The City: Private or Public? is a new working paper by Harvard Law Professor Gerald Frug that analyses the conceptual, financial, and structural privatisation of city governments in the United States. The article focuses on city services, economic development, and the design of the city population, and provides two contrasting approaches, one embraced by the private city and the other by the public city. By doing so, it seeks to emphasise the different choices facing state governments when they empower and disempower city governments and to suggest what is at stake when these choices are made.
The full paper is available here (pdf) and is part of a collection of themed research papers assigned by the New Urban Governance project to leading academics based across the world.