The Politics of Planning for Urban Redevelopment: Strategies in the Manipulation of Public Law

In this article Professors Plager and Handler examine the influence of legal process upon decision making in municipal redevelopment. Their thesis is that public acceptance of a redevelopment venture depends primarily on the command of political and planning skills and occurs despite rather than because of legal procedures designed to accommodate principles of democracy. Partly through the method of a case study of recent data collected from one municipality, partly by comparative analysis with other studies, they conclude that the reality of decision making in the region they explore is the predominance of informal power over formal, democratic, legal decision-making devices