Institutions and Urban Space: Land, Infrastructure, and Governance in the Production of Urban Property

Abstract

This paper develops an historical institutionalist approach to municipal governance, infrastructure, and property institutions, suggesting that the dense matrices of institutions in cities are co-evolutionary and path dependent. Property, infrastructure, and governance institutions play a central role in regulating capital investment in cities, structure urban change, protect and structure property’s meaning and value, and demonstrate enduringly different approaches between jurisdictions. The institutions in place when land is urbanized have profound impacts on the institutionalization and forms of urban property and the accompanying infrastructure created. The primary positive feedback that contributes to path dependence in cities flows from existing sets of property in any given jurisdiction. Cities from this perspective are path dependent landscapes of property that are differentiated primarily by the enduring imprint of the institutions that produce them.

Keywords:

• Path dependence
• property
• historical institutionalism
• international comparison
• institutional design

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at Willem Salet’s Institutions in Action workshop in Amsterdam, December 2016, and at the AESOP conference in Lisbon July 2017. I am grateful for the comments of Wendy Burton, Robert Freestone, John Friedmann, Patsy Healey, Bharat Punjabi, Lake Sagaris, Willem Salet, Zack Taylor, and Stephano Moroni on earlier drafts. The paper also benefitted greatly from the critical comments and advice of five referees, and the editors of the journal.

Notes

1. The presence of property markets is assumed, but is not a focus here.

2. This paper was inspired in part by Blomley’s (1998) paper on ‘landscapes of property,’ but the focus of our studies of such landscapes is different.

3. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this point.