Inserting scales of urban politics: the possibilities of meso-urban governance shims |
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| Authors: | Olivia R Williams Joseph Pierce |
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| Institution: | Department of Geography, The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA |
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| Abstract: | This article explores the geographic literature on governance at smaller-than-urban but larger-than-household scales, identifying a relative inattention to neighborhood and other partial-city scales of governance. Hegemonic power relationships are institutionalized at particular scales of state government (e.g. national, regional, municipal) and state-sanctioned governing units (e.g. jurisdictional districts or supranational bodies), which in turn shapes urban research. We propose a new analytical term, governance shims, to describe the insertion of new scales of governance between those already reified and reproduced; institutions at such scales may be unusually grounded in authority beyond the state. Geographers seem well positioned to explore the characteristics of governance shims at the meso-urban scale. We illustrate this by briefly tracing how common interest communities (CICs), housing cooperatives, and community land trusts (CLTs) might be analyzed through a shims approach. Provocatively, emergent governance at the meso-urban scale often leverages idiosyncratic structures of property ownership to produce institutional authority. |
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| Keywords: | Governance shim scale meso-urban shadow state housing cooperatives community land trusts |
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