TY - JOUR TI - Capitol Navy Yard DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T34B33R1 PY - 2017 AB - This case study of government’s role in development in Washington D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood covers the time period 1995-2008 and utilizes multiple source types to answer its research questions. Newspaper articles and other media reports, archived data, official government statistics, visual evidence, and structured surveys are used to construct a granular, narrative timeline of the neighborhood’s transition. This narrative is used to analyze the case and explore the literature on government’s role in urban development in order to explore perceived gaps in the theory; which include 1) a monolithic understanding of “government,” 2) an over-reliance on a search for universal truths, 3) an embedded unit of analysis problem, and 4) the use of methods that are prone to selection bias during the evidence-compilation stage and subjective assessment in the analysis stage. Findings include the conclusions that 1) government matters, even in the era of the decentralized state, 2) urban development is messy, chaotic, unpredictable, contextual, and subject to coincidence and 3) that there is indeed, trouble in the body of urban development theory. KW - Planning and Public Policy KW - Washington Navy Yard LA - eng ER -