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Urban regime theory has shaped the urban politics research agenda in the United States for the past two decades. The article argues that urban regime theory draws on public and corporate behavior and strategies that were typical to the industrial era in the United States. As a result, the theory is insensitive to changes in institutional hierarchies, economic globalization, and the emergence of new types of actors and issues in urban politics. Urban governance theory conceptualizes agency more generically that allows the theory to travel better than urban regime theory in time and space.

Nowhere is the urban challenge more starkly evident than in Asia. Many cities lack data and information on urban conditions and trends, which has undermined their ability to understand and manage the complex forces of urban growth and change.

Nowhere is the urban challenge more starkly evident than in Asia. Many cities lack data and information on urban conditions and trends, which has undermined their ability to understand and manage the complex forces of urban growth and change.

"Lecture Notes in Urban Economics and Urban Policy provides a wide-ranging introduction to urban economics and urban policy by Professor John Yinger, one of the world's leading scholars in urban economics. It draws on his extensive teaching and publication record to provide detailed lecture notes for both a PhD level course in urban economics and a master's level course in urban policy. Both the US and the world populations are becoming more and more urbanized, and these notes are designed to help scholars learn and teach about the factors that determine urban residential structure and that lead to urban problems such as inadequate housing, concentrated poverty, an inequitable distribution of local public services, racial and ethnic discrimination in housing, and traffic congestion. Although these notes focus on the US, many of the lessons in the notes apply to other countries as well. They also draw on Professor Yinger's extensive teaching experience and publication record in urban economics and should prove useful to many scholars who want to teach about or study urban areas."--

An "urban" definition of public policy problems raises great difficulties for the policy maker. If we emphasize implementation as a primary factor in evaluating public policy, we have good grounds for questioning the wisdom of an urban perspective. But urban questions have been and still are major areas of concern in public policy formulation. The ALP federal platform contains a long section on urban policies, reiterating what the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) was striving to achieve under the Whitlam Government. At state level, urban problems have been tackled with varying degrees of success and seriousness, although at this level overall urban perspectives tend to be ignored, for reasons we shall indicate. However urban planning authorities have been tried in most capital cities, and metropolitan plans have been drawn up for all of them. They have concentrated mainly on land use and urban form. By the 1970s a common criticism of such planning was that it left aside many social and economic aspects of urban growth. For example, one (admittedly partisan) government source—the N.S.W. Department of Decentralization and Development—noted "a massive and increasing trend towards socio‐economic segregation":…the remoteness of central city facilities …the cost of commuter transport and the inadequacy of community facilities in low‐income outer suburbs are operating to perpetuate economic under‐privilege.

Urban policy is unlikely to be a major concern of the Bush administration in the near future. Some of the reasons for this outlook are offered in this article, including the nature of Bush's electoral support and the benefits those constituencies receive from the allegedly natural workings of the "invisible hand" and the "invisible foot." Some countervailing tendencies are noted. A broader view of urban concerns is called for, a view that would lead toward a domestic policy with an urban consciousness.