ASSIGNMENT 4: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE CITY: POLITICAL ECONOMY PARADIGM (10 points, Due Date 10/18/2011)

Introduction The paradigm of urban ecology informed the vast majority of urban studies that were undertaken between the 1920s and the 1960s. Even researchers working in this framework questioned how far urban ecology could go in explaining urban form and urban social life. Some critics noted such problems as the failure to find a model of growth that would apply to all cities and the ecologists inability to make a clear distinction between the biotic and the social levels of social organization. Others thought that human ecology relied too heavily on economic competition between individuals to explain urban patterns, overlooking such shared cultural factors as social prestige and ethnic prejudices. Another potential problem has been ecologys determinism: that is, seeing social patterns as the outcome of impersonal social forces rather than of decisions made by human beings. One critique of human ecology was particularly useful in directing later research. In an article published in 1954, William Form argued that human ecologists had ignored the role of social structure, or organized groups, in shaping the urban landscape. He contended that real estate groups, big business, residents, and local governments all organize themselves in ways that permit or exclude land uses from locating in urban areas. The most highly institutionalized aspect of this organization is property zoning, through which local governments channel certain land uses to certain areas, regardless of their ability to pay for different locations. What Form questioned was the ecologists adherence to the assumption of neoclassical economic theory that land use is the natural result of competition in a free market. Rather, Form (1954, 323) proposed that researchers study land use by Isolating the important and powerful land-interested groups in the city. By 1970, researchers working within the paradigm of urban ecology had run out of questions that they could answer using their theoretical framework. Several limitations of human ecology prevented researchers from adapting the paradigm to new questions. First, urban ecologys assumption that society followed natural laws, and that it was an outgrowth of the biotic level of life, tended to make researchers ignore the role of human action and decision making on urban spatial patterns. Second, the ecologists emphasis on describing urban spatial patterns confined them to superficial questions of where different activities took place and how those patterns changed rather than why they changed. Finally, urban ecologys assumption that competition for land within the market determined the location of different land uses distracted researchers from the important impact that government officials and other powerful actors could have on the city. A new set of urban realities and a new set of questions challenged researchers to develop a new set of theories to explain urban spatial patterns. We will now turn to the paradigm of political economy and see how and why researchers adopted this new framework.

Antecedents: Marx, Engels, and Weber Just as the Chicago School was influenced by the writings of Tnnies, Durkheim, and Simmel, the political economists were influenced by the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber. These early writers observed and analyzed the same urban conditions that the classical theorists were examining: the growth of industrial cities, migration from rural to urban areas, spatial patterns of urban land use, and social characteristics of urban life. The aspects of the cities they highlighted and their perspectives on them, however, were quite different from those of Tnnies, Durkheim, and Simmel. In Grundrisse (1971, originally published in 1939), Marx discussed the growth of cities and their connection with the development of industrial capitalism. In his view, trade between towns and countryside disproportionately benefited the town dwellers, particularly capitalists. Marx identified a division of labor not among individuals (as Durkheim discussed) but among places, with towns specializing in producing goods and the rural areas specializing in producing food. In this division of labor, Marx argued, the towns were dominating and exploiting the rural areas. He thought that towns drew rural areas into their economic webs by encouraging rural dwellers to purchase products. To get cash to buy goods, farmers had to produce additional food and sell it in the urban marketplace. In Marxs view this process made rural dwellers dependent on urban markets to sell their products, and transformed rural life, making it more like town life and less self-sufficient than it had been. Marx was describing what today may be referred to as a coreperiphery relationship. (See Figure 1) Although Marx did not focus his work directly on cities, some of his concepts that he introduced in other contexts were later used to analyze urban phenomena. One of these concepts is the distinction between the use value and exchange value of objects. For example, to most people, their home represents a safe and comfortable place to live it has use value. For some people, their home may also represent a financial investment for them, it has exchange value. At times, one person or group gets the use value of a property while a different person or group gets the exchange value. This is the case with rental property the person who owns the property lets someone else pay to use it and it is also the case with property developers, who buy and sell property as their business. Marx argued that capitalism was converting many material objects into commodities, or objects that could be bought and sold for a profit. As a result, possessions such as land and houses had required a dual nature: they derived some of their value to owners from the fact that owners could use them for their own needs, and some of their values from the fact that owners could exchange them for cash. Another important concept drawn from Marxs writings is the idea that economic systems have inherent contradictions that prevent their smooth and consistent functioning. Marxs view of societies is that they are always changing and the societal patterns of any given time are temporary arrangements or compromises among different groups and institutions struggling for gain. To use one of Marxs most well-known examples, the growth of industrial capitalism in the 18th century created a new social class the urban industrial working class, or proletariat. The

creation of this class benefited the employer class, or bourgeoisie, because employers needed workers. Furthermore, employers were able to make profits by paying workers low wages. Figure 1 The core-periphery model shows the changing spatial inequalities which occur during the process of industrialization.

