Governing the Regimeless City The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960
Recent literature on urban governance has focused predominantly on cities with effective partnerships between business and local government. Increased attention to the role played by such partnerships in the creation of local governing capacity has changed the way that most contemporary urban theorists understand community power. In place of the Weberian model emphasizing the use of power for social control purposes, urban-regime theorists view power in terms of its capacity to accomplish goals—power to instead of power over. This article examines development policy in postwar Milwaukee during a period in which a business-government partnership failed to materialize. I argue that the absence of business-government cooperation placed a distinctive imprint on local power relations. Power in postwar Milwaukee is best understood through a multidimensional approach that incorporates both Weberian and contemporary approaches to the study of community power.
Based on Bonanno's (1987) model, this paper provides examples showing that (1) without locational regulation, antimonopoly regulation leads to the worst social welfare, and (2) protection of a monopolist is justifiable in a spatial market.