Management

Advanced Economy

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The Committee on National Urban Policy, established by the National Research Council (NRC) in 1981 with support from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Ford Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, was charged with responsibility for evaluating past urban policies, continuing review of current policies, examining the experiences of other advanced nations with urban policy, and developing policy options and recommendations for the future.
During the earliest stages of its deliberations, the committee decided that it could contribute most to the discussion of urban policy by addressing basic conditions or trends that seem likely to shape the future course of urban development and raise issues that public policy must face. Traditional approaches to urban policy that deal with a series of functional problems— housing, neighborhood and commercial district deterioration, transportation, urban poverty—have often failed to produce unified and lasting policies not because the problems are unimportant, but because they often tend to be derivative of more fundamental social and economic forces at work in cities and suburbs. It is also important to view urban areas as whole economic entities rather than solely in terms of political jurisdictions.
The first task of the committee, therefore, was to identify and describe those fundamental issues that we believed would shape the ways in which urban areas will develop over the next two decades and would frame the issues with which urban policies must contend. We also believed that national urban policy had to comprehend actions that could be taken at the state and local as well as at the federal level of government. This approach was reflected in the first major report of the committee, Critical Issues for National Urban Policy (National Research Council, 1982a). That report discussed five issues that will shape urban policy in the years to come: (1) the mobility of people and jobs, (2) the rise of an urban underclass, (3) changes in the allocation of responsibility for urban programs in the federal system, (4) changing relationships between the public and private sectors of the economy, and (5) the condition of urban infrastructure. The committee has also published a background paper, "The Evolution of National Urban Policy, 1970-1980" (Hanson, 1982), and a report on an international conference it conducted, National Policy and the Post-Industrial City (National Research Council, 1982b). Together these reports laid a foundation for this study, which is concerned with how urban policies might respond to the substantial changes that have occurred in the structure of the national economy.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Advanced Economy

Call Number

-

Publisher

: ., 1983

Collation

1-232

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-309-53386-4

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Economics

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

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