Introduction: Public and Private Provision of Urban Public Goods

Abstract

What is public, what is private, and what is the relationship between them? Can the public interest be clearly identified and protected? What role should government play in the lives of ordinary citizens? These are questions currently engaging policy makers and the general public as well as scholars in a range of disciplines. The provision and financing of urban public goods is one arena in which such questions have arisen. Historically, governments, private entities, and mixed forms such as public-private partnerships have undertaken these activities in the United States and other countries (Beito et al. 1989; Dyble 2010; Goodrich 1960; Hodge et al. 2010; Jacobson and Tarr 1995). In the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States, tax revolts and concerns about “big government” led to increased scrutiny of the appropriate role of government. Contracting out of government activities and privatization both assumed increased importance (Dyble 2012; Light 1999).