The ways in which the organization of local government and the practice of political power locally have changed over time has attracted heightened interest from urban and administrative historians over recent decades. Much of this burgeoning interest has paralleled the concurrent decline in the status and powers of local government since the 1980s. In recent years, a shifting focus from government to governance has allowed the historian to re-conceptualize approaches to urban political power. Urban governance denotes a wider system of government by encapsulating the complex range of actors, interests and resources, which straddle the public, private and voluntary sectors, each with a vested interest in the way that political power is organized and practised locally.Footnote ¹ By broadening their approach to urban political power, urban historians have, since the late 1980s, elicited new perspectives on municipal administration, reattaching it with the national and juridical frameworks of analysis from which it had been fractured. In general, this growing number of local, regional and cross-national historical studies hints at a more complex and interesting municipal dimension which transcends previously impermeable divisions between the private and the public spheres, between political democracy and administrative bureaucracy, between the central state and municipal administration, and between national and transnational contexts of administrative thought and practice.Footnote ²

Building upon these seminal studies on municipal services, municipal autonomy, municipal administration and transnational municipalism, younger scholars have explored municipal politics and municipal administration with new purviews. Recent theses have contributed to the unveiling of the complex worlds of municipal administration, and this review essay is concerned with the various approaches, concepts and methodologies which have been employed to grasp the historical nature of municipal administration. The theses under review date from late 2002 up until 2009 and roughly cover the period from the second half of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War II. The theses have tended to adopt the local or comparative city case study approach to municipal administration, and this review will interrogate British, French, Canadian and Dutch case studies. Some theses are, though, beginning to go beyond these narrow geographical parameters by examining the shared transnational language and experience moulding municipal administration, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the studies combine a conceptual framework borrowed from the social sciences and a historical approach based upon extensive empirical research.

To structure this essay, I have paired the theses around four central themes: municipal agency, suburban politics, regulating mobility and administration and expertise. This does not imply that the theses under review are exclusively classified under one theme; rather, that this thematic approach opens up the field to the varied fruitful approaches that are being utilized to study the history of urban governance. Each thesis makes a significant contribution in enlarging our understanding of the development of municipal administration, without subscribing to the much paraphrased aphorism that the state took over the city after World War I, allegedly bringing about the demise of municipal independence in urban governance.

Agency and urban governance

Two of the theses use a biographical lens to examine the inter-war developments of municipal politics and administration in, respectively, Coventry and Amsterdam. Cathy Hunt's ‘Alice Arnold of Coventry: trade unionism and municipal politics 1919–1939’ (Coventry University, 2003) inverts the predominant historical narrative of Coventry's vivid inter-war municipal politics and offers a fresh conceptual approach to studying the relationships that constitute municipal administration.Footnote ³ For Hunt, existing studies of the history of municipal politics tend to approach the question of gender in an unproblematic manner. As a consequence, they are generally tainted by ‘masculinised approaches’ (20) inasmuch as they inevitably overlook the underlying gendered nature of political power echoing from the sources, memoirs and published writings on town hall politics. Hunt equally warns against existing representations of inter-war Labour party women as forming a univocal collective characterized by a shared repertoire of local government work.

Hunt suggests that her protagonist, the radical politician Alice Arnold (1881–1955), has suffered from both tendencies, and that close scrutiny of Arnold's political life offers a new perspective on trade unionism and politics in inter-war Coventry. Within the biographical setup of her study, Hunt opts for an approach which is aimed at the deconstruction and critical assessment of socio-political discourses within the labour movement in Coventry and, more generally, in Britain. This amounts to a treatise which continuously reminds the reader of the gendered constructs of power within the labour movement and in local politics during the early twentieth century. The vicissitudes of Arnold, a lower-class single woman who devoted her life to trade unionism, and from 1919 onwards to a radical brand of local politics, offer an evocative enhancement of Hunt's argument.

Arnold proves to be the pre-eminent historical actor to depict the social patterns and constructs which impeded the participation of many women in local politics, or at least precluded them from certain domains of municipal politics. The focus here is on her municipal career since Arnold remained aloof from Labour's women networks, was excluded from many social events due to her status as a single woman and was actively marginalized within the Labour party of which she became a member around 1925. A prominent local Labour politician, a contemporary of Arnold's, who relied exclusively ‘on the loud voices of his male comrades’, even refused to mention Arnold in his political memoirs (194). Nonetheless, Arnold was unremittingly popular amongst her ward and made the transition from being the first Labour woman on the city council in 1919 to the first female mayor of Coventry in 1937.