Marx pointed out the contradiction inherent in the capitalist economic system between the need for a working class, the need to pay its members low wages, and the possibility for political and economic upheaval as this class grew and as the members became aware of their exploitation. The contradiction in this example is that the solution to one problem (the need for cheap and plentiful labor) leads to another problem (the potential for workers to get out of control), for which a new solution will be found, which will generate a new set of problems, and so on in a never-ending series of historical changes.

Friedrich Engels, who worked with Marx, studied and wrote about urban patterns. Engels took an empirical approach, mapping the spatial patterns and describing the social life of Englands growing industrial cities, or as he called them, the great towns. (See Figure 2) His most vivid discussion is of the relationship between work, social class, and living conditions in Manchester, described in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1958, originally published in 1848). He found that the workers residences were confined to the smallest, least accessible streets in the unhealthiest and least desirable physical locations of the city; whereas the more substantial residences of the industrialists occupied the cleaner, more desirable, and more centrally located main streets. Figure 2 Engelss map of Little Ireland in Manchester, which he described as the most disgusting area of the City.

Engelss analysis of this pattern was that the employer class had arranged the city in a way that permitted workers to live near their places of employment but also kept them hidden, off the main streets, so that the employers would not have to see their miserable living conditions. Employers could do this not simply because they had the ability to pay more for individual parcels of land (as the neoclassical economists would argue) but because as a group they held, economic, political, and social domination over the town, and thus could control its spatial layout. Engels rejected the notion that urban land use was simply a matter of the process of bidding for land in an impersonal marketplace. Instead, he pointed us toward a more fundamental mechanism of the social, economic, and political domination of one social class over another. To Engels, the economic and social relations of the workplace, in which employers dominated the workers, formed a foundation for all other aspects of life, including urban patterns.

The third important ancestor of contemporary political economy was Max Weber, whose theories made direct and indirect contributions to research on cities. His most direct discussion is found in the essay Die Stacht (The City) (1958). In it, Weber set out the idea that a city cannot be defined by a single dimension, such as population size. He argued that settlements recognized as cities have, throughout history, played economic and political roles: They have served as markets for trade and as seats of government. Thus the essence of the city lies not in its size alone but also in its economic and political functions. Without these institutions, even sizable communities would be socially insignificant and not truly cities. Besides his essays on cities, Weber has had additional impacts on scholars analyses of urban life. Webers work on social inequality, for example, has contributed to significant research and theorizing about urban life. Weber agreed with Marx that modern societies were full of social and economic inequalities, but he disagreed about the relative importance of different aspects of social inequality. While Marx argued that workplace relations were fundamental in creating and maintaining inequality, Weber thought that multiple, somewhat independent sources of inequality existed. He pointed out that, although class (or economic position) significantly influenced peoples lives, other factors such as social status and political power were also influential. Later theorists used Webers insights to examine urban patterns of inequality and conflict based on social divisions such as race, ethnicity, and religion as well as those based on class divisions. It was not until the 1960s that a number of urbanists began to recognize that the theories and concepts of Marx, Engels, and Weber would be useful in creating a new paradigm for urban studies. An important reason for their discovery of these three theorists is that both the intellectual environment and social environment had changed, encouraging scholars to ask different questions and to reexamine some fundamental assumptions about cities. EMERGENCE OF URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY By 1960, the social and economic context of cities was different from the context of the 1920s, when the ecologists developed their theories. One difference was that suburban communities had grown steadily, relative to the central cities. After World War II, suburban growth accelerated while central city populations began to stabilize or decline. Resources that had long been identified with the city relocated to the suburban areas. Many companies closed their urban facilities and built new plants in suburban locations. Housing construction crossed city boundaries into surrounding areas. With jobs and housing moving to the suburbs, large segments of the population followed, especially white middle-class homeowners. Some central cities experienced population declines, abandoned properties, and shrinking tax bases. How could suburban growth be explained? Human ecologists stressed the availability of automobile transportation, linking it to the process of adaptation to territory. In their view, new (suburban) territory became inhabitable because a new transportation technology had made it accessible. Political economists broadened the question of suburbanization to include other factors. They asked how and why automobiles became the dominant means of transportation. They asked how changes in the economy had encouraged companies to move to suburban locations. They asked how the federal governments highway policies and housing policies

