book review for my urban environment class
Book Review is a five page critique of Cities on the Hill by Ogorzalek. Students should cite 5 articles from the assigned readings when writing review. It should be written in terms of the following a) Book overview-2 pages) b) Link to relevant course articles and why or why not? (2 pages) c) Summary and Conclusion.
CITIES ON THE HILL NOTES
BY THOMAS OGORZALEK
GENERAL OVERVIEW: Book combines several themes of urban politics such as race, ethnicity, political economy and American political development. Its very similar to the book by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs. He evaluated 300 years of political development in New Haven. In Dahl’s book, the answer to who governs is that overtime many opportunities and political developments allowed several groups to have power albeit in limited fashion.
In Cities On The Hill, the background in the same, in that there is something very special about the urban environment. Ogorzalek admits his focus is to bridge majority centered polities with minority interests. However, he thinks the urban dilemma is not a north-south one, but one more in line with urban rural factions. Thus it is a challenges to understand how policies can satisfy all interests. It makes one wonder whether majority rules is truly ecumenical or… does it placate a narrow sense of interests.
I mentioned in that you should try to be on the lookout for horizontal management. This management approach is a central function of federalism. Ogorzalek suggests that American cities applied to their local governing approach to national politics, which in turn created a recursive relationship back at the local level. This means that local institutions had the credibility to create unity in city representation. I think the application to the national level simply means that it was accepted at the national level.
City delegation theory or Chapter 2 considers the complex relationship between urbanicity and governance in a modern representative democracy. In short this means effective local governing representation. It promoted both statism and group pluralism. It may seem but the statism provided for a stable structure yet group pluralism suggests that there were access points for many groups
In Chapter 3, one learns how urban policy rose to the national agenda. This was promoted by city leaders and for the first time it was realized that there was great similarity between local and national interests. Think of it like this, for a long time, the country was governed by dual federalism which meant that the national government was distinct from the state and local levels. However, over time and during the Great Depression, it was realized that federal, state and local needed to work together in a type of horizontal federalism and that’s why Ogorzalek is very much into the horizontal management approach.
Ogorzalek broadens his message of institutions of horizontal integration in Chapter 4. He feels these institutions foster cohesive representation among members of a city’s congressional delegation. He sees this reinforced especially when political parties are evident. In short the unit of the city delegation is vital to the maintenance of a progressive, united urban political order
Ogorzalek confronts the question of urban environment and race. However he is not satisfied with a mono variable explanation of why the south moved from blue democrat to red republican. In his own words urbanicity and the characteristics of local party organization were also important factors in this partisan change He applies Delegation Theory to help understand constituents in large cities played a key role if fostering racial liberalism something of which is often overlooked in urban politics.
Overall each chapter asks you to think locally, but see how local interests were not isolated and that during the New Deal, the country’s values and approaches were changing from dual federalism to cooperative federalism. Ogorzalek’s contributions are useful and hopefully you can identify a link between the book and the course articles.
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