PROMPT: What do this week’s readings by Logan & Molotch and Zukin have to say about the tensions between city love and city fear, or the city as a kind of freedom vs. the city as a place of constraint and struggle, which we introduced last week? In other words, how do these authors balance the tensions between the positive and negative aspects of urban life?
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“The City as a Growth Machine”
from Urban Fortunes:
The Political Economy of Place (1987)
John Logan and Harvey Molotch
Editors’ Introduction
The concept of the “growth machine” was initially formulated by Harvey Molotch as an outgrowth of his denunciation of the environmentally destructive effects of a massive 1969 oil tanker spill off the beautiful coastline
of Santa Barbara, California. The spill was considered by many to be a watershed for the national environmental movement, and an even more irrevocable turning point for California. Molotch contributed to the national
debate with a 1969 article in Ramparts magazine titled “Oil in the Velvet Playground.” In this and other articles he expressed the outrage of local businesses and residents, who perceived that they gained little wealth
or tax benefits from the oil companies working in offshore federal waters. The water and air pollution from
the drilling operations furthermore hampered the tourism industry, another major component of the regional
economic base. In the ensuing years, Molotch would continue to reflect on the damaging environmental and
social consequences of American capitalism and urbanization, and move towards a more generalized urban
political economy that understands cities as growth machines that serve elite interests, promote social inequality, and harm the environment. He eventually collaborated with John Logan and they published Urban Fortunes:
The Political Economy of Place in 1987.
Logan and Molotch reject the human ecology view that places and land markets are the natural outcome
of Darwinian and market processes in favor of a Marxist-influenced political economy perspective. They
comprehend homes not just as places that are “lived,” but also as commodities within real estate markets
that can be bought and exchanged, generating use and exchange values for producers and consumers. They
see prices and markets, importantly, as social phenomena, governed not by natural laws of competition,
supply, and demand, but by inequalities of wealth, ownership, and power. Places organize and distribute life
chances in a class stratification system. As commodities, places also acquire special use and exchange
values. In terms of use value, homes, neighborhoods, local businesses, localities, and other places obtain a
special preciousness for people characterized by intense sentiment, commitment, or attachment. In terms
of exchange values, places are idiosyncratic and not substitutable in the fashion of other commodities
such as cars, clothes, and food, because real estate is a more limited and finite resource. Because property
markets are structured by access to infrastructure such as jobs, housing, transportation, schools, hospitals,
and other resources, places determine life chances and are key components of the American class
stratification system.
Place entrepreneurs such as landlords, businessmen, developers, transportation and utility companies, banks,
and corporations gain profit from their control of land and from the proceeds of economic growth. There are
serendipitous, active, and structural entrepreneurs, with varying levels of access to capital as well as place
attachment. Place entrepreneurs form pro-growth coalitions with governmental units and other economic
interests to focus infrastructure and urban development in areas that intensify the profitability of their own
interests. They promote a good business climate and an ideology of growth as a public good through their
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influence on politicians and the media. They foster a booster spirit through partnerships with schools and civic
organizations with essay contests, public celebrations and spectacles such as dedications, soapbox derbies,
parade floats, and beauty contests. Growth machines have evolved from small groups of local power brokers
to include a more multifaceted matrix of auxiliary interests and institutions that include universities, museums,
convention centers, sports franchises, entertainment conglomerates, and tourism interests such as theme
parks. The growth machine works to suppress or deflect public consciousness from the negative social and
environmental consequences of urban development. Citizens’ movements have sprung up to contest
the negative externalities of growth through protests, lobbying, public hearings, and environmental impact
reviews.
