Comprehensive citywide planning is a practice that many cities undertake regularly. In theory, the principles laid out in citywide plans can help guide the distribution of public and private investments that shape the future development of that city. In recent years, many major cities have been incorporating equity goals and frameworks into planning efforts in attempts to close long-standing racial gaps. Although urban planning, as a field, has espoused goals of participation and shared power in development decisions, power and influence is often concentrated among wealthier households and institutions. Participation in planning processes often involves conflict between opposing interests, and development outcomes are often inequitable. Comprehensive planning has the potential to change some development rules and processes that lead to inequitable outcomes, but this is contingent upon shifting power and influence away from wealthy and elite citizens and institutions. Research on power and empowerment is critical to understanding how influence is manifested through planning policies and processes. The City of Chicago’s “We Will Chicago” plan provides a case example of how city planning processes attempt to engage stakeholders in developing a vision and goals that align with traditionally marginalized groups.

Chapter 4 deals first with the asymmetries between the different countries pre-existing to the EMU, due to behavioral and structural factors also of an inertial kind in peripheral countries (but also in the core to some extent). Asymmetries showed themselves mainly in the public accounts of some of them as well as in other features of the economies of all peripheral countries, such as higher inflation rates, and derived mostly from diffuse inefficiencies, but also, to some extent, from the different weight of the services and the productivity profile. Persisting these structural differences between peripheral and core countries, together with the high (low) level of domestic demand deriving from high (low) public spending and the higher (lower) wage rises, the current account of the former (the latter) would tend to be negative (positive). This did not worry the majority of scholars, but the lasting imbalances in the domestic and external accounts of each country that emerged when the Union began operating aggravated the crisis originated elsewhere, but developed in forms and with an intensity that appear as built-in in the way European institutions were devised as well as in the different growth strategies pursued by the various countries