Social scientists Lawrence J. R. Herson and John M. Bolland describe the connection between the city as government and the city as an urban place in terms of “rules that direct and constrain behavior on behalf of the collective good; services that make collective living possible; and money—raised through taxes—that pays the people who enforce the rules and provide city services.”

Americans have planned for their downtowns within a continually changing framework of images and assumptions about the nature of central business districts. During each decade since World War II, discussion of downtown problems and possibilities has been dominated by a distinct set of assumptions that has conditioned academic research, federal policy, and local planning. From decade to decade, experts on downtowns have chosen different themes as central to the interpretation of downtown growth, change, and policy needs. As the understanding of the situation has changed, so have the preferred planning solutions and public interventions.

In the late 1980s, congressional investigations revealed patterns of influence peddling, lack of oversight, and poorly targeted expenditures at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, criticizing both the content and administration of various federal housing initiatives. Some commentators have concluded that the dogged preference for a private-sector strategy and the privatization of public activities in the Reagan administration—goals pursued while the agency suffered dramatic budget cuts—are at the root of recent HUD embarrassment.

The most controversial component of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was its Community Action Program (CAP). Controversy resulted largely from the CAP because it employed activist professionals, mandated massscale resident participation, and encouraged federal-agency-sponsored institutional conflict as a mechanism for social reform. These strategies were tested earlier in the Mobilization for Youth program founded in the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s in the Ford Foundation Gray Areas programs and the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency projects. Indeed, the basic models of social expertise and community action employed in those programs were used in Chicago two decades before.

The first major piece of national transit legislation was enacted in 1964. By 1969 the Urban Mass Transportation Administration was the subject of a highly critical analysis by staff investigators for a Congressional Appropriations Committee, and in the early 1970s industry analysts sharply critiqued the rationality of urban transit policy in general. In 1981 the Comptroller General of the U.S. reported to Congress that the demand for transit subsidies was approaching crisis proportions. The U.S. government has come to play a greater role in the transit industry than do most European counterparts, provides more passenger subsidy per ride than any other country, and, though transit is everywhere subsidized, the U.S. federal government subsidizes a greater share of industry costs than most other national governments. This article examines the circumstances under which this particular industry-government relationship developed. As part of this industrial policy discussion, the article also looks at the culture of discourse that was present during the early intervention period and that has been characteristic of the transit policy community since that time.

The pariah garbage barge on a two-month odyssey with 3,100 tons of unwanted trash drew throngs of sightseers and reporters Sunday as it anchored just outside New York Harbor while city officials decide its fate.

The trek of the Mobro is well known. On 22 March 1987 the fully loaded garbage barge left Islip, New York, looking for a landfill that would take its unwanted cargo. Five states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida—as well as three countries, Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas, had banned the barge from unloading. Reluctantly, the captain turned the Mobro toward home, where it received an unceremonious, and dispirited, welcome.

Soon after American entry into World War I, Colonel Charles Keller of the Army Corps of Engineers confronted an emergency on the home front that threatened to stymie victory abroad. For several years, the West Point career officer had been in charge of overseeing the development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, New York. Now Keller began receiving urgent messages from manufacturers in nearby Buffalo complaining that shortages of electricity were preventing them from producing vital materials such as high-grade steel for shell casings, aluminum for airplanes, chlorine for poison gas, and other electrochemicals.

Let me take you on a Cook's tour of urban historic preservation outcomes in the United States. The undertaking is doubly complicated. First, I am an outsider from Australia, a nation that is known more for its sheep farms than for its cities—or, indeed, for a significant national history or a non- Aboriginal cultural heritage that is worth preserving. Second, the dislocation between subject matter and observer is further compounded because I am writing from the ancient Italian city of Parma. Here, in contrast both to the United States and Australia, a multiplicity of structures and artifacts dating back to Etruscan times makes manifest the depth and richness of the surrounding historical texture.

My initial decision to explicate how I read formal planning texts was provoked by the 1988 publication of a scheme for the CBD of Philadelphia and the adjacent residential neighborhoods. I thought initially that I might be able to help people directly read The Plan for Center City. Ultimately, however, I settled on a more modest goal: encouraging a conversation among planners about both reading and writing plans. My contribution to that conversation, an essay entitled “Reading Plans,” started with the notion that a plan, like any other text, creates images of an “ideal” and a “real” author and reader. I went on to explore the ways in which I located myself within and against those images. Once I'd fixed my location, I suggested, I read the core of a plan—whether it was a budget, a simple plat of streets and lots, a formal set of legal rules controlling land use, or an elaborately argued hybrid like The Plan for Center City—in three complementary ways: as a complex set of policy arguments, as an elaboration of a decision opportunity, and as a story.