What is public, what is private, and what is the relationship between them? Can the public interest be clearly identified and protected? What role should government play in the lives of ordinary citizens? These are questions currently engaging policy makers and the general public as well as scholars in a range of disciplines. The provision and financing of urban public goods is one arena in which such questions have arisen.Footnote ¹ Historically, governments, private entities, and mixed forms such as public-private partnerships have undertaken these activities in the United States and other countries (Beito et al. Reference Beito, Smith, Jacobson and Keating1989; Dyble Reference Dyble2010; Goodrich Reference Goodrich1960; Hodge et al. Reference Hodge, Greve and Boardman2010; Jacobson and Tarr Reference Jacobson and Tarr1995). In the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States, tax revolts and concerns about “big government” led to increased scrutiny of the appropriate role of government. Contracting out of government activities and privatization both assumed increased importance (Dyble Reference Dyble2012; Light Reference Light1999).

Legal cases regarding “takings” and eminent domain, most notably the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London, sparked concerns that boundaries between public and private were being transgressed inappropriately. Public outcry and a wave of state-level legislation to restrict eminent domain ensued. In the Kelo case, the city of New London was allowed to use eminent domain to transfer private property from one private owner to another for purposes of economic development and to raise the city's tax revenues. The homes that were taken and their neighborhood were not blighted and a public purpose of slum clearance was not claimed. The case raised broad questions of what constitutes public use, public purpose, and the public interest, as well as issues concerning who should decide (the judiciary or state legislatures) (Friedman Reference Friedman and Boyce2003; Lamoreaux Reference Lamoreaux2011; Lyons Reference Lyons2009).

In his analysis of the Kelo decision, Mihaly (Reference Mihaly2006) took the dissenting Supreme Court justices to task for failing to recognize that most urban development and redevelopment now are done through public-private partnerships and that mixed-use projects often are preferred. However, while it undoubtedly is true that public-private partnerships and mixed-use projects, which blur the distinction between public and private development and land use, have become dominant, that does not necessarily mean that the distinction between public and private interests has disappeared. It remains important for the public interest to be protected in the deals that are made. The relative bargaining power of public-sector agencies and private developers depends on the organizational and financial resources of each side and is affected by the strength of the local market and the real estate cycle (Sagalyn Reference Sagalyn2001, Reference Sagalyn2007).Footnote ²

While Sagalyn and others note ongoing divergences between public and private interests in the twentieth century, and raise the possibility of public interests being subordinated to private ones, another important strand of literature claims that in the nineteenth-century United States, private interests were firmly subordinated to public ones. Novak (Reference Novak1996) criticized the “myth of statelessness” and the idea that laissez-faire is an accurate portrayal of this period. Nineteenth-century governments, motivated by a concept of “the people's welfare,” undertook extensive regulation in the spheres of public safety, economy, space, morals, and health.Footnote ³

Hartog (Reference Hartog1983) discussed the development of the public-private distinction in American law through examination of the corporation of the city of New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, “the city's charter created an institution in which property and governmental rights were blurred and mixed” (Reference Hartogibid.: 21). Its corporate body had both private and public powers. However, during the mid-nineteenth century New York City came to be defined as a “public” corporation, subordinate to the state legislature and with powers differing from those of private business corporations. Urban historians have explored the changing role of municipal governments in providing urban infrastructure and services (see, among others, Melosi Reference Melosi2000; Monkkonen Reference Monkkonen1988; Platt Reference Platt1983; Tarr and Dupuy Reference Tarr and Dupuy1988; Teaford Reference Teaford1984; and Troesken Reference Troesken2004).

A fascinating recent body of literature examines institutions combining public and private characteristics in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. Following earlier accounts such as Caro's (Reference Caro1974) study of Robert Moses and his creation of public authorities in New York, scholars have explored the origins and operations of metropolitan special districts, public authorities, and business improvement districts (Brooks Reference Brooks2008; Brooks and Meltzer Reference Brooks, Meltzer, Ingram and Hong2010; Dilworth Reference Dilworth2010; Dyble Reference Dyble2009; Elkind Reference Elkind1998; Erie Reference Erie2006; Radford Reference Radford2013). Other recent contributions draw upon the political science and sociology literatures on urban regimes and urban growth coalitions to explore interactions between societal actors and governmental bodies at the municipal level (Fure-Slocum Reference Fure-Slocum2013; Kirkpatrick and Smith Reference Kirkpatrick and Smith2011; Rast Reference Rast2009).

