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Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Theories of Urban Growth, Sustainability, and Transparent Development -- Sustainable Development and the Growth Paradigm -- Steady-State Economics and Dematerialization -- Three Dimensions of Growth -- Regional Frameworks for Sustainable Development -- Regional Economic Development -- Bioregional Development -- Local Economies -- Transparency in Sustainable Urban Development -- Critical Theory Perspectives on Urban Land Development -- Exchange Value Versus Use Value -- Property Speculation -- Critical Theory and Sustainable Urban Development -- The Producer-Consumer Relationship -- The Person-Place Relationship -- References -- Chapter 2: The Speculative Growth Paradigm in the History of Phoenix -- Boosterism -- Non-local Capital Investment -- Property Speculation and Fraud -- Growth-Predicated Public Policy -- Generative Development and the Future of Phoenix's Growth Culture -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 3: A History of Property Development and Ownership in Downtown Phoenix -- Urban Decline and Automobile-Based Redevelopment Efforts -- Neobohemian Strategies of Urban Development -- Site-Specific Government Infill Development Initiatives -- Private Infill Development Market and Government Influence -- Vacant Land and Local Property Ownership in Downtown Phoenix, 1992-2012 -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 4: The Political Economy of Land Speculation in Downtown Phoenix -- Urban Growth Regimes and Speculation -- Analyzing Land Speculation in Phoenix, 1992-2012 -- Structural Speculation in Downtown Phoenix -- The Effect of Land Speculation on Infill Development -- Speculative Business Cycles -- Leveraging Cracks in the Foundations of Urban Regimes -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 5: Policy Approaches to Transparent Urban Development in Phoenix

This book studies both the tangible benefits and substantial barriers to sustainable development in the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Utilizing mixed research methods to probe downtown Phoenix's political economy of development, this study illustrates how non-local property ownership and land speculation negatively impacted a concerted public-private effort to encourage infill construction on vacant land. The book elaborates urban sustainability not only as a set of ecological and design prescriptions, but as a field needing increased engagement with the growth-based impetus, structural economic forces, and political details behind American urban land policy. Demonstrating how land use policies evolved in relation to Phoenix's historical dependence on outside investment, and are now interwoven across jurisdictional scales, the book concludes by identifying policy intervention points to increase the sustainability of Phoenix's development trajectory.

Land speculation has been an integral component of the political economy of land development in American urban history. In the American Sunbelt, land speculation occurs amid progrowth governance regimes that engage in intermunicipal competition for capital investment. This article presents a mixed-methods case study of vacant land speculation in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, before, during, and after the mid-2000s property boom. Results indicate that land speculation represented a significant barrier to both public and private infill development efforts, and that some municipal development initiatives actually facilitated private speculative profits. Speculative strategies are enabled when weaknesses in the coordination and bargaining power of urban growth regimes, derived from conflict within and between governmental scales, can be exploited by individual market actors. The self-propulsive nature of speculative property market cycles, unconstrained by local regimes increasingly dependent on nonlocal capital investment, represents an autonomous force actively orienting entries into property markets and influencing the ability to enact sustainable infill development.

All cities, from the distant past to the present, provide services for their residents, but the nature and level of urban services vary widely, as do the providers. How are we to understand this variation? We examine the major theoretical and conceptual approaches to urban services, and find that none is sufficiently comprehensive to explain patterns of service provision in all types of cities: public choice theory, co-production, critical theory, urban political ecology, collective action theory, and social integration. We use two premodern cities – Zanzibar and Tikal – to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these theories. A major challenge is to account for both central administrative control of services and more generative, bottom-up service provision.

This paper presents initial findings from longer-term transdisciplinary research concerning the social dynamics of urban neighbourhoods. It examines the spatial clustering of ethnicity and class in neighbourhoods over urban history, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to contemporary cities. Fourteen distinct drivers of social clustering are identified, grouped under the headers of macro-structural forces, the state, local regimes and institutions, and bottom–up processes. The operation of these processes is examined through three historical and three archaeological case studies of clustering. It is concluded that: clustering is a common, but not universal, attribute of cities; there is much variation in clustering patterns, both within and between cities and urban traditions; and, consideration of a wide variety of drivers is required to understand historical and modern residential dynamics.