Regional Planning and Land Use Localism: Can They Coexist?

The potential effectiveness and citizen acceptance of emerging regional and state land use planning programs in New England is examined. To be successful, these programs must find acceptance within a system of historically home-rule, town-based land use governance. This article investigates the interplay between regionalism and parochialism, discusses emerging strategies, and reports on a telephone survey of over three hundred Cape Cod residents that examined local opinion regarding the proposed creation of a regional land use regulatory commission. These citizens were queried about the perceived consequences of greater-than-local land use planning. Although local parochialism was found to be a strongly held attitude, regionalism support was substantial (76 percent in favor), because two perceptions overshadowed local biases — awareness of the regional impact of development and perceived utility of regional land use management. The negative image of a regional government preempting local control was largely overshadowed by the anticipated tangible benefits of regionalism. The transferability of Cape Cod regionalism to other New England areas is discussed

Managing contested spaces: Public managers, obscured mechanisms and the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland

Societies emerging from ethno-political and inter-communal conflict face a range of complex problems that stem directly from the recent lived experience of bloodshed and injury, militarisation, securitisation and segregation. As institutional agents in such an environment, public managers perform the dual role of both interpreting public policy and implementing it within a politically contested space and place. In this article we address how managers cope with the outworking of ethno-nationalist conflict and peace building within government processes and policy implementation and contend this is a subject of emerging concern within the wider public administration, urban studies and conflict literature. Using data from a witness seminar initiative on the Northern Ireland conflict transformation experience, we explain how public sector managers make sense of their role in post-agreement public management and highlight the importance of three identified mechanisms; ‘bricolage’, ‘diffusion’ and ‘translation’ in the management of public sector organisations and urban spaces in a context of entrenched conflict and an uncertain path to peace

Catalonia rescaling Spain : is it feasible to accommodate its "stateless citizenship"?

The Spanish nation-state is gradually being rescaled by Catalonia's “secession crisis.” Recently and dramatically, in the aftermath of the “illegal” and “constitutive referendum” that took place on 1 October 2017, 2,286,217 Catalan citizens attempted to exercise the “right to decide” to ultimately become “stateless citizens.” This paper examines this rescaling process that has been forming in Barcelona since 10 July 2010 when 1 million Catalan citizens marched to claim their “right to decide” on secession. This paper concludes that, at present, it is not feasible for the Spanish nation-state to accommodate Catalonia's “stateless citizenship.”

National Policy Agendas Encounter the City: Complexities of Political-Spatial Implementation

This article examines implementation of national political agendas in two urban settings—Israel’s program aimed at sole sovereign control of Jerusalem and Northern Ireland’s effort to build peace in Belfast. It is based on seven months of in-country research and 122 interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016. Political goals of united Jerusalem in Israel and shared future in Northern Ireland are problematized as they confront micro-scale urban dynamics and resistant patterns of community power. A national policy agenda aimed at managing a city requires a political-spatial process of implementation having erratic effects. National-urban disjunctions were found in fundamentally different national programs, illuminating the inherent disruptive quality of urban dynamics in resisting national mandates. Findings inform theories of policy implementation and urban governance, highlighting problematic characteristics of national goals when implemented in urban space and the role of ethnic and cultural interests operating outside formal urban governance institutions in impeding national directives