The political scientist John Mollenkopf offers a similar concept of “growth coalitions” in his 1983 book,
The Contested City. Joe Feagin offers an excellent historical and empirical case study of urban political economy in his 1988 book, Free Enterprise City. He charts the succession of the Houston growth elite from the
days of the “Suite 8F crowd” to the global corporate interests of the late twentieth century. Andrew Kirby and
A. Karen Lynch examine the negative social consequences of rapid growth and urban sprawl in Houston in
“A Ghost in the Growth Machine: The Aftermath of Rapid Population Growth in Houston,” Urban Studies 24
(1987): 587–596. Mark Gottdiener and Joe Feagin “The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology,” Urban Affairs
Quarterly 24, 2 (1987): 163–187, offer another useful articulation of the new urban sociology. John Walton
published a useful historical perspective on urban political economy in “Urban Sociology: The Contribution
and Limits of Political Economy,” Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1993): 301–320.
Harvey L. Molotch obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1968. He was on the
faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1967 to 2003, and also served as Centennial
Professor at the London School of Economics in 1998–99. He is now Professor of Metropolitan Studies and
Sociology at New York University. In 2003, Molotch won the Robert and Helen Lynd Award for lifetime career
contribution from the Community and Urban Section of the American Sociological Association. His latest book
is Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be
as They Are (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
John Logan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. He was on the faculty
of the State University of New York, Stony Brook from 1972 to 1980; then he moved to the State University
of New York, Albany, where he is now Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology and Department of Public Administration and Policy. He is also Director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative
Urban and Regional Research. He served as the Chair of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of
the American Sociological Association in 1993–94. Logan has published hundreds of articles in the areas
of urban sociology, race and ethnicity, political sociology, immigration, family, aging/gerontology, and social
movements.
Urban Fortunes won the 1988 Robert Park Award for best book on community and urban sociology from
the American Sociological Association (ASA). It also won the 1990 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award
of the ASA. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place is one of the best articulations of urban political
economy, sometimes described as the new urban sociology.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF CITIES
The earth below, the roof above, and the walls
around make up a special sort of commodity: a place
to be bought and sold, rented and leased, as well as
used for making a life. At least in the United States,
this is the standing of place in legal statutes and in
ordinary people’s imaginations. Places can (and
should) be the basis not only for carrying on a life
but also for exchange in a market. We consider this
commodification of place fundamental to urban life
and necessary in any urban analysis of market
societies.
Yet in contrast to the way neoclassical
economists (and their followers in sociology) have
undertaken the task of understanding the property
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commodity, we focus on how markets work as social
phenomena. Markets are not mere meetings
between producers and consumers, whose relations
are ordered by the impersonal “laws” of supply and
demand. For us, the fundamental attributes of all
commodities, but particularly of land and buildings,
are the social contexts through which they are
used and exchanged. Any given piece of real
estate has both a use value and an exchange
value.
[…]
PLACES AS COMMODITIES
For us, as for many of our intellectual predecessors, the market in land and buildings orders
urban phenomena and determines what city life
can be. This means we must show how real estate
markets actually work and how their operations fail
to meet the neoclassical economists’ assumptions.
In short, we will find the substance of urban
phenomena in the actual operations of markets.
Our goal is to identify the specific processes, the
sociological processes, through which the pursuit
of use and exchange values fixes property prices,
responds to prices, and in so doing determines land
uses and the distribution of fortunes. Since economic
sociology is still without a clear analytical foundation, we must begin our work in this chapter by
laying a conceptual basis for the empirical descriptions that will be presented later.
Special use values
People use place in ways contrary to the neoclassical assumptions of how commodities are
purchased and consumed. We do not dispose of
place after it has been bought and used. Places have
a certain preciousness for their users that is not part
of the conventional concept of a commodity. A
crucial initial difference is that place is indispensable; all human activity must occur somewhere.
Individuals cannot do without place by substituting another product. They can, of course, do with
less place and less desirable place, but they
cannot do without place altogether.
Even when compared to other indispensable
commodities – food, for example – place is still
idiosyncratic. The use of a particular place creates
and sustains access to additional use values. One’s
home in a particular place, for example, provides
access to school, friends, work place, and shops.
