CITY MANAGER

principal executive and administrative officer of a municipality under a council-manager system of local government. Under such a form the voters elect only the city council, which appoints a city manager to administer municipal affairs under its supervision. The council acts only collectively, and its individual members, including the mayor, have no administrative functions. The city manager, subject to the general supervision of the council, is in full charge of the administration of municipal affairs. He prepares the budget, appoints and dismisses personnel, directs the work of municipal departments, and attends council meetings in which he presents recommendations on municipal business and usually takes an active part in the discussions. The council-manager plan was devised and first advocated in the United States by the National Short Ballot Organization, which proposed to improve local and state government by reducing the number of elected officials. In 1913 Dayton, Ohio, was the first large city to adopt the plan. It spread quickly after that as the plan was adopted in many cities in the United States and Canada as well as in Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. Advantages of the council-manager plan are said to be that it provides for a shorter ballot by reducing the number of elected officials; that it unifies authority and political responsibility in the council; that it centralizes administrative responsibility in an administrator appointed by the council; and that it reduces the number of patronage jobs. Some criticisms of the plan are that the city manager usually comes from outside the city and is therefore unfamiliar with the problems of the city; that it places too much power in the hands of one person; that it promotes a middle-class orientation to efficiency rather than to need; and that the purely bureaucratic administration of the city may be unresponsive to the demands and problems of the people. Modern city government A city cannot operate without a government of some kind. There are, indeed, no known examples of a city without government, however far back one goes in history. In some European countries cities were for centuries virtually independent political entities. Although the city-states of ancient Greece are the most famous illustration of this phenomenon, local government in such countries as England, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany is much older than national government. In the modern world, however, cities are contained within the boundaries of national states, and city government forms part of a much larger and more complex constitutional regime. City government invariably reflects the general characteristics of this national regime. When political democracy exists at the national level, as in most of the Western world and Japan today, cities enjoy a substantial degree of local autonomy and have democratic systems of government. When the regime is authoritarian, central control is likely to diminish or extinguish local self-government and to suppress democratic forms. Similarly, a country that prefers to concentrate power and responsibility in a single individualor, conversely, in a committeeis likely to display this preference in its cities no less than in its central government. Basic characteristics of city government Jurisdictions of cities Hitherto, the jurisdiction of city governments has been limited to the built-up urban area although there are exceptions to this, as, for example, in Brazil and South Africa. A clear distinction between the city and the surrounding countryside no longer exists. The built-up central area extends without any sharp dividing line to the suburbs, then to the farther fringe composed of housing estates and villages for commuters, interspersed with small produce farms, recreational areas, industrial estates, and so forth, all of which may form a single area of interrelated activities. An army of commuters daily invades the main city, and at the close of the day they retreat to their homes in the suburbs or beyond. They and their families use the city for such purposes as recreation, trade, shopping, professional services, and higher or technical education. The city depends for its economic health on their services and their purchasing power. But commuters also have to be provided with costly daytime services such as police and fire protection, water supply, sewage, public health, highways, and public transport, although those who live outside the city limits usually contribute little or nothing to the municipal revenue. Urban technology and the patterns of behaviour of contemporary life have made it difficult or impossible for municipalities to cope with the mounting problems of the city region, and particularly those of the metropolitan areas, unless drastic changes of structure and scope are carried out.