Cities and Stability examines the threats that large cities pose to authoritarian regime survival and the ways that regimes respond to those threats, particularly focusing on China's management of urbanization through its household registration (hukou) system.

China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization" -- the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes. To combat the threat, many regimes, including China's, favor cities in policymaking. Cities and Stability shows this "urban bias" to be a Faustian Bargain: cities may be stabilized for a time, but the massive in-migration from the countryside that results can generate the conditions for political upheaval. Through its hukou system of internal migration restrictions, China has avoided this dilemma, simultaneously aiding urbanites and keeping farmers in the countryside. The system helped prevent social upheaval even during the Great Recession, when tens of millions of laid-off migrant workers dispersed from coastal cities. Jeremy Wallace's powerful account forces us to rethink the relationship between cities and political stability throughout the developing world.

From Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Miami, US cities are struggling to address the twin crises of high housing costs and household instability. Debates over the appropriate course of action have been defined by two poles: building more housing or enacting stronger tenant protections. These options are often treated as mutually exclusive, with support for one implying opposition to the other. Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy. The remaining recommendations are organized by what he calls the Three S’s of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. Phillips makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together. There is no single solution to the housing crisis—it will require a comprehensive approach backed by strong, diverse coalitions. The Affordable City is an essential tool for professionals and advocates working to improve affordability and increase community resilience through local action.

The cities of the developing world are hubs of economic growth, but they are increasingly ecologically unsustainable and unliveable. This book explores the issues of livelihood and ecological sustainability in cities of the developing world.

Metropolitan communities across the country are facing the same, seemingly unsolvable problems: the concentration of poverty in central cities, with flashpoints of increasing crime and segregation; declining older suburbs and vulnerable developing suburbs; and costly urban sprawl, with upper-middle-class residents and new jobs moving further and further out to an insulated, favored quarter. Exacerbating this polarization, the federal government has largely abandoned urban policy. Most officials, educators, and citizens have been at a loss to create workable solutions to these complex, widespread trends. And until now, there has been no national discussion to adequately and practically address the future of America's metropolitan regions. Metropolitics is the story of how demographic research and state-of-the-art mapping, together with resourceful and pragmatic politics, built a powerful political alliance between the central cities, declining inner suburbs, and developing suburbs with low tax bases. In an unprecedented accomplishment, groups formerly divided by race and class--poor minority groups and blue-collar suburbanites--together with churches, environmental groups, and parts of the business community, began to act in concert to stabilize their communities. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul believed that they were immune from the forces of central city decline, urban sprawl, and regional polarization, but the 1980s hit them hard. The number of poor and minority children in central-city schools doubled from 25 to 50 percent, segregation rapidly increased, distressed urban neighborhoods grew at the fourth fastest rate in the United States, and the murder rate in Minneapolis surpassed that of New York City. These changes tended to accelerate and intensify as they reached middle- and working-class bedroom communities, which were less able to respond and went into transition far more rapidly. On the other side of the region, massive infrastructure investment and exclusive zoning were creating a different type of community. In white-collar suburbs with high tax bases, where only 27 percent of the region's population lived, 61 percent of the region's new jobs were created. As the rest of the region struggled, these communities pulled away physically and financially. In this powerful book, Myron Orfield details a regional agenda and the political struggle that accompanied the creation of the nation's most significant regional government and the enactment of land use, fair housing, and tax-equity reform legislation. He shows the link between television and talk radio sensationalism and bad public policy and, conversely, how a well-delivered message can ensure broad press coverage of even complicated issues. Metropolitics and the experience of the Twin Cities show that no American region is immune from pervasive and difficult problems. Orfield argues that the forces of decline, sprawl, and polarization are too large for individual cities and suburbs to confront alone. The answer lies in a regional agenda that promotes both community and stability. Copublished with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

This book explores and debates the urban transformations that have taken place in Vienna over the past 30 years and their consequences in policy fields such as labour and housing, political and social participation and the environment. Historically, European cities have been characterised by a strong association between social cohesion, quality of life, economic ambition and a robust State. Vienna is an excellent example for that. In more recent years, however, cities were pressured to change policy principles and mechanisms in the context of demographic shifts, post-industrial transformations and welfare recalibration which have led to worsened social conditions in many cities. Each chapter in this volume discusses Vienna’s responses to these pressures in key policy arenas, looking at outcomes from the context-specific local arrangements. Against a theoretical framework debating the European city as a model of inclusion and social justice, authors explore the local capacity to innovate urban policies and to address new social risks, while paying attention to potential trade-offs. The book questions and assesses the city’s resilience using time series and an institutional analysis of four key dimensions that characterise the European city model within the context of post-industrial transition: redistribution, recognition, representation and sustainability. It offers a multiscalar perspective of urban governance through labour, housing, participatory and environmental policies, bringing together different levels and public policy types. Vienna: Still a Just City? is aimed at academics, researchers and policy-makers in urban studies, including urban sociology, ecology, geography and welfare. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.