A Cross-national Comparison of Intergovernmental Approaches to Urban Resiliency

• In Event: Disasters and Resilience Policies in Global Cities

Abstract

The seeds of discontent within a society are often found in cities – rife with inequity and exclusion – and thus fuel populist tendencies at other levels of government. For many cities, their response, or lack of response, to deindustrialization, partially explains this discontent. For many cities, decades have passed since deindustrialization first decimated their local economies, and yet, the effects are still reverberating across multiple levels of government and a significant variance in outcomes is evident. This research project examines three cities across the Americas: Buffalo, NY and Pittsburgh, PA in the U.S. and the city of Córdoba in Argentina in an effort to understand how local, state, and national scales interact while combating deindustrialization and building urban resiliency in both of these federal systems. How does governance, broadly conceptualized, respond in times of economic shock? Can a cross-national comparison provide a means to identify the factors explaining a city’s ability to bounce back from global economic restructuring? This paper employs a comparative historical analysis, case studies, and process tracing to sort out these factors. Data from 50 interviews with policymakers, economic development and community leaders, and others in each of the three cities is used along with archival sources. The empirical data supports the argument that intergovernmental relations are indeed powerful factors in conditioning a city’s response to deindustrialization as is a city’s own social connectedness – the ability of nonstate and state actors to collaborate and coordinate both resources and responses. These findings support the idea that answers to urban resiliency are not merely a matter of one’s human capital stocks, or one’s economic diversity, but can also be found in one’s political institutions and approaches to governance. This paper thus adds to our knowledge of urban resiliency, intergovernmental relations in a federal system, and processes of governance at the local level.

Author

• Maureen Heffern Ponicki, University of Illinois at Chicago