Hunt's study mitigates the pre-existing images of Arnold as being an ‘emotional and outlandish’ (315) anomaly in inter-war Coventry. Instead, Hunt suggests a more complicated picture in which political radicalism and determination informed Arnold's struggle to gain acceptance from her male colleagues in the Coventry Labour party and city council, which all bore the traces of gendered prejudice about the work of local government. Not only was Arnold a woman, but she was the wrong kind of woman. What is most interesting about this thesis is how individual agency relates to the formal and informal institutions involved in urban governance. In a political culture where defined patterns of behaviour and action persisted, Arnold was able to find a route to pursue her political agenda and build an impressive municipal career. Hunt's biographical study thus offers a nuanced reminder of the influence that gender, class, marital status and radicalism had on the careers of individual women in local government during the inter-war years.

Harm Kaal's ‘Het hoofd van de stad. Amsterdam en zijn burgemeester tijdens het interbellum’ (The head of the city. Amsterdam and its mayor during the inter-war period) (Free University Amsterdam, 2008) similarly takes a biographical approach in order to interrogate the complex institutional and interpersonal relationships of inter-war municipal politics.Footnote ⁴ At first sight, Kaal's protagonist also appears just as anomalous with regard to the known familiar figures of inter-war Amsterdam. Like in Coventry, municipal politics in Amsterdam was largely dominated by socialist forces during the inter-war period. Reform socialists comprised one third of the city council and supplied roughly half of the executive's membership. An extensive interventionist agenda was pursued after World War I, including municipal housing, retailing, market regulation and a comprehensive cultural programme. However, Amsterdam's mayor during this period, Willem De Vlugt (1872–1945), was an orthodox-protestant contractor who had no track record in socialist politics.

The Dutch mayoralty was not on a par with similar offices elsewhere in Europe because the Dutch mayor was (and still is) appointed by the crown and enjoyed no explicit executive responsibilities. Yet Kaal sketches how De Vlugt was able to redefine Amsterdam's mayoralty, notwithstanding the progressive political culture and formal restrictions of his position. To do this, Kaal incorporates an urban governance approach into his study, going beyond the traditional structures and organizations of municipal administration. Whereas progressive movements and political parties monopolized socio-economic regulation policies within the municipal fabric, De Vlugt sought to extend his office beyond the tasks assigned to it; that is, of being the chairman of the council and the executive, and being responsible for maintaining public order. As such, De Vlugt penetrated into several urban milieus outside the city hall, gradually becoming Amsterdam's most important salesman on an international stage. The most striking illustration Kaal gives of this was De Vlugt's successful negotiations with Moscow to land large orders aimed at reviving Amsterdam's declining shipbuilding industry (74–80). In addition to his mercantile spirit, Kaal also identities De Vlugt's moral campaign to regulate Amsterdam's modern entertainment venues, notably its dance-halls and cinemas, which emerged from the 1920s onwards.

Kaal concludes his study by presenting De Vlugt as a prelude to the post-war managerial mayors, who widened their scope of action far beyond the formal powers and ceremonial privileges attached to the office. At the same time, however, De Vlugt was affected by the noblesse emanating from his liberal predecessors. By increasingly representing himself as the Dutch capital's ‘first citizen’, through means of gesture, decorum and clothing (part of Amsterdam's upper-class habitus), De Vlugt sought to distance himself from the socialist politicians and officials who excluded him from the more significant policy-making processes of the inter-war period. Similarly to Hunt's thesis, we are presented with an alternative picture of municipal politics, one which stresses the broader social and cultural influences on the actions and priorities of individual municipal politicians.

