City Limits

by Paul E. Peterson

Book Overview

Winner of the 1981 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs.

"City Limits radically reinterprets urban politics by deriving its dominant forces from the logic of the American federal structure. It is thereby able to explain some pervasive tendencies of urban political outcomes that are puzzling or scarcely noticed at all when cities are viewed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226662934
• ISBN13: 9780226662930
• Release Date: July 1981
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A must-read for the aspiring political scientist

This is an important book for people interested in urban studies to read. It has made some people angry (see Imbroscio, 2003 for more details), but it deserves to be read to get a grounding in Urban Political theory. It discusses why local politics are different. It explains the types of policies cities create (developmental, allocation, and redistributive). It discusses why cities do not generally get into the welfare policy business. Some believe that Peterson's "Unitary" interest of cities is incorrect in that politics do matter and that cities do not just have one interest of developmental politics. Nevertheless, Peterson's theory is tight, well-reasoned and more correct than it is incorrect.

Great Book

Exceptional analysis of city limits