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- Title
Have Cities a Future?
- Authors
Long, Norton E.
- Abstract
The article discusses cities of future. The most obvious indicators of the quality of life in cities-per capita income, median school years completed, home ownership, morbidity rates, participation in cultural activities are not much affected by the form or functioning of city government. The life chances of an individual are much more the function of aggregate national and regional factors economic growth, the structure of the labor market, national security than of factors over which local officials and power structures have much control. The definition of the city as largely powerless to significantly affect the lives of its inhabitants for good or ill gives the best of good reasons for the apathy that scholar Robert A. Dahl and others have found so prevalent among the citizens. Politics becomes a form of entertainment, a distraction, a circus rather than a serious instrument for the improvement of the human condition. If the city is powerless to significantly alter in desired ways the important dimensions of the lives of its citizens, it can at best become a conduit for external sources of power to do things it might wish but is fiscally and politically incapable of doing. This conception of the city explains the mayor's emerging role as beggar-in-chief for federal and state funds.
- Subjects
METROPOLITAN government; CITIES &; towns; DAHL, Robert Alan, 1915-2014; ECONOMIC development; POLITICAL science; LABOR; BASIC needs; ECONOMIC policy; LABOR market
- Publication
Public Administration Review, 1973, Vol 33, Issue 6, p543
- ISSN
0033-3352
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/974566