Or rather, what can cities expect from President Obama?

A day after the election, Planetizen has a look.  Their conclusion:

In the end, as Planetizen blogger and land use law professor Michael Lewyn reminds us, the hands-on work of urban planning, zoning and development are firmly in the hands of local government and therefore won't be directly impacted by a new president. But if the evidence is to be believed, an Obama presidency will be much more hands-on in making decisions about urban policy, particularly when it comes to significant investments in infrastructure for energy and transportation.

Sorry to be repeating themes lately, but the election has obviously been dominating popular discourse of late, and this is the obvious way to tie it in here.  Plus, speaking for myself -- on top of last night's big event, this has been an especially hectic couple of weeks schoolwise, so I really haven't had a chance to branch out much.  But expect things here to get mixed up again soon.

City Limits goes quite a bit more in depth than the Philly Daily News did a couple weeks ago regarding the respective urban agendas of the two major presidential candidates.

I don't think I need to remind anyone reading this to VOTE, do I?

Two more days, folks.

Last Saturday on his excellent website FiveThirtyEight.com (seriously, if you're as obsessed with presidential politics as I am and haven't yet bookmarked/RSS-feeded that site, you must do so now) Nate Silver looked at the demographics of the places Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have visited since August 29th, and, in what may well constitute your Unsurprising News Item of the Day, he found that Obama has spoken to much more racially diverse areas than has Palin.  From this one could deduce that Obama has been paying attention to larger municipalities, and without looking up the actual numbers, I'd guess that Detroit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Denver, St. Louis and Milwaukee are in fact bigger than anywhere Palin has been. Choose your own set of implications here. 

Of course, this analysis has a shortcoming: Sarah Palin is not John McCain.  Minor detail, right? 

Well, the next day the Philadelphia Daily News wondered explicitly: "Do the candidates have an urban agenda?"

Here's the short answer they were given:

"John McCain basically has one underlying proposal," said Ed Schwartz, president of the Institute for Civic Values in Philadelphia. "Cut taxes and things will get better. There is no urban policy built into that, because urban policy involves an investment."

Schwartz said Obama's plans are very different.

"You look now at Obama's proposals and they are responsive to the things that cities need," he said. "He talks about community development. He talks about a transition to work and re-entry. He's saying that this is an absolute priority."