The Politics of Metropolitan Development Institutions, Interests, and Ideas in the Making of Urban Governance in the United States and Canada, 1800-2000

The urban form and local government organization of Canadian and American cities differ in consequential ways. These differences are typically explained by political cultural or economic and social structures. On the basis of archival and interview research, and supported by descriptive statistics and mapping, this dissertation argues that the long-term development of different national urban forms is the product of how Canadian and American subnational political institutions structured contention among societal interests and processed policy ideas within a changing normative context. During long-term periods of single-party dominance during the early postwar period (1945-70), Westminster institutions in Canadian provinces were highly autonomous from societal influence, which enabled them to establish land-use planning systems administered by metropolitan governments as recommended by American reformers. Fragmented authority and permeability to societal interests kept American state governments from doing the same. As a result, metropolitan land-use and infrastructure policies guided a greater proportion of urban development in Canadian cities than in their American counterparts. In some American states, highly organized bipartisan civic elite networks briefly overcame state governments' centrifugal nature to install metropolitan institutions. On both sides of the border, institutions and policies were enabled by a normative context of faith in government and deference to elites and expert knowledge. In the later postwar period (1970-2000), however, they were delegitimized by a new normative context that rejected narrow technical rationality in favour of livability concerns, participatory policymaking, and the protection of the natural environment and urban place qualities. At the same time, political contention became increasingly polarized, especially in the United States. It became more difficult to create new metropolitan institutions and policies, however the historical analysis shows that earlier, technocratic institutions may be brought into alignment with the new normative context if policies are framed in relation to new concerns and institutions cultivate new support coalitions. The analysis challenges the narrowly municipal, present-oriented, and single-case focus of urban political research, instead arguing for a multi-level, long-term historical, and comparative perspective. To this end, the argument is made through a comparative analysis of two Canadian-American pairs of cities (Toronto and Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Vancouver and Portland, OR) over the course of their development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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