Urban Governance and Business Improvement Districts: The Washington, DC BIDs

Metropolitan areas have increasingly relied on the creation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) as a way to focus on the special needs of retail and commercial centers. Whether part of the central city or a suburb, these relatively recent forms of organizations represent a new way to address sub-municipal issues. As such, they have become an important part of metropolitan governance and administration. The BIDs also clearly fit within the recent set of ideas represented by advocates of "new governance" that emphasizes both public/private partnerships and alternative institutional structures as strategies for addressing problems of metropolitan governance. This article examines four active BIDs in downtown Washington, DC. It presents the political and economic context of both the creation and operation of the four BIDs, relates them to new governance ideas, considers the extent that they have become an institutionalized form of metropolitan governance and finally, speculates on the extent that they are part of enterprise of public administration and management.