Changing homes disrupts connections to these
other places and their related values as well. Place
is thus not a discrete element, like a toy or even
food; the precise conditions of its use determine how
other elements, including other commodities, will
be used. Any individual residential location connects
people to a range of complementary persons,
organizations, and physical resources.
The stakes involved in the relationship to place
can be high, reflecting all manner of material,
spiritual, and psychological connections to land
and buildings. Numerous scholars have shown
that given places achieve significance beyond
the more casual relations people have to other
commodities. The connection to place can vary
in intensity for different class, age, gender, and
ethnic groups, individual relationships to place
are often characterized by intense feelings and
commitments appropriate to long-term and multifaceted social and material attachments.
This special intensity creates an asymmetrical
market relation between buyers and sellers. People
pay what the landlord demands, not because
the housing unit is worth it, but because the
property is held to have idiosyncratic locational
benefits. Access to resources like friends, jobs,
and schools is so important that residents (as continuous consumers–buyers) are willing to resort to
all sorts of “extramarket” mechanisms to fight for
their right to keep locational relations intact. They
organize, protest, use violence, and seek political
regulation. They strive not just for tenure in a
given home but for stability in the surrounding
neighborhood as well.
Location establishes a special collective interest
among individuals. People who have “bought” into
the same neighborhood share a quality of public
services (garbage pickup, police behavior); residents have a common stake in the area’s future.
Residents also share the same fate when natural
disasters such as floods and hurricanes threaten and
when institutions alter the local landscape by creating highways, parks, or toxic dumps. Individuals
are not only mutually dependent on what goes on
inside a neighborhood (including “compositional
effects”); they are affected by what goes on outside
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it as well. The standing of a neighborhood vis-àvis other neighborhoods creates conditions that its
residents experience in common. Each place has a
particular political or economic standing vis-à-vis
other places that affect the quality of life and
opportunities available to those who live within its
boundaries. A neighborhood with a critical voting
bloc (for example, Chicago’s Irish wards in the
1930s) may generate high levels of public services
or large numbers of patronage jobs for its workingclass residents, thereby aiding their well being. A
rich neighborhood can protect its residents’ life styles
from external threats (sewer plants, public housing)
in a way that transcends personal resources, even
those typically associated with the affluent. The community in itself can be a local force.
Neighborhoods organize life chances in the
same sense as do the more familiar dimensions of
class and caste. . . . Like class and status groupings,
and even more than many other associations,
places create communities of fate. Thus we must
consider the stratification of places along with the
stratification of individuals in order to understand
the distribution of life chances. People’s sense
of these dynamics, perceived as the relative
“standing” of their neighborhood, gives them some
of their spiritual or sentimental stake in place – thus
further distinguishing home from other, less lifesignificant, commodities.
Contrary to much academic debate on the
subject, we hold that the material use of place
cannot be separated from psychological use; the
daily round that makes physical survival possible
takes on emotional meanings through that very
capacity to fulfill life’s crucial goals. The material
and psychic rewards thus combine to create
feelings of “community.” Much of residents’ striving as members of community organizations or just
as responsible neighbors represents an effort to preserve and enhance their networks of sustenance.
Appreciation of neighborhood resources, so varied
and diffusely experienced, gives rise to “sentiment.” Sentiment is the inadequately articulated
sense that a particular place uniquely fulfills a complex set of needs. When we speak of residents’
use values, we imply fulfillment of all these needs,
material and non-material.
Homeownership gives some residents exchange
value interests along with use value goals. Their
houses are the basis of a lifetime wealth strategy.
For those who pay rent to landlords, use values
are the only values at issue. Owners and tenants
can thus sometimes have divergent interests.
When rising property values portend neighborhood transformation, tenants and owners may
adopt different community roles; but ordinarily,
the exchange interests of owners are not
sufficiently significant to divide them from other
residents.
