Anchoring the city? Retail location and the politics of downtown development

Anchoring the city? Retail location and the politics of downtown development

regime theory, urban politics, retail location, location incentives

The purpose of this study is to understand variations in the municipal use of subsidies to attract and / or retain traditional department stores to CBDs in cities in the United States. The approach taken is urban regime theory, which claims that local policy is shaped by particular regimes or political coalitions. Two hypotheses are proposed. First, it is hypothesized that cities whose governing regimes or political coalitions reflect characteristics commonly referred to as “developmental” are more likely to offer subsidies for attraction / retention of department stores than other regime or political coalition types. Second, it is hypothesized that the composition of corporate communities in cities influences the types of regimes or political coalitions that cities are likely to develop. The study covers twenty-four cities across the United States. Utilizing lists of boards of directors across three major sectors, each city’s composition of business and community elites are profiled. Utilizing factor analysis for sectoral categories, prototype profiles are generated for three major regime typologies identified in the literature. Each city’s profile is then correlated with each of the three regime prototypes through scatter plots. Concerning the first hypothesis, eight of the twenty-four cities are identified as having provided subsidies for the attraction or retention of a ddepartment store to their respective CBD. All but one of these are identified as having developmental-type regimes by previous case studies, confirming the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis likewise appears to be confirmed by the results of the study. Correlations of sixteen of the twenty-four cities with the markers for regime prototypes strongly match their expected regime type. This study demonstrates the utility of fleshing out the corporate structures of cities to determine whether or not different mixes of economic activities predispose cities towards different regime types and policy agendas. Business elites afforded positions of influence may be biased in their expertise regarding urban development, thereby affecting urban policymaking in ways that could prove detrimental to the city.

de Socio, Mark

University of Cincinnati

2005

South, Robert. Advisor

en

Dissertation

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1117210929

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/1088

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/archive/files/9349a1c71f661e965e8f0031e585f1c0.jpg