public services

The notion of a creative class has been used to shape public policies promoting urban growth by building infrastructures and developing amenities that are likely to attract the ”creative workers”. And yet this hypothesis does not hold up, as the results of a European study show. Developing education and infrastructures that can serve the population as a whole may be a much more productive strategy.

In their discussion of crime and the best ways to curb it, French politicians have relied on a crude opposition between “the culture of results” and neighborhood policing, a doctrine whose American origins they seem to ignore: for sociologist Fabien Jobard, more than creating a new force, reforming the police implies better coordinating between central and local authorities.

Dieter Plehwe describes how the different European postal services, in the backdrop of the crisis of Fordism and state regulation, have had to face new innovative groups with aggressive expansion strategies. He shows how decisive the role of governments and how intricate private and public actors, national and European regulations have been.