[…]
Special exchange values
Exchange values from place appear as “rent.” We
use the term broadly to include outright purchase
expenditures as well as payments that homebuyers or tenants make to landlords, realtors, mortgage
lenders, real estate lawyers, title companies, and so
forth. As with use values, people pursue exchange
values in ways that differ from the manner in
which they create other commodities. Suppliers
cannot “produce” places in the usual sense of the
term. All places consist, at least in part, of land,
which “is only another name for nature, which is
not produced by man” (Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944, p. 72)
and obviously not produced for sale in a market.
The quantity is fixed. It is not, says David Harvey
(The Limits to Capital. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982, p. 357), “the product of labor.” This
makes the commodity description of land, in
Marx’s word, “fictitious.” Michael Storper and
Richard Walker (“The Theory of Labor and the
Theory of Location,” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 7, 1 (1983): 43) describe
land, like labor, as a “pseudocommodity.”
Place as monopoly
Perhaps the fundamental “curiosity” is that land
markets are inherently monopolistic, providing
owners, as a class, with complete control over the
total commodity supply. There can be no additional
entrepreneurs or any new product. The individual
owner also has a monopoly over a subsection of
the marketplace. Every parcel of land is unique
in the idiosyncratic access it provides to other
parcels and uses, and this quality underscores the
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specialness of property as a commodity. Unlike
widgets or Ford Pintos, more of the same product cannot be added as market demand grows.
Instead the owner of a particular parcel controls
all access to it and its given set of spatial relations.
In setting prices and other conditions of use, the
owner operates with this constraint on competition
in mind.
Property prices do go down as well as up, but
less because of what entrepreneurs do with their
own holdings than because of the changing relations among properties. This dynamic accounts
for much of the energy of the urban system as
place entrepreneurs strive to increase their rent
by revamping the spatial organization of the city.
Rent levels are based on the location of a property
vis-à-vis other places, on its particularity. In
Marxian conceptual terms, entrepreneurs establish
the rent according to the “differential” locational
advantage of one site over another. Gaining
“differential rent” necessarily depends on the fate
of other parcels and those who own and use them.
In economists’ language, each property use “spills
over” to other parcels and, as part of these “externality effects,” crucially determines what every
other property will be. The “web of externalities”
affects an entrepreneur’s particular holding. When
a favorable relationship can be made permanent
(for example, by freezing out competitors through
restrictive zoning), spatial monopolies that yield even
higher rents – “monopoly rents” in the Marxian
lexicon – are created. But all property tends to have
a monopolistic character. . . .
Nevertheless, property owners can and do
inventively alter the content of their holdings.
Sometimes they build higher and more densely,
increasing the supply of dwellings, stores, or
offices on their land. According to neoclassical
thinking, this manner of increase should balance
supply and demand, thus making property
respond to market pressures as other commodities
supposedly do. But new construction has less
bearing on market dynamics than such reasoning
would imply. New units on the same land can
never duplicate previous products; condominiums
stacked in a high-rise building are not the same as
split-levels surrounded by lawn. Office space on
the top roof of a skyscraper is more desirable
than the same square footage just one floor lower.
Conversely, the advantages of street-level retail
space cannot be duplicated on a floor above. Each
product, old or new, is different and unique, and
each therefore reinforces the monopoly character
property and the resulting price system.
Another curious aspect of the real estate market is its essentially second-hand nature. Buildings
and land parcels are sold and resold, rented and
rerented. In a typical area, no more than 3 percent
of the product for sale or rent consists of new
construction. Not only land, but even the structures
on any piece of land can have infinite (for all
practical purposes) lives; neither utility nor market
price need decrease through continuous use. . . .
Moreover, since the amount of “new” property
on the market at any given moment is ordinarily
only a small part of the total that is for sale,
entrepreneurs’ decisions to add to this supply by
building additional structures will have a much
more limited impact on price than would the
same decisions with other types of commodities.