The unelected officials who dominated the inter-war municipal bureaucracy are notable omissions in both studies. Like De Vlugt, who collaborated with many of Amsterdam's officials behind the scenes of public politics, these municipal experts were able to express and pursue their own policy agendas beyond the restrictions of their formal positions, thereby circumventing the structures and customs of political decision-making. In my own thesis on inter-war Amsterdam, ‘De machinerie van de stad: Stadsbestuur als idee en praktijk in Nederland en Amsterdam, 1900–1940’ (The machinery of the city: urban governance as idea and practice, the Netherlands and Amsterdam 1900–1940) (University of Groningen, 2009), I have stressed the enormous impact on municipal administration practice of increasingly remote and independent service agencies.Footnote ⁵

Alongside the trajectory of the electoral-representative local democracy, a whole new political space of interactive decision-making emerged in which various actors from civil society, including trade unions, co-operatives, consumer associations, industrialists and municipal officials, were pivotal in the process of formulating, co-ordinating and implementing new policies. These included new associations and operating procedures such as a collective bargaining system between trade unions and the municipal employers from 1916, a Municipal Inspection Service, established in 1919, and a Municipal Food Council, established in 1932, all of which compelled Amsterdam city council to rethink the relationship between policy-making, administration and service delivery. Many of the influences emanated from overseas: the Dutch scholar and municipal official, G.A. van Poelje (1884–1976), initiated many of the knowledge exchanges through his lectures and publications on American public administration theory, while the socialist alderman, F.M. Wibaut (1859–1936), put his interpretation of ‘scientific management’ into practice in Amsterdam. My thesis challenges the implicit assumption of many studies which posit that, although municipal administration is explicitly related to civil society, there remains some sort of essentialist division between politics and administration (the black box). As well as my own, the theses by Sébastien Gardon, Shane Ewen and Renaud Payre reveal a far more complex relationship that includes both public politics as well as less visible developments with regard to the organization of the municipal fabric as a whole.

Suburban politics

A significant theme of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century municipal administration was the incorporation of neighbouring smaller municipalities into the larger whole of urban or metropolitan jurisdiction. In ‘Suburban dilemmas: the development and amalgamation of Ontario suburban municipalities, 1853 to 1897’ (McMaster University, 2004), Gregory Stott probes the amalgamation of six suburban municipalities adjacent to the Canadian cities of Ottawa, Toronto and London in the Ontario region during the second half of the nineteenth century. Stott starts with an overview of how the six suburbs – Yorkville, New Edinburgh, London West, London East, Parkdale and Brockton – were municipally incorporated as autonomous local authorities, before their amalgamation during the final two decades of the century. Stott shows how suburbanites established their own municipal institutions, which sought to protect their own independent identities. This suburban semiotics fostered a sense of separateness, depending on the origins of each suburb (for example, as milling centres, tollgate suburbs, industrial suburbs or real estate suburbs) and their ethnic and religious composition. At the same time, many suburbanites believed that amalgamation with the cities was inevitable and desirable due to the financial pressures exerted upon the suburban communities by the need to develop their infrastructures while keeping taxation low. Suburban local government only persisted ‘as long as it served the interests of the local ratepayers, and pitted questions of suburban solvency against questions of agency and local identity’ (7). The competition between the urban and suburban municipalities, as it was perceived by suburban administrators, was characterized by a paradox. In their defence of their fiscal autonomy and independent identity, suburban communities tried to emulate the quality of services (particularly utilities and public works) offered in the neighbouring city. The corollary of these endeavours was a further overture to the actual annexation by the cities, due to increasing financial debts and infrastructural dependence on the urban core.

What is interesting at an institutional level about Stott's inquiry is the absence of any municipal safeguards under Canadian constitutional law. Formally, the regional authorities had to decide over municipal incorporation and amalgamation in their territory of jurisdiction. It is, therefore, striking to note that in practice the amalgamation was primarily a bargaining process between the urban centre and its suburban periphery, despite the larger, regional impact of public opinion formation. By concentrating on suburban politics and the continuous threat of annexation in late nineteenth-century Ontario, Stott lucidly illustrates how seemingly separate issues of financial and economic efficiency and expediency were weighted against considerations of suburban identity and independence, of which the former proved decisive.

In a similar vein to Stott, Timothy Cooper's ‘The politics of radicalism in suburban Walthamstow, 1870–1914’ (University of Cambridge, 2005) stresses the ‘ownness’ of the north-east London industrial suburb. According to Cooper, the history of the late Victorian suburb is still associated with a generic terminology that views suburbs as inherently depoliticized, conservative and dull middle-class residential enclaves. Cooper charts a British historiography that portrays suburbia as ‘little more than a story of the emergence of built environment; important in itself, but failing to make wider connections with the nature of suburban society or politics’ (4).

