourhoods of their most capable residents, on the grounds that it is they who are most likely to be motivated or able to take advantage of opportunities to move to other neighbourhoods. Opponents of public housing redevelopment programs have pointed to statistics that show a relatively small percentage of original residents returning to the redeveloped areas as proof that redevelopment is tantamount to gentrification and displacement of the poor.

Proponents of income-mixing schemes, whose pedigree goes back at least to Jane Jacobs's Death and life of great American cities, have offered a variety of reasons why mixed income neighbourhoods are better places for the poor: a middle-class presence builds social capital; middle-class people provide salutary role models; they know, and can teach others, how to take advantage of education and job opportunities; a middle class presence deters criminals, and makes it more likely that a good level of public services and facilities will be provided by the municipality.

There are plenty of arguments on both sides, and public discussion has resolved itself largely into a left-liberal ideological debate, with maximum opportunity on both sides for rhetoric and minimum enlightenment. A recent article in the Urban Affairs Review, therefore, blows over this tired controversy like a breath of fresh air. Authors Mark L. Joseph, Robert J. Chaskin and Henry S. Webber offer a careful examination of the theoretical underpinnings of the various arguments for mixed-income neighbourhoods and draw on a large literature to assess the evidence for each theory.

The outcome of their assessment is a specification of the benefits we might reasonably be able to expect to gain from mixed-income development and those that are less likely to materialize. The authors find, for example, that personal social ties between low-income and middle-income residents of mixed neighbourhoods are unlikely to develop. This largely puts paid to the notion that less well-off residents can expect to get advice regarding job or education opportunities from their better-off neighbours, and casts doubt on the idea that the affluent will provide role models for the poor (a dubious notion to begin with, given the frequency of personal problems, bad habits, and social discord throughout society).

At the same time, the evidence the authors find gives credence to the idea that a middle-class presence can provide a bulwark against social disorder and support for the provision of a high level of public services for the neighbourhood as a whole. The authors go on to point out that, if we start with a specific and realistic set of expectations for mixed-income development, we will be in a better position to make intelligent decisions about such things as the design of neighbourhoods, the mix of populations, the level and types of public services provided, and the procedures followed in implementing programs.

In three other posts, "Thinking a little harder about urban crime", "Are you tired of the sprawl game?", and "Fixing sprawl would be a lot easier if we'd focus on the problem", I provided examples of how the fixed ideological positions we love to argue about tend to defeat our intentions of improving our lives and those of others. We imagine ourselves to be standing up and fighting for what is right, but often we are in fact substituting slogans for thought, and putting up obstacles to the improvements we seek. Big ideas are well and good up to a point, but we have plenty of them. What we need more of is critical questions and smart research. Authors Joseph, Chaskin and Webber thought of a good question to ask, and have assembled answers we can use.

Want to ask some critical questions about mixed-income neighbourhoods, and do a little smart research, of your own? The points briefly summarized in this blog entry are subjected to careful analysis and thorough documentation in:

Joseph, M., Chaskin, R., & Webber, H. (2007). The Theoretical Basis for Addressing Poverty Through Mixed-Income Development Urban Affairs Review, 42 (3), 369-409 DOI: 10.1177/1078087406294043

Joseph et al also provide lots of citations of other good research, as does:

Susan J. Popkin, Bruce Katz, Mary K. Cunningham, Karen D. Brown, Jeremy Gustafson, and Margery A. Turner. 2004. "A decade of Hope VI: Research findings and policy challenges." Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Accessed at www.urban.org.

Although there has been much agonizing over the apparent inability of most local governments to take meaningful control of urban development, there has been little or no discussion, in the academic literature, of alternatives to local control. And yet there are very good reasons for questioning the assumption that land use is primarily a concern for municipal councils and local planning authorities, indeed for seeing urban growth as an issue that is both national and global in its significance. Let's take a look at three of them.

The environment

It is now widely agreed that the health of the environment is a global issue. We usually think of such problems as climate change, and soil, air and water pollution as being related to economic growth, population growth and energy consumption, and rightly so, but we rarely consider the environmental significance of urban growth.

We all know that petroleum-driven transportation is a major emitter of greenhouse gases and a variety of other pollutants, but we're very likely to forget that urban land use is an important determinant of petroleum consumption. Standard-issue North American development, featuring generally low densities and strict separation of residential, commercial and industrial areas from each other, privileges the automobile as the primary mode of transportation, often eliminates other means of transportation as viable alternatives, and even forces automobile use when one might prefer a different way of getting around. (The next time you're in a suburban home, try figuring out a way to fetch a litre of milk without using petroleum.)

And that's not even mentioning how vast expanses of pavement produce run-off that pollutes our waterways, or the impact of residential septic tanks on underground water resources. In short, a very significant proportion of the global environmental problems we struggle with are driven by urban land use patterns. Urban land use, therefore, is a global issue.

Agriculture...

...is an issue that's national in scope, for a number of reasons. Low-density urban development that straggles out across agricultural areas undermines the viability of adjacent agriculture, to a degree that's more serious than most people realize. In order to impair the viability of agriculture, you don't have to pave over farmland. All you have to do is locate a few urbanites in the area, and before you know it, you get conflicts between the farmers and the space-seeking urbanites. Urban-style development may drive up the price of land, forcing farmers to pay more property taxes. Urbanites complain about livestock smells and heavy machinery on the roads, their septic tanks pollute the water table, and their pets harass farm animals. Such conflicts are well known, by both land use planners and agronomists, to undermine the viability of commercial agriculture. This concern is even more important in Canada than the United States because a very substantial proportion of Canada's limited supply of prime agricultural land is located in urbanizing areas.

Infrastructure

In short, agriculture is a national resource that is threatened by urban sprawl. Another national problem that originates in large part from urban land use decisions is the seemingly never-ending "infrastructure crisis". Since the 1990s, both Canadian and American governments have been allocating funds to address this problem, while the rhetoric surrounding it has escalated from "crumbling roads" to "collapsing bridges". The problem is becoming more serious even as money continues to be poured into addressing it.

An important source of that problem is difficult to identify from national statistics, but clearly visible at the local level. A case I have investigated is that of Winnipeg, where, for decades, money has been readily available to extend roads, bridges, and sewer and water lines - often across the bald prairie - but spending on infrastructure maintenance has consistently fallen short of needs. In other words, the city's expansion of infrastructure is out-pacing its ability to maintain existing infrastructure.

The degree to which maintenance is falling short varies from city to city, with some cities in more serious straits than others. We need much more research to gain an overview of the local sources of the infrastructure deficit. What is clear already, however, is that federal and provincial funds are being spent to address infrastructure deficits that originate, to a significant extent, in local land use decisions. The problems that stem from this local decision-making are sufficiently regional and national in scope to make out a serious case that there is a legitimate regional and national interest in the setting of urban growth policies.

In Europe, there are national and European Union rules governing land use. In North America, Oregon is notable for having enforced state regulations governing urban land use for some time, and Ontario has recently promulgated rules governing the growth of the Greater Toronto Area. It's time for other jurisdictions to assess these examples, and see what can be done better, and what can be done elsewhere.

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There is a vast literature on urban sprawl, smart growth and related questions, but there has been very little done in North America to treat it as a problem that is national in scope. Two recent exceptions are:

Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the wilderness: A new vision of land use in America. Washington: Island Press, 2007.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Earlier publications of my own that form part of the basis for this entry are:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Christopher Leo with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is urban sprawl back on the political agenda? Local growth control, regional growth management and politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.