encouraged the growth of suburbs. They argued that researchers had to look beyond the growth patterns themselves and examine the context that made it possible for suburban areas to grow. A second trend that pointed the political economists in a new direction was the increasing racial polarization in urban areas. The Chicago School ecologists had more frequently studied immigrant neighborhoods than African-American neighborhoods, because the population of Chicago and other U.S. cities in the 1920s contained many more immigrants than AfricanAmericans. By the 1960s, however, the proportions were reversed, due o both drastic cutbacks in the number of immigrants and the migration of large numbers of African-Americans from rural areas to cities. In addition, racial segregation had developed into more than just where people lived. The inner-city ghettos had become powerful symbols of the lack of social and economic opportunity for African Americans. The early human ecologists had thought that racial segregation, like ethnic segregation, would lessen with time, but later ecological studies showed that racial segregation had actually intensified. Why had many white members of ethnic minority groups been able to move out of their inner-city neighborhoods while large numbers of African Americans were confined to racially segregated ghettos? Human ecology could not answer this question. A third source of new thinking about cities was the changing role of the government in urban affairs. In the 1920s the federal government had few if any policies oriented toward cities. Local governments had just begun some basic policies such as planning and zoning regulations. Over the next three decades, however, the federal government took on an increasingly active role, influencing such aspects of urban life such as housing construction, highway location, and urban redevelopment. Some government actions seemed to exacerbate problems for example, demolishing low cost housing in an effort to eliminate slums but replacing it with high cost housing that was out of the reach of former residents. As government agencies became larger and governments role in urban life became more pervasive, the ecological assumption that urban spatial patterns are the outcome of free market competition between different groups became questionable. A fourth trend that laid the groundwork for a political economy approach to urban issues was the changing nature of the economy and its impacts on cities. Beginning in 1973 with a recession and high rates of unemployment, the industrial jobs that had provided a livelihood for several generations of urban residents dramatically declined in number. Some of those jobs, as we have seen, moved to the suburbs; some moved from one region of the United States to another; some moved overseas or to Mexico; and some simply disappeared due to changing technology and changing market demand. As researchers investigated urban social conditions such as poverty and inequality, they found that local conditions within neighborhoods and households were strongly influenced by the larger economic context. Thus, the ecologists focus on individual cities and areas within cities was too narrow to take in the big picture. A final set of influences on the emerging paradigm was the changing trajectory of cities around the world, particularly in the poor, nonindustrialized countries of the periphery. Scholars had approached cities in other countries looking for similarities and differences but particularly for similarities with cities in the United States. By the 1960s it became apparent that many cities in

the nonindustrialized countries were not only not similar to North American cities, they were becoming increasingly different from them. Researchers became dissatisfied with the assumption that the peripheral nations, including their cities, would become more like those of the industrialized world and instead began to ask why they were different. These and other changes in urban realities prompted scholars to ask new questions and develop a new paradigm. The paradigm has grown steadily but is still developing and changing. PROMISE AND LIMITATION OF POLITICAL ECONOMY What forms the basis of urban political economy? Its proponents agree on a number of main points. First, cities are part of the political, economic, and social arrangements of their times rather than products of natural processes. Cities are shaped by decision making, especially the decisions made by powerful actors who control resources. These may be individual actors, such as investors, or they may be institutions such as banks, schools, corporations, or government agencies. Decisions that involve investing money are particularly important in shaping cities. Cities have also taken different forms at different times, depending upon the institutions prevalent at that time. Second, conflicts over the distribution of resources help shape urban spatial patterns and urban social life. Conflicts between social classes are important for cities. Employer-employee issues such as the formation of labor unions, contract negotiations, strikes, wage levels, and numbers of jobs added or lost are reflections of conflicts between social classes and have serious economic consequences for cities. Conflicts among racial and ethnic groups can be expressed openly (as violence) or covertly (as discrimination). They affect urban spatial patterns because they channel people, housing jobs, and other resources into certain geographic areas. People sometimes react to submerged conflicts or perceived inequalities by organizing for action in social movements. Urban social movements are the attempts of groups to increase their economic and political power to shape the city and its resources in their favor. Third, government is an important institution influencing urban patterns. Government (in the broadest sense, including laws, programs, spending priorities, and other actions) plays a role in where people live, where businesses locate, what type of housing is available, how racial and ethnic groups relate to each other, and many other urban phenomena. Local politics is the key arena for observing conflicts over resources. Even when the discussion seems to be about the common good, participants often define the common good in ways that are favorable to their own goals and interests. In complex societies like the United States, Canada, and European countries, federal or national governments exert great power to influence what happens in cities. Because they spend a good deal of money and can establish rules for other investors, government agencies are significant shapers of urban spatial patterns. Fourth, economic restructuring, or a pattern of widespread shifts in the economy, is one of the most important factors affecting local communities. Several shifts have been occurring simultaneously. A particularly important shift is the globalization of the economy, or the increase in the number of economic transactions taking place across national borders. Another is the consolidation of corporations within industries, with a shift from many medium-sized firms to a

