In Managing Urban America, Eighth Edition, the authors guide students through the politics of urban management—doing less with more while managing conflict, delivering goods and services, responding to federal and state mandates, adapting to changing demographics, and coping with economic and budgetary challenges. This revision: highlights the difficulties cities confront as they deal with the lingering economic challenges of the 2008 Recession evaluates the concept of e-government, and offers numerous examples in both theory and practice considers environmental issues and the implications for urban government management includes new case studies, including some with a global perspective as the authors examine the management of international cities thoroughly updates all data and scholarship.

Urban mobility is a major problem all over the world. This book addresses the problem of managing urban mobility systems in a novel way by considering the complexity and diversity of the conurbation and agents involved in a UMS, putting forward the evidence that urban mobility must be managed at system level.

The Urban Racial State introduces a new multi-disciplinary analytical approach to urban racial politics that provides a bridging concept for urban theory, racism theory, and state theory. This perspective, dubbed by Noel A. Cazenave as the Urban Racial State, both names and explains the workings of the political structure whose chief function for cities and other urban governments is the regulation of race relations within their geopolitical boundaries. In The Urban Racial State, Cazenave incorporates extensive archival and oral history case study data to support the placement of racism analysis as the focal point of the formulation of urban theory and the study of urban politics. Cazenave's approach offers a set of analytical tools that is sophisticated enough to address topics like the persistence of the urban racial state under the rule of African Americans and other politicians of color.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina laid bare the tragedy of American cities. What the storm revealed about the social conditions in New Orleans shocked many Americans. Even more shocking is how widespread these conditions are throughout much of urban America. Plagued by ineffectual and inegalitarian governance, acute social problems such as extreme poverty, and social and economic injustice, many American cities suffer a fate similar to that of New Orleans before and after the hurricane. Gentrification and corporate redevelopment schemes merely distract from this disturbing reality. Compounding this tragedy is a failure in urban analysis and scholarship. Little has been offered in the way of solving urban America's problems, and much of what has been proposed or practiced remains profoundly misguided, in David Imbroscio's view. In Urban America Reconsidered, he offers a timely response. He urges a reconsideration of the two reigning orthodoxies in urban studies: regime theory, which provides an understanding of governance in cities, and liberal expansionism, which advocates regional policies linking cities to surrounding suburbs. Declaring both approaches to be insufficient—and sometimes harmful—Imbroscio illuminates another path for urban America: remaking city economies via an array of local economic alternative development strategies (or LEADS). Notable LEADS include efforts to build community-based development institutions, worker-owned firms, publicly controlled businesses, and webs of interdependent entrepreneurial enterprises. Equally notable is the innovative use of urban development tools to generate indigenous, stable, and balanced growth in local economies. Urban America Reconsidered makes a strong case for the LEADS approach for constructing progressive urban regimes and addressing America's deepest urban problems.

Managing a vastly diverse population, often stratified by economic status, education, culture, language, ideology, and political party, is no picnic. It never has been, nor is it likely to be. Managing Urban America has become the standard guide offering sage advice as to how to approach the formidable task. In a comprehensive, balanced manner, the authors discuss a wide range of structural, financial, and political problems confronting today s urban managers. They also review the successes and failures of policies aimed at solving those problems. In an era of tough budget choices this book is written with the practical urban public official in mind.