Indeed, recent studies indicate that U.S. cities
with more rapid rates of housing construction
have higher, not lower, housing costs, even when
demand factors are statistically controlled. Similarly,
relatively high vacancy rates are not associated
with lower rent levels, which suggests that new
construction “leads” local markets to a new,
higher pricing structure rather than equilibrating
a previous one. Given the fixed supply of land and
the monopolies over relational advantages, more
money entering an area’s real estate market not only
results in more structures being built but also
increases the price of land and, quite plausibly, the
rents on previously existing “comparable” buildings.
Thus higher investment levels can push the entire
price structure upward.
[…]
GROWTH MACHINES
Those seeking exchange value often share interests
with others who control property in the same
block, city, or region. Like residents, entrepreneurs in similar situations also make up
communities of fate, and they often get together
to help fate along a remunerative path.
Whether the geographical unit of their interest
is as small as a neighborhood shopping district or
as large as a national region, place entrepreneurs
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attempt, through collective action and often in
alliance with other business people, to create
conditions that will intensify future land use in
an area. There is an unrelenting search, even in
already successful places, for more and more.
An apparatus of interlocking progrowth associations
and governmental units makes up . . . the “growth
machine.” Growth machine activists are largely
free from concern for what goes on within
production processes (for example, occupational
safety), for the actual use value of the products made
locally (for example, cigarettes), or for spillover
consequences in the lives of residents (for example,
pollution). They tend to oppose any intervention
that might regulate development on behalf of
use values. They may quarrel among themselves
over exactly how rents will be distributed among
parcels, over how, that is, they will share the
spoils of aggregate growth. But virtually all place
entrepreneurs and their growth machine associates,
regardless of geographical or social location,
easily agree on the issue of growth itself.
They unite behind a doctrine of value-free
development – the notion that free markets alone
should determine land use. In the entrepreneur’s
view, land-use regulation endangers both society
at large and the specific localities favored as
production sites.
[…]
Growth machines in U.S. history
The role of the growth machine as a driving force
in U.S. urban development has long been a factor
in U.S. history, and is nowhere more clearly
documented than in the histories of eighteenthand nineteenth-century American cities. Indeed,
although historians have chronicled many types
of mass opposition to capitalist organization (for
example, labor unions and the Wobblie movement), there is precious little evidence of resistance
to the dynamics of value-free city building characteristic of the American past. . . . The creators of
towns and the builders of cities strained to use all
the resources at their disposal, including crude
political clout, to make great fortunes out of place.
. . . Sometimes, the “communities” were merely
subdivided parcels with town names on them,
on whose behalf governmental actions could
nonetheless be taken. The competition among
them was primarily among growth elites.
These communities competed to attract federal
land offices, colleges and academies, or installations
such as arsenals and prisons as a means of stimulating development. . . . The other important arena
of competition was also dependent on government decision making and funding: the development
of a transportation infrastructure that would give a
locality better access to raw materials and markets.
First came the myriad efforts to attract state and
federal funds to link towns to waterways through
canals. Then came efforts to subsidize and direct
the paths of railroads. Town leaders used their
governmental authority to determine routes and subsidies, motivated by their private interest in rents.
The people who engaged in this city building
have often been celebrated for their inspired
vision and “absolute faith.” . . . But more important
than their personalities, these urban founders were
in the business of manipulating place for its
exchange values. Their occupations most often
were real estate or banking. Even those who
initially practiced law, medicine, or pharmacy
were rentiers in the making.
[…]
The city-building activities of these growth
entrepreneurs in frontier towns became the
springboard for the much celebrated taming of the
American wilderness. The upstart western cities
functioned as market, finance, and administrative
outposts that made rural pioneering possible. This
conquering of the West, accomplished through the
machinations of “the urban frontier,” was critically
bound up with a coordinated effort to gain
rents. . . .
Perhaps the most spectacular case of urban
ingenuity was the Chicago of William Ogden.
