Category: Writing

In a recent article in the journal Planning Theory, I draw on the work of Scharpf and Schmidt to outline how institutional design shapes the legitimacy of planning institutions.

Using Canadian census data for neighbourhood change research is hard because tract boundaries change. Jeff Allen and I decided to fix it. This article in the journal Canadian Geographer describes our method.

Do campaign finance and other rules that govern elections level the playing field? My analysis of the 2014 City of Toronto ward elections, published in the journal Urban Affairs Review, suggests not much.

The relationship between cities and the state and provincial governments that empower them differs between Canada and the United States. In this piece, published in the International Journal of Canadian Studies, I argue that this is the result of divergent processes of incremental institutional change beginning in the early 19th century.

The concept of planning culture has become a popular way of explaining national differences in urban planning practice and development outcomes. In this piece in Town Planning Review, I argue that an historical institutionalist analysis is a more helpful basis for comparative planning research.

In this article in Canadian Journal of Political Science, Gabriel Eidelman and I survey the how Canadian political scientists have studied urban politics and local governments since the 1970s, and point to gaps that should be filled.

Why haven’t Canadian political scientists paid much attention to urban politics? In the Journal of Urban Affairs, Gabriel Eidelman and I argue that there are institutional, epistemological, and ontological reasons for this fact.