ABSTRACT
“The urban political process is basically concerned with allocation, access, rent, and property” (Pahl 1975: 296; quoted in Pratt 1982: 481). Forty years ago such a nomothetic claim deftly summarized the interdisciplinary study of urban politics. It focused attention on the distributional issues of politics in the city, and prompted questions about both human agency and social structure in shaping them. Williams (1975) interpreted this coming-together of factors as a kind of urban political ecology: where the city was more interactional than territorially defined. The city was a location that intensely brought together competing interests, which in turn reflected structures of the possible. “The process of forming locational arrangements and rules for governing changes in them forms a logical central focus for urban political analysis” (Williams 1975: 131). And certainly this concise summary still captures key elements and research agendas in the field.
