National Urban Policy and the Local State

Abstract

There has been a failure in the mainstream discussion of national urban policy to recognize that policy ends and means are derived from political choices (not economic laws); that federal policy has been contradictory in rhetoric and effect but consistent in favoring capital over place and people; and that proposed national solutions tend to be top-down and limited, particularly in relation to class and race. To confront these issues, the terms of discourse must be reconstituted to reflect the social, economic, and political value of place and the legitimacy of community-level democratic participation in the local state and control of production.