small number of large firms. In the United States, restructuring has also involved a decline in manufacturing industries and an increase in service industries. Economic restructuring has many implications for cities. It has affected the location of jobs, which has in turn affected the growth and decline of cities and regions. It has changed the types of jobs people have, thus contributing to a wider gap between rich and poor and between whites and people of color. It has changed peoples expectations of local government by adding the task of managing the communitys economic base to the governments responsibilities. These basic items form a point of departure from which different scholars have gone in different directions. Although certain researchers have interpreted some of these points differently, they still agree with the overall paradigm. Below we will see how scholars have investigated the proposition that cities are part of the political, economic, and social arrangements of their time. Cities are influenced by the mode of production. The mode of production, Marxs term for the economic system, includes the machinery, money, markets, and also the norms, laws, and social relations that accompany different economic systems. The mode of production currently operating in the United States and Western Europe is advanced capitalism, which is characterized by the dominance of large firms and the operation of the global economy. Geographer David Harvey (1978) investigated why advanced capitalist cities have spurts of building construction. He argues that businesses normally reinvest their profits into machinery and raw materials, but at certain times they make more profits than they can reinvest in equipment. As a response to this large profit, companies shift some of their investment out of the actual production of products and into building new buildings for offices or new facilities for production. When many companies make this decision simultaneously, motivated by their similar economic situations, urban building booms occur, as happened in the United States in the 1920s and again in the 1980s. In American society, cities are growth machines. This interpretation emphasizes the ways politics and the economy interact in shaping cities. Harvey Moltoch (1976; 1993) contends that cities are machines for economic growth and are built, shaped, and maintained by groups of people who stand to benefit from that growth. These pro-growth elites consist largely of business owners who need population growth to keep their businesses profitable, including the real estate, hotel, and restaurant industries, retail shops, newspapers, sports franchises, and banks. They support growth by becoming influential in local politics and using their influence to advance a pro-growth agenda for cities. Real estate development and government intervention are the most important influences in metropolitan areas. This interpretation is part of the sociospatial perspective. The sociospatial perspective is similar to political economy in some ways, but it emphasizes physical space and how space can be manipulated to affect urban life. In contrast with the growth machine perspective, the

sociospatial perspective holds that real estate developers and local government officials are much more influential in changing the form and function of cities than are the many other businesses that might be included in a pro-growth elite. Furthermore, in contrast to Harveys emphasis on the mode of production as affecting urban change, the sociospatial perspective emphasizes peoples understanding of space, including the ways in which local cultures differ in the symbolic meanings they attach to different spaces. Rather than confining analysis to political and economic factors causing the urban change, the sociospatial perspective adds cultural factors such as symbols and meanings to the analysis of urban life. CONCLUSION No single perspective has the answer to why cities grow, but all three have made a significant contribution to understanding the issue of urban growth. The paradigm of urban political economy has grown in acceptance in recent years and has helped researchers address questions that were outside of urban ecologys scope. The paradigm however is far from perfect. Critics have noted two main problems. First, within political economy it easy to overemphasize the uniformity with which large-scale political and economic factors affect cities and neighborhoods, while ignoring local variations. Large-scale concepts such as the mode of production cannot fully explain the differences between different cities that are within the same mode of production. Second, within political economy it is easy to lose sight of the individual actor and the links between the macrolevel and microlevel of human existence. Just because social scientists categorize people as belonging to the same groups (e.g., the working class), do these people think and act similarly?