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In the past 35 years, St. Louis, Missouri, has built all of the components of a complete infrastructure of urban tourism: three sports facilities, a convention center and its renovation, an urban entertainment districts and two downtown malls. This sequence of large projects was undertaken even though St. Louis has an extremely fragmented government, and despite the gradual withdrawal of the business elite from the city's affairs. In this article, it is suggested that the city was able to undertake a significant agenda of construction because of the presence of policy communities that linked policy entrepreneurs within the city to external groups. If St. Louis can be taken as a typical case, in many cities a constellation of policy communities may be appropriating decision making and fiscal authority from the democratic institutions of city government. Keywords: policy communities; tourism; infrastructure; urban politics; institutions

This article discusses the history and social aspects of life in St. Louis Chinatown. Topics include social prejudice, poverty, race relations, and urban growth.

Urban school systems face many problems and challenges. Policy responses require not only improvement within schools but also a broad structure of civic support. These authors focus on the creation and activation of civic support for public education. Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis provide very different examples of how civic support develops or fails to develop. Our comparative analysis highlights two major elements in this process: institution building to redirect business coalitions from a focus on economic development to a focus on education and leadership in activating civic capacity on behalf of public education., Public schools in urban America face widespread criticism. Charges of poor student performance and low academic achievement are commonplace. The policy response includes such reforms as privatization, vouchers, charter schools, [...]