The case of Walthamstow offers interesting possibilities to lay bare these wider connections. In the period under scrutiny, Walthamstow was transformed from ‘a relatively dispersed village’ into ‘a major and socially diverse suburban town dominated by the working-class’ (49). Consequently, municipal politics in Walthamstow was shaped by various converging and diverging currents of political radicalism, which accompanied the influx of working-class residents, totalling almost 100,000 in 1901. Whereas municipal politics in the suburb initially amounted to a division between ratepayers and landowners, from the 1880s onwards the enormous population increase provoked new cleavages revolving around the improvement of living conditions for the working-class majority. The Irish progressive-radical, James McSheedy, embodied a new political culture of forthrightness, fierce debate and violence. Ultimately, Walthamstow's McSheedyism tapped into agendas of British metropolitan progressivism (popularly known as ‘gas and water socialism’) by adhering to the municipalization and modernization of the urban infrastructure. After the local government reforms of 1894, Walthamstow's radicals were strongly represented on the newly established urban district council. After the turn of the century, however, the radical-populist discourse diminished and was succeeded by more moderate and social-democratic movements in municipal politics.

In short, Cooper intelligently narrates the intertwinement of suburbanization and political radicalism in Walthamstow. His goal is not to generalize from this single case, though he rightly states that the reality of suburbia as a dynamic environment comprised of both pre-existing and changing social and political identities should not be obscured by the persistent perception of the conservative, middle-class Victorian suburb. Nevertheless, a comparative approach could have strengthened his case; one can hardly avoid the impression that Walthamstow's experience is highly idiosyncratic.

Regulating mobility

With the physical growth of industrial cities and subsequent interventionist schemes to plan and manage urban space, the regulation of mobility and traffic circulation became a crucial part of administrative routines from the nineteenth century onwards. Carlos Andrés López Galvis’ ‘Polis of the metro: the introduction of the city railway in nineteenth-century London and Paris’ (University of London, 2009) examines the introduction of city railways in Western Europe's capitals of modernity, and shows how these urban undertakings were cultural constructs fabricated and represented through several discourses and artefacts such as maps. Though not central to his approach, the study elaborates on how different systems of local government enabled a similar interplay between networks and actors of industry, urban society, administration and science; though the municipal co-ordination of the railway project was much more evident in Paris than in London. López Galvis convincingly argues that the visual and technical representations involved in the conception and construction of metropolitan railway systems sparked new images of the metropolis, which appealed to both citizens and those involved in managing the railways. In short, urban railway maps manifested a socio-political language that was essential to the acceptance and integration of city railways into the urban fabrics of London and Paris.

Sébastien Gardon's ‘Gouverner la circulation urbaine: des villes françaises face à l'automobile (années dix – années soixante)’ (Lumière University Lyon 2, 2009) is concerned with the municipal regulation of motoring in several French cities between the 1910s and 1960s. Whereas López Galvis presents the planning of railway networks as constructs of spatial knowledge representing new visions of metropolitan life, Gardon avoids viewing automobiles in this way. He is more interested in the way in which the automobile industry, interest groups and municipal authorities were involved in the process of adapting urban space to the age of the motor-car, and how the introduction of the motor-car in the urban landscape affected and provoked institutional changes in municipal administration.

Gardon's bulky thesis, based on an impressive body of archival records, shows how the introduction of the motor-car in the urban areas of Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille, Saint-Etienne, Villeurbanne, Marseille and Nice gradually transformed motoring from a technological marvel into a widely debated public issue, which demanded governmental regulation in many ways. Gardon adheres to an urban governance approach, illustrating how institutional liaisons between industry, interest groups, municipal actors and representatives of the central state facilitated a ‘système d'acteurs’ (214) involved in the regulation of urban motor-car traffic.

At several instances, Gardon's approach is reminiscent of urban regime theory, which emphasizes the ‘interdependence of governmental and non-governmental forces in meeting economic and social challenges’.Footnote ⁶ Although Gardon reserves many pages to an account of his theoretical and conceptual framework, no mention is made of the possibilities of interpreting the recurring coalition of motor-car regulators in terms of an urban regime. Gardon's account is exemplary for the historical study of urban governance processes, but a more eclectic conceptual framework might have produced an even more interesting yield.

