The Politics of U.S. Urban Agendas: Ideology, Government and Public Policies

The chapter offers a detailed examination of the American national urban agenda and policies from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present day. It explains the complex web of demographic and macroeconomic dynamics that affect urban agenda-setting. Aspects of political culture and ideology are thematized in discussing policy design features of “explicitly urban” and “non-urban” governmental policymaking, concluding that the governance of democratic federalism is a determinant feature in American urban policies. In the evolution of American national urban policy different alternating policy design approaches can be observed. A distinctive feature is the prevailing technical or socio-political constructions of policy problems related to the rationality of planning at work—whether the “design attitude” moves beyond ideas of technical innovation and social engineering, based on powerful social theories, professional problem solving and ex-ante policy integration, or whether a more interactive designing is under experiment, with open and participated problem-solving, incremental coordination, inspired by ideas of social innovation and democratic design thinking. Several types of important factors come into play in the enterprise of urban agendas at the national level. Political and legal resources, public scrutiny, expert advice and advocacy planning, academic involvement matter a lot; but the ability to activate local resources is essential to the goal. During specific periods, the influential leadership of charismatic Presidents was crucial to give impetus to a political agenda for urban America. Political and ideological consensus, budget constraints, unforeseen events conditioned the results for change. But policy narratives describing urban conditions and potential for innovation produced new powerful representations of America and its future, becoming a frame for action with influential legacies in the aftermath. The U.S. case is well suited to come up with generalizations on urban agendas. Differently from other countries where the stimulus to a domestic national urban agenda derives from policy transfer mechanisms, under the influence of supranational or international organizations—by adaptation, or imitation, rarely coercion—and/or in the opportunity of global urban policy agendas, the U.S. governmental system elaborated its own methods and schemes of intervention. The U.S. case offers a wide range of innovative formulations of urban-related program policies, which have been a source of policy transfer for policy design. It is a critical case for policy learning from both an understanding-oriented and an action-oriented perspective, and it is also a paradigmatic case as it has a prototypical value and sets the standards for policy research on urban agendas. U.S. urban policy over the time frame considered herein has been a reference model in urban policy studies, acknowledged worldwide. The case study presented in the chapter served as the foundation for the development of the theoretical-conceptual framework and the research guidelines for the empirical analysis of the 12 international case studies included in the volume "Identifying Models of Nationa Urban Agendas. A View to the Global Transition", to which 22 researchers have contributed. This book encompasses the results of a comparative research project entitled "Models of national urban agendas in perspective", developed within the Jean Monnet Chair “The Urban and Territorial dimension of EU policies” held by Francesca Gelli (from 2016 to 2019) at the University Iuav of Venice.