Faculty
Alan Altshuler
Professor
Department of Urban Planning and Design
Publications
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Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investments
Since the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s, the politics of large-scale public investment in and around major American cities has received little scholarly attention. In Mega-Projects, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since. They also appraise the most important consequences of policy shifts over this half-century and draw out common themes from the rich variety of programmatic and project developments that they chronicle. The authors integrate narratives of national as well as state and local policymaking, and of mobilization by (mainly local) project advocates, with a profound examination of how well leading theories of urban politics explain the observed realities. The specific cases they analyze include a wide mix of transportation and downtown revitalization projects, drawn from numerous regions—most notably Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Portland, and Seattle. While their original research focuses on highway, airport, and rail transit programs and projects, they draw as well on the work of others to analyze the politics of public investment in urban renewal, downtown retailing, convention centers, and professional sports facilities. In comparing their findings with leading theories of urban and American politics, Altshuler and Luberoff arrive at some surprising findings about which perform best and also reveal some important gaps in the literature as a whole. In a concluding chapter, they examine the potential effects of new fiscal pressures, business mobilization to relax environmental constraints, and security concerns in the wake of September 11. And they make clear their own views about how best to achieve a balance between developmental, environmental, and democratic values in public investment decisionmaking. Integrating fifty years of urban development history with leading theories of urban and American politics, MEGA-PROJECTS provides significant new insights into urban and intergovernmental politics.
Governance
and Opportunity in Metropolitan America
The Committee on Improving the Future of U.S. Cities Through Improved Metropolitan Area Governance was charged with examining metropolitan problems and their relationship to metropolitan governance. Determining that the future of U.S. cities merited serious attention by the Academy, the Three Presidents' Committee of the National Research Council (NRC), composed of the presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, provided funds to support the study. The committee gratefully acknowledges additional support received from the Rockefeller Foundation for its information-gathering activities. The committee's original scope of work and plan of action envisioned a focus on a small number of "problems of metropolitan areas" (transportation, environmental regulation, and residential segregation were suggested); the unifying concern was to be "the extent to which current governance structures contribute to improvements in these areas or exacerbate the problems." The committee's task was thus a logical extension of two previous NRC reports: Urban Change and Poverty (1988) was concerned with demographic and economic trends affecting urban areas and their central cities, and Inner-City Poverty in the United States (1990) focused more intensively on the extent and location of neighborhood poverty and the question of neighborhood effects. Following the original charge, the committee began by making clear that its conception of urban was metropolitan in scope, and therefore we took urban problems to mean metropolitan-area problems. Metropolitan problems were defined as problems affecting the entire metropolitan area or significant parts of it or problems caused by the characteristics of metropolitan areas.
Innovation in American Government: Challenges, Opportunities, and Dilemmas
All organizations, both public and private, need innovation, but making innovation work in government is a greater challenge than doing so in business. This book identifies a number of dilemmas that complicate the process of innovating in American government. For example, there is the "trust dilemma": Innovation may be necessary to establish public faith in the ability of government agencies to perform, but before the public grants agencies a license to be truly innovative, it needs to be convinced that these same agencies have the ability to perform. The contributors to this book analyze a number of issues raised by the task of innovation, including: Who is responsible for innovating? How can innovative individuals and teams be held accountable? What kinds of organizational arrangements beget the most innovation? How can innovation be fostered in agencies devoted to routinization? How should innovative ideas be disseminated? And what exactly is an "innovation" anyway? The contributors gathered data for this book from winners and finalists in the Ford Foundation's Innovations Awards program, as well as from other innovators and innovations. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Babak J. Armajani, Michael Barzelay, W. Lance Bennett, Paul Berman, Richard F. Elmore, Robert M. Entman, Lee S. Friedman, Thomas N. Gilmore, Olivia Golden, James Krantz, Laurence E. Lynn Jr., Mark H. Moore, Beryl Nelson, Ellen Schall, Malcolm Sparrow, William Spelman, Deborah A. Stone, and Marc D. Zegans.
Regulation for Revenue: the Political Economy of Land Development Exactions Alan A. Altshuler, author
Over the past two decades Americans have become increasingly skeptical about the benefits of community growth and hostile to new taxes—while continuing to demand improvements in local services. One response to this tension has been a burgeoning movement to raise public revenue by regulating growth. In this timely book, the authors explain that most growing localities now require private developers to finance public improvements as a condition for receiving permits to build. These permit conditions, known as "exactions," are most commonly used to ensure that infrastructure capacity will be adequate to serve the occupants of new real estate developments and to lessen the harmful effects of these developments on other local citizens. Exactions are often used to finance new roads, water and waste disposal facilities, and public open space, but some communities have begun to require developer financing for such services as day care, job training, low-cost housing, and ride sharing. The authors see the dramatic growth of exaction financing as an epochal shift in the character of American land use regulation. A function once isolated from the local government mainstream is now close to the heart of fiscal and public works decision-making. Politicians find exactions an extremely valuable tactic for resolving land use conflict. Lawyers and developers worry about how to establish appropriate limits on the use of exactions, economists debate their equity and efficiency, and planners consider their effect on urban form. Regulation for Revenue offers an integrated appraisal of exaction financing, showing that exactions come in many forms and that they can be meaningfully evaluated only by comparison with realistic alternatives. These include growth restrictions, tolerance of infrastructure overload, and increased tax and user charges. Contents
The Future of the Automobile: the Report of MIT's International Automobile Program
A new shape for the world auto industry emerges from this far-ranging study, which reveals a path of development quite different from those widely forecast and leaves no doubt that the changes ahead will be dramatic. Cited by Business Week as one of 1984's ten best books on business and economics, The Future of the Automobile is the most comprehensive assessment ever conducted of the world's largest industry. It is a collaborative study by leading researchers and industry experts in Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States that covers the industry at the firm level and at the global level. It projects the composition of the industry 20 years hence, estimates long-term demand for the product, focuses on the growing cooperation between producers on individual models even as overall competition in the industry intensifies, and reveals alternative paths for industrial relations.
"The Ideo-Logics of Urban Land Use Politics"
This paper seeks to explain why localities remain the most significant public actors in shaping urban land use, and to portray the contours of contemporary debate about whether the land-use policy system is in need of fundamental reform. Altshuler argues that American land use conflict is organized around two competing ideologies, one emphasizing communal values and the benefits of government intervention on their behalf, the other emphasizing individualistic values and the benefits of reliance on free markets. He demonstrates how these ideologies play out in a wide varietyof land use policy situations. One section seeks to explain, moreover, why land use policy has remained so much more decentralized than K-12 education. More Publications The Urban Transportation System: Politics and Policy Innovation Alan Altshuler Current Issues in Transportation Policy Alan A. Altshuler, editor Community Control: the Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities Alan A. Altshuler, author The Politics of the Federal Bureaucracy Alan A. Altshuler, editor The City Planning Process: a Political Analysis Alan A. Altshuler, author |
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