Detroit's Urban Regime: Composition and Consequence

Abstract

This article examines the urban regime in Detroit, Michigan, specifically examining how the regime makes decisions about redevelopment and major capital projects. Detroit's urban regime, which emergedfrom the urban unrest of the 1960s, mobilizes resources, promotes cooperation, and manages conflicts between public and private interests to facilitate and justify redevelopment. Although political decision makers are represented in the regime, we argue that the business community's influence is pervasive, visible. and overwhelming. The participants in Detroit's regime are more adversarial and disrespectful of local political entities than regimes previously studied. Regimes may warp democratic processes to accommodate business interests because the financial decisions of economic institutions reverberate throughout the local political economy.