Administration and expertise

The final two theses under review deal explicitly with the overarching theme of locating and interpreting the role of municipal administration within the process of urban governance. As such, they shed new light on the relation between local politics and municipal administration at different tiers of society and government. Shane Ewen's ‘Power and administration in two Midland cities, c. 1870–1938’ (University of Leicester, 2004) spans a period of nearly eight decades during which administrative power and municipal expertise considerably changed in Birmingham and Leicester. Ewen compares the municipalization of police and fire-fighting services in both cities. He posits that within the institutional framework of municipal administration, power and expertise are essentially social constructions, shaped and modified by interactions and policy outcomes situated at several layers of government. Ewen explicitly diverts from readings of municipal administration informed by financial (in)dependence or de jure local government. Rather, he forwards a narrative in which (particularly inter-war) municipal administration was ‘a contingent process influenced by the interplay of the various municipal, national and professional institutions involved in service delivery’ (255). Ewen sketches the less visible dynamics of municipal administration involving inter- and intra-governmental relations, the social construction of municipal expertise and experience and the conversion of existing institutions (notably the Watch Committee) to adapt to the new demands of urban governance processes – all going far beyond the city walls.

Although significant differences existed between the two Midland cities and the two services at stake, the similarities point to a pattern of fundamental changes within the municipal fabric which are also, to varying degrees, foregrounded in the theses by Payre, Gardon, Stott and Kaal. Ewen opens up a world of associations, institutions and individuals at different tiers and layers of society and government to elaborate upon how municipal expertise, experience, power, co-ordination, efficiency and autonomy were negotiated and constructed.

Ewen elegantly shows how power relations were continuously negotiated due to changing perceptions of what experience or expertise was deemed as significant during specific policy windows. Whereas, for instance, the Watch Committee lost a great deal of its operational functions in municipal administration after 1914, the highest police and fire-fighting officials were increasingly regarded as indispensable to urban risk management in the inter-war period. At the same time the Watch Committee found new means to legitimize itself as a managerial institution (244) and was also regarded as a direct link to the Home Office of the central state.

The thesis by the French political scientist Renaud Payre is the most synthesizing of all under review here. In ‘À la recherche de la “science communale”. Les “mondes” de la réforme municipale dans la France de la première moitié du vingtième siècle’ (University of Grenoble 2, 2002), Payre connects with the rich French historiography on local government and municipal reform, but adds to it a wider analytical scope.Footnote ⁷ Central to his work is the connection between the epistemological shifts in municipal administration, derived from the social sciences and industrial management, and the organization of administrative practice in French cities during the first half of the twentieth century. With regard to this epistemological shift, Payre hints at a ‘petite transformation’ (644), alluding to Karl Polanyi's famous ‘Great Transformation’. Whereas the latter refers to the advent of a political economy of planned interventions in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the former refers to the changing epistemological underpinnings of municipal administration in France.

Similarly to Ewen, Payre outlines a universe of municipal reform in which party politics, public administration theory, professional associations, specialist journals, transnational interchanges, educational institutions and their representatives are all interconnected. Rather than focusing on the development of specific municipal services, he emphasizes the ‘administrativisation’ (498) of a new political order. Payre essentially argues that the creed of ‘municipal socialism’ lost its appeal among socialists and other municipal reformers during the inter-war period, and, consequently, the rationalization of municipal administration by means of creating a ‘science communale’ became the leitmotiv of local politicians, scholars and officials. In other words, what was perceived as an ideological, socialist endeavour per se before World War I was transformed into an imperative of rationalized and technical municipal administration during the 1920s and 1930s.

Payre's thesis is richly researched and synthesized. He provides a balanced narrative of the conceptualization of municipal administration in France and how this relates to the wider context of municipal reform and public administration. Of particular interest to urban historians are the sections on the International Union of Local Authorities, which was founded in Ghent in 1913, and became one of the main transnational platforms for discussing the political, intellectual and practical implications of municipal administration during the inter-war period. Payre's study of French metropolitan government shares many similarities with the Dutch case in my own research, although in inter-war France the avalanche of periodicals, associations, educational institutes and congresses resulted in an impasse on the road to a universally applied municipal science. The relationship between social science and administrative practice, as well as the influence of Taylorism on municipal administration, adds an interesting theme to the history of urban governance.