Zack Taylor - Böcker

Rising income inequality and concentrated poverty threaten the social sustainability of North American cities. Suburban growth endangers sensitive ecosystems, water supplies, and food security. Existing urban infrastructure is crumbling while governments struggle to pay for new and expanded services. Can our inherited urban governance institutions and policies effectively respond to these problems? In Shaping the Metropolis Zack Taylor compares the historical development of American and Canadian urban governance, both at the national level and through specific metropolitan case studies. Examining Minneapolis–St Paul and Portland, Oregon, in the United States, and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada, Taylor shows how differences in the structure of governing institutions in American states and Canadian provinces cumulatively produced different forms of urban governance. Arguing that since the nineteenth century American state governments have responded less effectively to rapid urban growth than Canadian provinces, he shows that the concentration of authority in Canadian provincial governments enabled the rapid adoption of coherent urban policies after the Second World War, while dispersed authority in American state governments fostered indecision and catered to parochial interests. Most contemporary policy problems and their solutions are to be found in cities. Shaping the Metropolis shows that urban governance encompasses far more than local government, and that states and provinces have always played a central role in responding to urban policy challenges and will continue to do so in the future.

Canada’s big cities are at the forefront of social and economic change. They account for most of Canada’s population growth, they are magnets for immigrants from all parts of the world, and they have led Canada’s shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. Today, perhaps more than ever, Canada’s cities are the places where new policy problems, new political movements, and new demands for representation first emerge. In City Politics in Canada: Forty Years of Continuity and Change, co-editors Martin Horak, Jack Lucas, and Zack Taylor and their team of authors explore how these great transformations have reshaped the practice of politics in seven large Canadian cities: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Calgary. In doing so, they revisit and carry forward the ambition of City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton and published by UTP in 1983. That landmark volume was the first to offer an in-depth view of Canadian city politics. Forty years later, a new generation of scholars take up the same expansive, cross-country goal. The editors’ introduction presents a holistic picture of urban change in Canada, complete with up-to-date social, economic, fiscal, and electoral data, and identifies important questions. The city chapters, written by local experts, illuminate the dynamics of political continuity and change over four transformative decades. In the closing chapter, the editors synthesize the findings to draw out new insights about the nature of Canadian urban politics.