This book by Blair A. Ruble (1949), Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and Co-Director of the Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Research Centre (USA), is essentially a half-century episode of the fascinating, almost adventurous history of Moscow, Chicago and Osaka in the real context of ‘wild capitalism’ during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Exploring the causes and the essence of specific urban problems, the author concludes that city leaders were doomed to build coalitions between seemingly disparate social groups, ‘benefiting from interaction with individuals or groups that were repugnant in every way’. The effectiveness of city government depended directly on the ability to implement one of the few effective political methods of managing material and human resources, which the author has defined as pragmatic pluralism. Unique experience of the ‘second capitals’ in Russia, the USA and Japan is still relevant today in many aspects whenever such method of optimal management is applied.
Big City Strategy
Pragmatic Pluralism in «Gilded Age Chicago», Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka
Blair A. Ruble. Big City Strategy. Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji era Osaka. (Blair A. Ruble. Second Metropolis. Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka. — Cambridge University Press, 2001). — Moscow: Moscow School of Political Studies, 2004. — 456 p.