When Ogden came to Chicago in 1835, its population was under four thousand. He succeeded in
becoming its mayor, its great railway developer, and
the owner of much of its best real estate. As the
organizer and first president of the Union Pacific
(among other railroads) and in combination with his
other business and civic roles, he was able to
make Chicago (as a “public duty”) the crossroads
of America, and hence the dominant metropolis of
the Midwest. Chicago became a crossroads not only
because it was “central” (other places were also in
the “middle”) but because a small group of people
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(led by Ogden) had the power to literally have the
roads cross in the spot they chose. . . .
This tendency to use land and government
activity to make money was not invented in
nineteenth-century America, nor did it end then. The
development of the American Midwest was only one
particularly noticed (and celebrated) moment in
the total process. One of the more fascinating
instances, farther to the West and later in history,
was the rapid development of Los Angeles, an
anomaly to many because it had none of the
“natural” features that are thought to support
urban growth: no centrality, no harbor, no transportation crossroads, not even a water supply. Indeed,
the rise of Los Angeles as the preeminent city of
the West, eclipsing its rivals San Diego and San
Francisco, can only be explained as a remarkable
victory of human cunning over the so-called limits
of nature. Much of the development of western cities
hinged on access to a railroad; the termination of
the first continental railroad at San Francisco,
therefore, secured that city’s early lead over other
western towns. The railroad was thus crucial to the
fortunes of the barons with extensive real estate and
commercial interests in San Francisco – Stanford,
Crocker, Huntington, and Hopkins. These men
feared the coming of a second cross-country railroad (the southern route), for its urban terminus
might threaten the San Francisco investments. San
Diego, with its natural port, could become a rival
to San Francisco, but Los Angeles, which had no
comparable advantage, would remain forever in its
shadow. Hence the San Francisco elites used their
economic and political power to keep San Diego
from becoming the terminus of the southern route.
. . . Of course, Los Angeles won in the end, but here
again the wiles of boosters were crucial: the
Los Angeles interests managed to secure millions
in federal funds to construct a port, today the
world’s largest artificial harbor – as well as federal
backing to gain water.
The same dynamic accounts for the other
great harbor in the Southwest. Houston beat out
Galveston as the major port of Texas (ranked third
in the country in 1979) only when Congressman
Tom Ball of Houston successfully won, at the
beginning of this century, a million-dollar federal
appropriation to construct a canal linking landlocked Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. That was
the crucial event that, capitalizing on Galveston’s
susceptibility to hurricanes, put Houston permanently in the lead.
In more recent times, the mammoth federal
interstate highway system . . . has similarly made and
unmade urban fortunes. To use one clear case,
Colorado’s leaders made Denver a highway
crossroads by convincing President Eisenhower in
1956 to add three hundred miles to the system to
link Denver to Salt Lake City by an expensive
mountain route. A presidential stroke of the pen
removed the prospects of Cheyenne, Wyoming, of
replacing Denver as a major western transportation
center. In a case reminiscent of the nineteenthcentury canal era, the Tennessee-Tolnbigbee
Waterway opened in 1985, dramatically altering the
shipping distances to the Gulf of Mexico for many
inland cities. The largest project ever built by the
U.S. Corps of Engineers, the $2 billion project was
questioned as a boondoggle in Baltimore, which
will lose port business because of it, but praised
in Decatur, Alabama, and Knoxville, Tennessee,
which expect to profit from it. The opening of
the canal cut by four-fifths the distance from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, to the Gulf, but did
almost nothing for places like Minneapolis and
Pittsburgh, which were previously about the same
nautical distance from the Gulf as Chattanooga.
Despite the general hometown hoopla of
boosters who have won infrastructural victories, not
everyone gains when the structural speculators
of a city defeat their competition. Given the
stakes, the rentier elites would obviously become
engulfed by the “booster spirit.” . . . Researchers
have made little effort to question the linkage
between public betterment and growth, even when
they could see that specific social groups were
being hurt. Zunz reports that in industrializing
Detroit, city authorities extended utility service
into uninhabitated areas to help development
rather than into existing residential zones, whose
working-class residents went without service even
as they bore the costs (through taxes) of the new
installations.
