Local Implementation Strategies in the Urban Built Environment

The implementation of built-environment policies by the local state in the City of Boston in the last three decades is examined, and the contextual limits placed on the local state in devising and implementing policies is discussed. Two Boston neighborhoods, the Waterfront and the South End, are introduced as political spaces whose experience identifies three themes in the local state's management of possibly contentious built-environment policies: the encouragement of citizens' interest groups; the spatially differential targeting of public investment; and the awarding of advantage to large-scale capital.