Faculty Bibliography

Imagine if Boston had only one revenue source: a tax on shopping mall sales. You know what would happen. The city would do everything it could to attract shopping malls in order to pay for schools, police, fire services, and everything else. It wouldn't matter whether the city actually wanted more shopping malls. Shopping malls would have to be encouraged, and the mall tax would influence every facet of city policy. Zoning officials would be attentive to the concerns of mall developers. Transportation policy would focus on the needs of suburban consumers. Requests for security near Bloomingdale's would influence the allocation of police patrols. And residents seeking bonds for low-cost housing or protection against crime in city parks would have a hard time getting heard. These differences matter. Current economic forces reward cities with the ability to respond creatively and flexibly to fast-changing conditions. Urban centers that can't pursue cutting-edge economic development strategies, or respond boldly to the special challenges urban success may bring, risk slipping slowly but surely behind their competitors. Boston's ability to compete in an increasingly globalized market for urban economic development is directly connected to the state's willingness to loosen the reigns of power. Thanks to private innovation, public sector investments, and a good deal of luck, Boston has managed to succeed despite its highly constrained legal structure. But there are troubling signs on the horizon. Again and again, our study found that other cities are using their legal powers to capitalize on their recent successes in ways that Boston cannot. Chicago completed its widely praised Millennium Park with a degree of independence that, as the interminable debates over control of the Rose Kennedy Greenway demonstrate, Boston can only marvel at. Denver has relied on its home rule powers to contain spiraling municipal employment costs in ways that Massachusetts precludes Boston from doing.

Domestic policies and domestic legal rules largely determine the legal status of cities, and these rules have a major influence on both the experience of city life and the practice of local self-government. Today, this traditional way of creating local government law is changing. Parties negotiating international trade agreements, international tribunals arbitrating commercial disputes, United Nations' rapporteurs investigating compliance with human rights obligations, and international financial institutions formulating development policy are expressing interest in the legal relationship between cities and their national governments. This new development is examined by way of three goals. First, it is demonstrated that a focus on international local government differs from other ways in which scholars have begun to think about cities and their place in the world. It is explained that the study of international local government law emphasizes cities' roles as simultaneously subordinate domestic governments and independent international actors. Second, the topic of international local government law is introduced into the field of international law. Focus is on decisions by international arbitration tribunals regulating cities' ability to control land use development. Finally, an analytic framework for evaluating the content of international local government law at this initial stage of its development is proposed.

Proponents of regionalism usually blame the recognition of local autonomy, otherwise known as "home rule," for familiar metropolitan problems - housing segregation, the stark divide between rich and poor communities, environmentally destructive sprawl. They say that states have enabled municipalities to act like independent sovereigns and that selfish local policymaking has led to problematic growth in virtually every metropolitan area. Regionalists argue, therefore, that in order to stop individual municipalities from pursuing parochial ends, power must be shifted upwards - if not entirely, then substantially. But regionalists doubt this shift will occur. Why, they wonder, would local communities favor dismantling such an empowering legal structure? We offer a different view. We do not think that local governments have anything like autonomy. Even states that have formal home rule structures place significant limits on local policymaking, and greater-than-local forces exert significant pressure on local choices. It seems implausible, therefore, that local actors understand themselves to be autonomous in any meaningful way. The form of local power most cities and towns possess grants them only limited authority. It is this condition of having limited power - rather than of being autonomous - that underlies the wariness towards regionalism. This condition encourages an insular and defensive mindset that makes regionalism an unattractive risk. The parochialism that regionalists rightly wish to check, therefore, is as much a consequence of the constraints that cities and towns confront as of the powers they possess. This suggests that "defensive localism" - the defense of local power in order to preserve the status quo - rather than "local autonomy" best describes the current form of local power. We find empirical support for this alternative account in a study we recently conducted on home rule in metropolitan Boston. Our research plan was simple. We first mapped the powers that Massachusetts permits local governments to exercise. We then interviewed local officials from the 101 cities and towns located within Boston's metropolitan area. We asked two types of questions: Did the legal structure of local power in Massachusetts confer home rule in the "local autonomy" sense? And, did the local official think regionalism presented an attractive solution to the problems of their community or the region as a whole?

Discusses changing legal responses to eminent domain policies in urban planning. The authors detail recent cases in Illinois and Mesa, Arizona where a court ruled a planning authority's plans to redevelop urban areas as unconstitutional, focus on the legal decisions surrounding the planned expansion of the Metropolitan Airport in Wayne County, and note that the U.S. Supreme Court is considering constitutional reform for eminent domain in the coming year. They highlight the importance of treating eminent domain on a case-by-case basis, suggest how differing definitions of public use complicate the legal response to eminent domain policies, and argues for the importance of effective municipal planning.

Home rule lurks behind every important concern of Greater Boston. Local policies on a wide variety of issues – finance and management, land use, housing, and education – depend on the state grant of home rule. But real local authority in Massachusetts is restricted. Cities and towns have little discretion over taxes, fees, and borrowing, and only fragmented control over their public schools. State government imposes a number of unfunded mandates. State law supersedes local law on all issues, forcing localities to seek special state legislation on matters of immediate concern. Based on interviews with local officials in the 101 towns and cities that make up Greater Boston, the study by David Barron, Gerald Frug, and Rick Su argues one way to open up the possibilities for regional policy is to take the local desire for home rule more seriously. This important work provides a much-needed blueprint to the most fundamental issue of state and local governance in Massachusetts.

Do the horrifying terrorist attacks of September 11 signal a new era of anti-urbanism? The question might, on first inspection, seem absurd. Cities have been bombed before and survived. They have been leveled and conquered and they have endured. Cities have even thrived in the wake of the devastation wrought upon them. The reasons that cities grow or shrink, in the end, are simply too variegated to be traced to a single casual factor. Thus, we would not be inclined to take seriously the question whether September 11 will mark the beginning of a decline in the fortunes of urban spaces had so many people in positions of influence not been committed to convincing us of just that proposition. These analysts have argued that the attacks—devastating one of the nation's most visible urban symbols—show that the iconic city center is no longer a viable institution of social life. The only wise course, they have suggested, is to spread out, to empty the urban core, to sprawl. At the very least, they have argued, this is inevitably the message that most people will take from the attacks. Even if prudence does not demand more far-flung development, market forces will dictate that the escape to the suburbs will proceed with a new vigor in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center. This essay situates these contentions within a broader way of thinking about urbanism. We show that the assertions about the post-September 11 world are quite similar to arguments that have long been offered to suggest the virtues (or at least the inevitability) of the pattern of sprawl that has dominated our landscape since World War II. These arguments draw upon a familiar and well-developed rhetoric that makes sprawling development seem to be the consequence of individuals making rational decisions to disperse in order to vindicate their "self-interest." In response, many have drawn upon an equally well- developed rhetoric that seeks to privilege urban spaces over suburban ones by emphasizing the ways that central cities might win in the unavoidable competition with suburbs.