JoAnna M.
Male

01

Load-Bearing: How Cities Hold Together When the Pressure Comes

The council that’s home to an 826-year-old mayor’s office is being abolished under an Act of Parliament. A Kyiv metro station flips from rush-hour commute to bomb shelter in the time it takes a siren to sound. Load-Bearing: How Cities Hold Together When the Pressure Comes is narrative nonfiction, in the tradition of Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave, built from comparative fieldwork across nine cities on three continents — a Kansas farm town, a wartime capital, a dominant-party democracy, a Balinese regency governing itself within living memory of dictatorship — chosen for how differently they’re built to withstand pressure. It is a mechanism-first account of what it takes for local institutions to hold together under pressure, told through the residents whose daily lives depend on it.

02

Governing Under Load: Local Institutions and the Comparative Politics of Strain

Nine cities, eight governance traditions, and no two facing the same kind of pressure: one is absorbing decades of growth over a shrinking aquifer, another is sustaining basic services through open war. What they all share is the demand every resident makes of local government: deliver. Governing Under Load is a comparative account of how, and how well, nine such different governments actually do.

It is the research stream behind the book: fieldwork, public documents and structured comparison across cities chosen to span the range of how local government is built. It follows how rules, money, coordination and discretion route ordinary decisions toward dependable delivery or its breakdown, and it produces a deposited research protocol, a methods paper, three teaching cases and a diagnostic instrument for practitioners, with a monograph in prospect. Whether dependable delivery turns more on structure than on resources — on how discretion is distributed, coordinated and constrained when routine breaks down — is the question the fieldwork is built to answer.