Talk, Money and Institutional Design: Comparing Urban Policy Prospects in Toronto Versus London‪.‬

Abstract Discursive social movement, political economy and institutional approaches tend to dominate studies of large urban centres and, in particular, efforts to assess the prospects for progressive public policies in them. This article uses a revised version of Vincent Lemieux's 1996 framework to compare Toronto and London, two cities that underwent major governance transitions during the late 1990s, with respect to their normative discourse, fiscal resource, institutional and local leadership contexts. The discussion concludes that talk, money, design and mayoral factors seemed less conducive to progressive policy outcomes in early post-transition Toronto than London.