How do cities foster autonomous planning practices despite top-down control?

How do city governments create their own regulatory practices despite top-down control? We explore this question by focusing on a major planning quandary that has emerged in Israel over the last two decades: regulating the maintenance of high-rise residential buildings. Despite its social and economic importance, there are no national regulations in this domain. The city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa proactively filled this policy lacuna by gradually devising maintenance regulations, despite disagreements over whether it has the authority to regulate the upkeep of privately owned housing. The analysis herein reveals an ongoing struggle between local and central governments with very distinct worldviews. The case study demonstrates how municipalities push the central government to act, to assess its attitudes, and to review policies, and how they create a degree of autonomy for themselves. The analysis contributes to existing literature by proposing a conceptual framework consisting of two types of municipal autonomy. The first is the ordinary exercise of cities' administrative and planning powers independent of intervention by higher governmental levels. The second type is the extraordinary exercise of cities' political power vis-à-vis governments higher in the vertical hierarchy. •Local governments can act autonomously despite top-down control.•Regulatory void is filled when central government looks away, or via confrontation.•Cities and municipalities engender two types of autonomy.•Municipal Autonomy type 1: Jurisdictional autonomy, independent of intervention by governments higher in the vertical hierarchy.•Municipal Autonomy type 2: Meta-jurisdictional autonomy, diverging and challenging centralized governmental control.