[…]
The modern-day good business climate
The jockeying for canals, railroads, and arsenals of
the previous century has given way in this one to
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more complex and subtle efforts to manipulate
space and redistribute rents. The fusing of public
duty and private gain has become much less acceptable (both in public opinion and in the criminal
courts); the replacing of frontiers by complex
cities has given important roles to mass media, urban
professionals, and skilled political entrepreneurs. The
growth machine is less personalized, with fewer local
heroes, and has become instead a multifaceted
matrix of important social institutions pressing
along complementary lines.
With a transportation and communication grid
already in place, modern cities typically seek
growth in basic economic functions, particularly job
intensive ones. Economic growth sets in motion
the migration of labor and a demand for ancillary
production services, housing, retailing, and wholesaling (“multiplier effects”). Contemporary places
differ in the type of economic base they strive to
build (for example, manufacturing, research and
development, information processing, or tourism).
But any one of the rainbows leads to the same pot
of gold: more intense land use and thus higher rent
collections, with associated professional fees and
locally based profits.
Cities are in a position to affect the factors of
production that are widely believed to channel the
capital investments that drive local growth. They
can, for example, lower access costs of raw materials and markets through the creation of shipping
ports and airfields (either by using local subsidies
or by facilitating state and federal support).
Localities can decrease corporate overhead costs
through sympathetic policies on pollution abatement,
employee health standards, and taxes. Labor costs
can be indirectly lowered by pushing welfare recipients into low-paying jobs and through the use of
police to constrain union organizing. Moral laws can
be changed; for example, drinking alcohol can be
legalized (as in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Evanston,
Ill.) or gambling can be promoted (as in Atlantic
City, N.J.) to build tourism and convention business.
Increased utility costs caused by new development
can be borne, as they usually are, by the public at
large rather than by those responsible for the
“excess” demand they generate. Federally financed
programs can be harnessed to provide cheap
water supplies; state agencies can be manipulated
to subsidize insurance rates; local political units
can forgive business property taxes. Government
installations of various sorts (universities, military
bases) can be used to leverage additional development by guaranteeing the presence of skilled
labor, retailing customers, or proximate markets for
subcontractors. For some analytical purposes, it
doesn’t even matter that a number of these factors
have little bearing on corporate locational decisions
(some certainly do; others are debated); just the
possibility that they might matter invigorates local
growth activism and dominates policy agendas.
Following the lead of St. Petersburg, Florida, the
first city to hire a press agent (in 1918) to boost
growth, virtually all major urban areas now use
experts to attract outside investment. One city,
Dixon, Illinois, has gone so far as to systematically
contact former residents who might be in a position to help (as many as twenty thousand people)
and offer them a finder’s fee up to $10,000 for directing corporate investment toward their old home
town. More pervasively, each city tries to create
a “good business climate.” The ingredients are
well known in city-building circles and have even
been codified and turned into “official” lists for each
regional area. The much-used Fantus rankings of
business climates are based on factors like taxation,
labor legislation, unemployment compensation,
scale of government, and public indebtedness
(Fantus ranks Texas as number one and New York
as number forty-eight). In 1975, the Industrial
Development Research Council, made up of
corporate executives responsible for site selection
decisions, conducted a survey of its members. In
that survey, states were rated more simply as
“cooperative,” “indifferent,” or “antigrowth”; the
results closely paralleled the Fantus rankings of
the same year.
Any issue of a major business magazine is
replete with advertisements from localities of
all types (including whole countries) striving to
portray themselves in a manner attractive to
business. Consider these claims culled from one
issue of Business Week (February 12, 1979):
New York City is open for business. No other
city in America offers more financial incentives
to expand or relocate. . . .