This special section of Social Science History adds to the growing body of scholarship on permutations of public and private. It has its origins in a panel on “Public and Private Provision of Urban Public Goods” at the Social Science History Association annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2012. The articles address several overlapping themes, including the choice of public versus private provision, the question of how urban public goods are financed, the purposes served by their provision, the evolution of ideas about what are “necessary” public goods, the extent of inequality in their provision, and the issue of who decides about their provision, financing, and location. The articles also raise a wide range of questions for future theoretical, historical, and comparative research.

Four of the articles address the choice of public versus private provision of infrastructure and services, with Jessica Trounstine and Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan putting it at the center of their analyses. Trounstine's empirical study of community security and education services, “The Privatization of Public Services in American Cities,” tests the hypothesis that increased race and income diversity lead to greater private provision of urban public goods. Using a data set for 446 incorporated places during 2000–7, she finds that when cities have more diversity and more inequality, a larger proportion of their policing and education needs is met by the private sector. Economically and racially homogenous communities are collectively willing to invest more resources in public goods.

In “Dirty Politics: Public Employees, Private Contractors, and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Trash Collection in Pittsburgh and New Orleans,” Strach and Sullivan provide a detailed historical narrative of the provision of garbage collection services in each city. Like many other Northeastern cities, Pittsburgh chose a system in which the city awarded contracts for trash removal to private parties. In New Orleans, garbage collection was managed by city officials in the Public Works Department, but actually undertaken by owners of carts (often widows) who were selected as “deserving” and paid by the city.

Strach and Sullivan emphasize political determinants of choices about public goods provision. They argue that municipal officials chose systems that benefited their political standing, with Pittsburgh's political machine awarding its first contract in 1895 to a company headed by the brother of a local Republican Party boss, and New Orleans’ Ring using patronage to shore up its shaky political standing. They highlight the difficulty of drawing distinctions between public and private because “city collection” in New Orleans and other cities encompassed a motley assortment of practices and people including many private actors (e.g., scavengers, widows, convict labor, and local women) as well as more classic administrative departments.

In “Public Interest and the Financing of Local Water Control in Qing China, 1750–1850,” Wenkai He explains that local gentry had participated actively in both financing and management of hydraulic projects since the Song dynasty (960–1279). The Qing government encouraged local participation on the grounds that local inhabitants were the beneficiaries. Moreover, it felt that local financing and management decreased the likelihood of embezzlement and abuse of power by county government officials. When local financial resources were inadequate for repairing or strengthening private water-control projects, the central government sometimes was willing to supplement those resources through the financing system described in the following text. However, local gentry remained important in spending the money and managing the “people's projects,” and the central government expected local people to take responsibility for maintenance of parts of dikes located in their communities. He concludes that in the case of hydraulic projects in Qing China, state and society should not be viewed as two opposing sides, and active participation by nonstate actors does not suggest rejection of, or opposition to, state power and authority.

Naomi Adiv traces the history of municipal bathing and swimming facilities from the 1870s to the present in “Paidia meets ludus: New York City Municipal Pools and the Infrastructure of Play.” She portrays the choice between public and private provision as being partly grounded in economic inequality. Beginning in 1901, free municipal baths replaced those provided by charity groups to the poor and working immigrants living in crowded tenements. State legislation played a decisive role, requiring provision of baths in cities with populations of more than 50,000.

Drawing upon earlier historical work by Wiltse (Reference Wiltse2007), Renner (Reference Renner2008), and others, Adiv explains that middle- and upper-class New Yorkers, who could afford indoor plumbing and trips to beachside resorts, had already made bathing and swimming part of their routine since the mid-nineteenth century. She cites an 1874 New York Times article claiming a widespread preference for private bathing establishments by those who could pay for them. As in Trounstine's article, private provision of some urban public goods was a choice made by those with greater economic means.

Finance of urban public goods is the main focus of two articles, those by Wenkai He and Carol Heim. He analyzes a system in which many water-control projects were financed by the central government, but not through direct government spending. Instead, localities borrowed official funds and repaid them through extra land taxes over a period of time. This financing method seemed not to increase the state's regular expenditure, although it was effectively a method of state investment in small-scale infrastructure. When arrears accumulated, as they frequently did in less well-off communities, central government might choose not to require repayment. These “loans” were especially important in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Qing state was experiencing fiscal difficulties that limited its direct expenditures, and when it had a relatively inflexible fiscal system.

