Beyond Mobility:The Limits of Liberal Urban Policy

Abstract

:Liberalism remains the dominant philosophical perspective underlying the development of urban public policy in the United States. At the heart of Liberal Urban Policy lies a Mobility Paradigm, which is marked by a strong emphasis on facilitating population movement as a means of addressing urban social problems. In this paper, I explicate the nature of this Mobility Paradigm across four key urban policy goals and then develop a critique of it. In its place, I offer one alternative—a Placemaking Paradigm—and discuss its contrasting conceptual attributes and policy implications. The Placemaking Paradigm points toward the nascent development of a Critical Urban Policy, which stands as an insurgent normative and empirical challenge to hitherto liberal dominance.