Paving bodies politic: Government fragmentation and infrastructural development in the American metropolis (New Jersey).

摘要

This dissertation provides a new perspective on American urban politics through an examination of "infrastructural development" (the construction of sewerage, water supply, street lighting and street paving systems) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because infrastructural development was an inherently political feature of urban growth, it provides an especially good vantage point by which to view urban politics.; The hypothesized relationship between central city infrastructural development and suburban autonomy has several implications for the study of urban politics. Most authors treat metropolitan fragmentation as either an independent or exogenous variable: regional inequality of local government resources is caused by metropolitan fragmentation, or metropolitan fragmentation provides the framework by which local government resources can be unequally distributed. In contrast, I treat metropolitan fragmentation as an intermediary process that explains how central city government policies have transformed the context in which they are formulated. The thesis also reverses the traditional understanding between city politics and "the larger socioeconomic and political context." By arguing that infrastructure policies and politics within the central city played a significant factor in shaping the city's geographic limits, I am suggesting that city politics had an important impact on at least part of the larger context---the metropolitan region---in which it took place. The thesis also suggests that a classic "developmental" policy which ostensibly benefitted all city residents actually operated over the long term to facilitate economic sorting in metropolitan regions, in which some cities become middle- and upper-class enclaves, while others become repositories of the lower-class.; I provide evidence for my thesis by demonstrating that there was a statistically significant and substantively meaningful relationship across the United States between central city infrastructural development and the growth of populations living immediately outside central cities; and by clarifying the meaning and causes of this relationship through several case studies of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan region. The statistical analysis serves to provide an evidentiary basis for the argument, showing that it conforms to national patterns of metropolitan growth. The case studies provide a more detailed test of the argument. They show that infrastructural development was consistently characterized by political corruption in large central cities. At the same time, infrastructural development trained and empowered city engineers. In many instances, city engineers then went to work as consultants on infrastructure projects in surrounding communities. Within surrounding communities, infrastructural development, perceived levels of political corruption, and taxes were three of the most widely discussed issues related to annexation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)