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Chicago is celebrated for its rich diversity, but, even more than most US cities, it is also plagued by segregation and extreme inequality. More than ever, Chicago is a "dual city," a condition taken for granted by many residents. In this book, Joel Rast reveals that today's tacit acceptance of rising urban inequality is a marked departure from the past. For much of the twentieth century, a key goal for civic leaders was the total elimination of slums and blight. Yet over time, as anti-slum efforts faltered, leaders shifted the focus of their initiatives away from low-income areas and toward the upgrading of neighborhoods with greater economic promise. As misguided as postwar public housing and urban renewal programs were, they were born of a long-standing reformist impulse aimed at improving living conditions for people of all classes and colors across the city—something that can't be said to be a true priority for many policymakers today. The Origins of the Dual City illuminates how we normalized and became resigned to living amid stark racial and economic divides

Studies of political power and governance in U.S. cities have long been dominated by political economy approaches in which the material interests of political actors are seen as the principal drivers of preferences and behavior. More recently, scholars from the emerging field of urban political development have questioned this view, arguing that ideas may play an important role—along with material factors—in determining what actors desire. Less understood, however, is where ideas of this nature come from. This article identifies social learning as one possible source. Social learning can be understood as a change in perceptions and behavior that results from experiences of some kind that provide important policy lessons. Through a case study of a near-downtown housing development in Chicago, I show how social learning caused actors to reinterpret their interests and behave in ways contrary to what materialist arguments would predict.

The 25th anniversary of the publication of Clarence Stone's Regime Politics presents an opportunity to consider ways of moving forward theoretically in a world that has begun to look much different from postwar Atlanta. In recent years, Stone has turned his attention from stability to change in urban governing arrangements, proposing American political development (APD) as a promising theoretical approach. While broadly in agreement with Stone about the advantages of APD for the study of urban political change, I identify some potential problems with his efforts to combine APD and regime analysis. In particular, I suggest that Stone more fully embrace APD's emphasis on friction and disorder as a driver of change in governing arrangements and that the role of institutions, in addition to informal arrangements, be considered more directly in arguments about how change occurs.

Scholarship on path dependence, policy feedback, timing and sequence, and punctuated versus incremental change has fueled new debates and produced new theoretical insights into how time and history factor into political and social outcomes. This work has done much to clarify why history matters in social scientific investigation. However, it appears to have gone largely unnoticed by most contemporary urban political scientists and sociologists, who are far more likely to focus on the present or the recent past than to pursue genuinely historical approaches. This article examines certain causal mechanisms that operate in time and shows how their application to the study of urban settings can enhance what scholars know about urban political processes.

Facing severe social and economic challenges following World War II, both Chicago and Milwaukee formed local economic development partnerships. However, Chicago's development approach emphasized downtown, while Milwaukee's approach focused largely on manufacturing. This article uses literature on path dependence and urban regimes to show how development strategies initiated in both cities during the late 1940s became entrenched over time, although more so in Chicago than in Milwaukee. I argue that postwar development policy in each city can be understood only through a genuinely historical approach that links outcomes at the close of this narrative in 1980 with key causal factors dating back to the 1940s.

Recent literature on urban governance has focused predominantly on cities with effective partnerships between business and local government. Increased attention to the role played by such partnerships in the creation of local governing capacity has changed the way that most contemporary urban theorists understand community power. In place of the Weberian model emphasizing the use of power for social control purposes, urban-regime theorists view power in terms of its capacity to accomplish goals— power to instead of power over. This article examines development policy in postwar Milwaukee during a period in which a business-government partnership failed to materialize. I argue that the absence of business-government cooperation placed a distinctive imprint on local power relations. Power in postwar Milwaukee is best understood through a multidimensional approach that incorporates both Weberian and contemporary approaches to the study of community power.

In March 2001, the Boeing Company announced that it would move its headquarters from Seattle to the Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Chicago regions. Boeing requested that each region coordinate its recruitment efforts by providing a single point of contact for all dealings with company representatives. This study addresses two principal questions: First, how effectively did municipalities within each region coordinate their recruitment efforts? Second, did such coordination play a decisive role in Boeing's choice about where to locate its headquarters facility? Boeing's choice of Chicago-the city in which recruitment efforts were the least coordinated of the three regions-raises questions about the importance of regional cooperation in corporate recruitment campaigns. Adapted from the source document.