Urban Governance and Industrial Decline

Abstract

There has been a marked increase in comparative research examining the dynamics of regime formation in the United Kingdom and the United States. These authors consider regime formation processes in three deindustrializing cities: Detroit, Michigan, and Birmingham and Sheffield, England. The article identifies two cross-cutting themes: the effects of national/international political and economic forces on local governance and the role of public and private interactions in regime formation. Finally, in an attempt to enlarge the scope of regime theory, the authors develop a comparative perspective on urban governance based on the concepts of governing structures and policy agendas.