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Is anyone listening to minority voices in reforming American schools?

Editor's Note: A two-part podcast featuring a discussion by the authors of the Mini-symposium on Urban Governance can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/uar/podcasts The renaissance in place-based, cross-sector local collaboratives in American cities is distinguished by diverse strategies and actors. This exploratory research compares early stages of two collaborative initiatives—one relying on traditional state-centric collaboration models and the other drawing on emergent civil society collaboration models—in Denver, Colorado. The FasTracks initiative is a complex public-sector effort involving multiple jurisdictions, private-sector partners, and civic organizations in developing a regional transit system. The Children's Corridor, spearheaded by the Piton Foundation, links efforts of local government, multiple nonprofit organizations, and private providers to improve children's well-being in a targeted area. Although the Children's Corridor collaboration suffered unanticipated disruptions, the argument here is not that one collaborative strategy is more effective than another. Rather, the resilience of the large-scale FasTracks collaborative—despite high transaction costs, diverse interests, eroding trust—was contingent on "bridging the collaborative divide" with dynamic scaling to accommodate multiple governance challenges.

Lynn Staeheli's elegant and insightful work on Citizenship and the Problem of Community is an agenda-setting essay. I highlight three issues that merit further research: the implications of the moral turn in politics for territorially based institutions of government; the questions raised by problematic understandings of citizenship; and the need for better specification of the institutional contexts in which inclusion/exclusion mechanisms operate. Although community can be the basis for inclusion/exclusion at a micro scale, as Staeheli describes, analyses at more macro scales suggest citizenship-more often than not defined in terms of national identity and a culturally defined civic identity-can precede community as the basis for inclusion/exclusion. This indicates that citizenship is as problematic as community. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.]

This account of the development of Walt Disney World in Florida is an engaging contribution to the growing literature on tourism and urban politics. The many pleasures of reading this book include learning that Disney World was initially slated for St. Louis, that Henry Kissinger declared that Epcot would enhance world peace more than this shuttle diplomacy, that Disney prepared a proposal for a HUD planning grant for Disney World, and that even Walt Disney thought that Disneyland Anaheim was tacky. Foglesong meticulously details more than three decades of negotiations among the Walt Disney corporate conglomerate, the city of Orlando, and Orange and Osceola counties in Florida over the location and development of Walt Disney World and its spinoff theme parks. Not surprisingly, the Mouse wins most of the battles.