This article investigates the impact of public land ownership on long-term processes of urban development by comparing the political histories of waterfront redevelopment in Chicago, Vancouver, and Toronto. The study is driven by two research questions: Why have redevelopment efforts in Chicago and Vancouver apparently succeeded whereas those in Toronto failed? And what was the impact of public land ownership on these outcomes? Drawing from archival, interview, and geospatial data, I argue that land ownership conditions had a defining and enduring impact on the shape and scale of waterfront redevelopment in each city. What separates Toronto's waterfront from Chicago and Vancouver is not how much land was historically controlled by public versus private owners, but rather the relative distribution and concentration of these assets. Early political events involving the consolidation or fragmentation of land ownership established institutional arrangements that either enabled or inhibited effective implementation.
The Ontario Places to Grow Plan, finalized in 2006, marks the boldest attempt to address urban sprawl in Canada, and arguably North America. Among its many components, the Plan establishes a permanent greenbelt covering roughly 1.8 million acres (728,000 hectares) of environmentally sensitive land. This article seeks to explain the political calculations and conditions that led to the Ontario policy. I argue that the Plan was partially devised to garner support in key suburban ridings (electoral districts) across the Greater Toronto Area in the 2003 provincial election. The campaign marked the final ingredient in the opening of a critical "policy window" through which dramatic changes in land‐use policy could be realized. The Ontario case underlines the utility of adaptive models of policy making to the study of environmental policy, but suggests that these models perhaps underemphasize the desire of politicians and political parties to pursue policies in their electoral interest.El Plan de Lugares de Ontario para Crecer, publicado en 2006, señala el intento más audaz para hacer frente a la expansión urbana en Canadá, y quizás en toda Norteamérica. Entre sus muchos componentes, el plan establece un cinturón verde permanente que cubre aproximadamente 1.8 millones de acres (728,000 hectáreas) de tierra ambientalmente sensible. Este artículo busca explicar los cálculos políticos y las causas que llevaron a dicha política. Argumento que el plan fue parcialmente ideado para reunir apoyo de distritos suburbanos electorales clave a través del Área Metropolitana de Toronto en la elección provincial de 2003. La campaña marcó el ingrediente final en la apertura de una "ventana política" crítica que permitió cambios dramáticos en la política de uso de suelo. El caso de Ontario subraya la utilidad de modelos adaptativos de hechura de políticas en el estudio de la política ambiental, pero sugiere que quizás estos modelos subestiman el deseo de los políticos y los partidos de buscar políticas que los beneficien electoralmente.
Abstract.This paper expands on the work of Higgins, whose 1979 review remains the only synthetic overview of the field, by presenting an updated analysis of the study of municipal, local and urban issues in Canadian political science. We conclude that despite several discursive shifts—from the descriptive works of the 1950s and 1960s, through to the blossoming of interdisciplinary research in the 1980s and 1990s—Higgins' principal conclusion, that the various streams of urban politics continue to be studied in relative isolation from each other, still rings true. Despite the recent broadening of the literature, productive scholarly debates within and across research clusters are rare, and where debates do emerge, they are more often driven by current events and normative claims than by theoretical innovations. To remedy these deficiencies, we propose several bases for a new urban research agenda that is more methodologically and theoretically diverse and connected to work in other disciplines.Résumé.Dans la foulée des travaux de Higgins, cet article présente une mise à jour sur les enjeux municipaux, locaux et urbains en science politique canadienne. Higgins publia en 1979 la seule synthèse des travaux dans ce domaine disponible à ce jour. Il y concluait que les diverses problématiques associées aux politiques urbaines étaient étudiées de manière isolée les unes par rapport aux autres. Cette conclusion nous apparaît encore juste, malgré les nombreux changements de discours qu'a connus ce domaine d'études. En effet, les travaux descriptifs des années 1950 et 1960 ont fait place, dans les décennies 1980 et 1990, à un foisonnement de recherches interdisciplinaires. Or, malgré ce récent élargissement de la littérature, les débats productifs dans et entre les différents champs de recherche sont rares. De plus, lorsque des débats émergent, ils sont plus souvent motivés par les événements de l'actualité et les opinions émises que par l'innovation théorique. Pour combler ces lacunes, nous proposons plusieurs avenues ouvrant sur un nouvel agenda de recherche en politiques urbaines à la fois plus diversifié sur le plan méthodologique et théorique et davantage connecté aux travaux réalisés à l'extérieur de la science politique.
AbstractSince its inception in 2009, Uber has grown into a technology behemoth, with operations in over 70 countries and 500 cities around the world. Along the way, it has successfully forced regulatory upheaval in hundreds of local taxi markets controlled by municipal authorities. In this sense, Uber is not only a market disruptor, but also a policy disruptor. This paper examines the nature of such policy disruption at the local level by reviewing regulatory responses to Uber in ten North American cities. We find that regulatory outcomes are a function of two factors: Uber's government relations strategy, either cooperative or confrontational, and the degree to which local governments perceive Uber as complementary or harmful to the existing marketplace. We conclude by proposing a typology of regulatory responses to Uber as a basis to identify patterns in the behavior of municipal regulatory authorities and political leaders.
AbstractThis research note describes the Canadian Municipal Elections Database (CMED), a new publicly available and actively maintained dataset of more than 24,000 municipal elections in Canada. We describe the need for high-quality election results data for municipal politics research and describe the content, sources and construction of the CMED. To illustrate the value of the CMED, we estimate gender differences in municipal electoral performance for the first time, finding that women are, on average, more likely than men to win municipal elections in Canada.