In “Who Pays, Who Benefits, Who Decides? Urban Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Chicago and Twentieth-Century Phoenix,” Heim discusses the emergence in both cities of financing systems based upon a benefit principle of taxation: those who create a need for additional public goods, and receive their benefits, are those who should pay for them. In this respect, these financing systems share the intention of the original system of financing water-control projects in late imperial China. Special assessments in Chicago and development impact fees in Phoenix both represented a movement away from taxing the city as a whole for urban public goods.Footnote ⁴ They reflected in part a desire to avoid using government to redistribute. In He's account, by contrast, the government became willing to redistribute in response to disaster circumstances; the “loan” system was, in practice, a means to transfer wealth from richer to poorer areas unable to pay for their infrastructure.

The government undertaking redistribution in He's article was central rather than local, and central government typically is considered to be the appropriate level for redistribution. During the 1840s in Chicago and the 1980s in Phoenix, however, there was considerable aversion to using the federal government (as well as local government) to redistribute. These cases also differed from those discussed by He in being examples of booming cities, rather than areas recovering from disaster events. In Adiv's account, redistribution in the sense of providing free recreational facilities for the urban poor was partly a strategic attempt to maintain community order and prevent riots in the 1960s. She points out that the advantage of infrastructural, as opposed to purely programmatic, changes is that they persist; pools continued to offer popular access to water for cooling and play.

The articles by He and Adiv highlight a third theme: the purposes served by provision or financing of urban public goods. These purposes may extend beyond simply making needed goods available or solving a market failure. He's main argument is that financing water-control projects was important for legitimation of the state in Qing China, as in other early modern and modern states for whom war was no longer the only important basis for legitimation. The Qing state's role in safeguarding “public welfare” or “the public interest” was invoked to justify its coercive power. He concludes that the state's duty to secure the public interest was recognized by both state and society actors. A political purpose also is present in Strach and Sullivan's article, though not necessarily in the direction of best serving the public interest. As noted in the preceding text, they argue that methods of providing garbage collection services in Pittsburgh and New Orleans served to benefit the standing of local political elites.

Adiv argues that municipal baths and swimming pools in New York, like many public health programs, were meant to provide infrastructure that was not available to poor people, while also being part of a larger social program to produce “desirable qualities” in the citizenry, including cleanliness, fitness, and strength. Tension between two concepts of play (paidia, or childlike exuberance, and ludus, involving competition based on standardized rules) persisted through different programs of construction of municipal swimming pools. Adiv describes the episode of construction undertaken in the 1960s as combining the goals of offering meaningful amenities to urban populations and attempting to prevent urban unrest. She notes that community members advised New York City's Emergency Summer Task Force that “temporary cooling programs during the hot summer months” (Reference Adiv2015: 448) would be an insufficient remedy for urban problems.

The idea of social control, and who controls public space, is an important one in Adiv's article. She describes conflicts over appropriate behavior (struggles between public officials, reformers, or lifeguards, on the one hand, and river, municipal bath, or pool users, on the other) throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Definitions of misbehavior versus play differed significantly depending on the racial and income makeup of a pool's population.

Adiv's article also touches upon a fourth theme: the evolution of ideas about what public goods people are considered to have a right to, and whether government should be expected to provide them. Adiv notes the tension between the idea that provision of public space should promote a regulated, disciplined public, and the idea that public space should be available to be enjoyed by all people on an equal basis (see also Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris Reference Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris2007, cited by Adiv, on sidewalks in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Los Angeles). This theme arises in Heim's article as well. In mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, urban residents were not considered to have a right to paved streets. By the late twentieth century, in Phoenix and elsewhere, governments were expected to provide streets and a wide range of other public goods.Footnote ⁵ The range of necessary public goods that government should be expected to provide continues to be contested; current debates in the United States center on health care, and what should be provided in terms of housing remains unresolved.

