Urban government

Urban government poses a range of definitional challenges, particularly regarding how to define the ‘urban’. Here we focus on municipal, local or city government, as a functional, spatial, legal, economic, political and administrative jurisdiction. We locate city government within its wider, inter-governmental context which determines and delimits the powers accruing to it within the vertical state hierarchy. We consider the political autonomy of city government in terms of its capacity to make choices about governance priorities in the context of power relations between different tiers of the state, with an examination of the use of ‘localism’ in the UK. Considering the relative power of ‘the local’ in determining place-based visions and values benefits from critical scholarship’s focus not only on the formal institutions of government but on everyday forms of politics, and how these combine in new municipalisms.