The state of Louisiana advertises
Nature made it perfect. We made it profitable.
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“THE CITY AS A GROWTH MACHINE”
On another page we find the claim that “Northern
Ireland works” and has a work force with
“positive attitudes toward company loyalty,
productivity and labor relations.” Georgia asserts,
“Government should strive to improve business
conditions, not hinder them.” Atlanta headlines
that as “A City Without Limits” it “has ways of getting people like you out of town” and then details
its transportation advantages to business. Some
places describe attributes that would enhance the
life style of executives and professional employees
(not a dimension of Fantus rankings); thus a number of cities push an image of artistic refinement.
No advertisements in this issue (or in any other, we
suspect) show city workers living in nice homes or
influencing their working conditions.
While a good opera or ballet company may
subtly enhance the growth potential of some
cities, other cultural ingredients are crucial for a good
business climate. There should be no violent
class or ethnic conflict. Racial violence in South
Africa is finally leading to the disinvestment that
reformers could not bring about through moral
suasion. In the good business climate, the work force
should be sufficiently quiescent and healthy to be
productive; this was the rationale originally behind
many programs in work place relations and public
health. Labor must, in other words, be “reproduced,” but only under conditions that least
interfere with local growth trajectories.
Perhaps most important of all, local publics
should favor growth and support the ideology
of value-free development. This public attitude
reassures investors that the concrete enticements
of a locality will be upheld by future politicians. The
challenge is to connect civic pride to the growth
goal, tying the presumed economic and social
benefits of growth in general to growth in the
local area. Probably only partly aware of this, elites
generate and sustain the place patriotism of the
masses. . . . In the nineteenth-century cities, the
great rivalries over canal and railway installations
were the political spectacles of the day, with
attention devoted to their public, not private, benefits. With the drama of the new railway technology,
ordinary people were swept into the competition
among places, rooting for their own town to become
the new “crossroads” or at least a way station.
The celebration of local growth continues to be
a theme in the culture of localities. Schoolchildren
are taught to view local history as a series of
breakthroughs in the expansion of the economic
base of their city and region, celebrating its
numerical leadership in one sort of production or
another; more generally, increases in population tend
to be equated with local progress. Civic organizations sponsor essay contests on the topic of local
greatness. They encourage public celebrations
and spectacles in which the locality name can be
proudly advanced for the benefit of both locals and
outsiders. They subsidize soapbox derbies, parade
floats, and beauty contests to “spread around”
the locality’s name in the media and at distant
competitive sites.
One case can illustrate the link between growth
goals and cultural institutions. In the Los Angeles
area, St. Patrick’s Day parades are held at four
different locales, because the city’s Irish leaders can’t
agree on the venue for a joint celebration. The
source of the difficulty (and much acrimony) is that
these parades march down the main business
streets in each locale, thereby making them a
symbol of the life of the city. Business groups
associated with each of the strips want to claim
the parade as exclusively their own, leading to
charges by still a fifth parade organization that
the other groups are only out to make money. The
countercharge, vehemently denied, was that the
leader of the challenging business street was not
even Irish. Thus even an ethnic celebration can
receive its special form from the machinations of
growth interests and the competitions among them.
The growth machine avidly supports whatever
cultural institutions can play a role in building
locality. Always ready to oppose cultural and
political developments contrary to their interests (for
example, black nationalism and communal cults),
rentiers and their associates encourage activities that
will connect feelings of community . . . to the goal
of local growth. The overall ideological thrust is to
deemphasize the connection between growth and
exchange values and to reinforce the link between
growth goals and better lives for the majority.
We do not mean to suggest that the only source
of civic pride is the desire to collect rents; certainly the cultural pride of tribal groups predates
growth machines. Nevertheless, the growth machine
coalition mobilizes these cultural motivations,
legitimizes them, and channels them into activites
that are consistent with growth goals.
117
T
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THE CULTURESOF CITIES
Sharon Zukin
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1995
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