One consequence of the view that urban residents are not necessarily entitled to certain public goods can be a tolerance of a large degree of spatial or other inequality in their provision. Heim cites Einhorn's (Reference Einhorn1991) discussion of spatial variation in provision of streets and sidewalks. Many working-class homeowners in nineteenth-century Chicago, as in other cities such as Detroit and Milwaukee, were able to afford their homes (often ones they built themselves) but did not have the means to pay for additional urban infrastructure. The special assessment system protected them from being required to contribute to financing the infrastructure of their more well-off neighbors. On the other hand, it meant that they (and nonhomeowners) lacked comparable infrastructure. A progressive tax structure based on ability to pay, if politically feasible, would allow for more universal provision of public goods (though the question of which goods are “necessary” for all would remain).

He's article suggests an effort by the Qing government to reduce spatial inequality in the provision of water-control projects. The government was more likely to allow nonrepayment of loans in areas that were too poor to be able to repay them, but that would otherwise lack infrastructure present in other localities. Trounstine's article describes a process of privatization by which inequality in provision of public goods could be exacerbated even for goods that have come to be widely regarded as “necessary”: education and community security services.

Finally, the theme of “who decides?” is present in each of the five articles in this special section. Heim discusses the shift from citywide to more segmented decision making with the emergence of the ward system in Chicago and the district system in Phoenix. She also notes the contrast between homeowners in Chicago who were excluded from local decisions to create infrastructure they might oppose and (prospective) homeowners in Phoenix who were not involved in decisions to create infrastructure that they and/or others considered “necessary.” In both cases, there was a desire to make decisions about infrastructure more administrative and less political, along with a desire to avoid or downplay a redistributive role for government.

In He's article, interesting questions about “who decides” revolve around the relationship between central and local decision makers. Redistribution by the central government was in part an outcome of the dilemma in which local decision makers found themselves. Magistrates in rural areas, such as Juye County where a dike protected the county seat, were charged by the center with responsibility for preventing flooding. But they were constrained by an inflexible fiscal system that did not grant them sufficient funds. The system of “lending rather than spending” emerged in part in response to this dilemma.

In Trounstine's article, there is an implication that decisions by one group of urban residents (to switch to private provision of public goods) effectively amount to making decisions for another group. The quantity and quality of urban public goods consumed by the second group may diminish as more well-off residents opt out of provision by the public sector. Strach and Sullivan highlight the role of different political machines in decision making in their two cases. “Who decided” influenced both the character of the overall systems used for trash collection and the particular individuals who were awarded contracts (in Pittsburgh) or allowed to operate carts (in New Orleans). Adiv emphasizes decisions about the appropriate use of public goods and public space, rather than decisions about providing or financing them. Struggles between working-class men and boys and the reformers who wanted to remove them from view, or between boisterous teenagers and pool lifeguards, reflected differing views both about acceptable behavior and about who should define it.

Taken together, these five articles present new insights on both positive and normative questions associated with urban public goods. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and drawing upon several disciplines, they enhance our understanding of both broad processes and specific historical cases. In addition to the agendas for future research suggested by the authors, these articles spark additional questions for inquiries into the past and for reflections upon current developments and policy. Trounstine's model could be fruitfully applied to earlier time periods to explore whether similar dynamics are observed. Strach and Sullivan's comparison could be widened to other cities and linked to more analytical treatments of public versus private provision of urban public goods. The financing system described by He bears very interesting similarities to value-capture methods of financing currently being tried by fiscally strapped local governments in the United States and other countries (Ingram and Hong Reference Ingram and Hong2012). Heim's article invites further consideration of the ways in which costs of public goods have been, or could be, shifted among different groups. Adiv's discussion resonates with current debates about policies regarding use of public space by homeless individuals; some business improvement districts and local governments have generated controversies over both appropriate use and over who decides.

Recent decades have seen a worsening of income and wealth inequality in the United States and some other countries. Among the many implications of this trend are its impacts on provision and financing of urban public goods. Some have argued that strategies of redistribution by government no longer are politically viable and that alternatives based on widening ownership of productive assets need to be developed (Imbroscio Reference Imbroscio2013). It is useful to keep in mind Rosen's (Reference Rosen1986: 57) observation that barriers to some urban infrastructural improvements include what she termed “class biases in the demand articulation process.” More aggressive voices in that process (upper- and middle-class people, land developers, and powerful corporations) receive a larger share of the benefits. Although Rosen's focus was on the aftermath of great fires in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States, her concerns about political influence and strategic maneuver to both promote and block change remain relevant 100 years later.