Urban Growth Machine Research Articles

The economic and spatial restructuring and development process in the North Sector of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais

This aim of this study is to evaluate the economic and spatial restructuring process implemented by the public authorities in the North Sector of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, and the appropriation of space by the land and real estate markets in the north and periphery of the capital, seeking to identify the elements that have contributed to altering the land order and to the elitization of spaces. The metropolitan strategic plan sought to diversify the industrial base of the region by attracting investments and creating high-tech hubs. In order to ensure its greater competitiveness on the global stage, it was accompanied by large public infrastructure works and support services. The present study has concluded that the modifying actions undertaken by the public authorities have influenced the valorization of urban land, the appropriation of the space by the land/real estate markets and the elitization of the north and peripheral region of the capital, thus supporting the thesis of the city as an urban growth machine.

Labor Unions and Race-conscious Housing in the Postwar Bay Area

This article examines two racially integrated labor union-sponsored housing cooperatives developed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s. The projects offer examples of small-scale alternative paths to postwar suburbanization and inner-city decline. St. Francis Square, in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, was sponsored by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Sunnyhills, in the newly incorporated town of Milpitas in Santa Clara County, was sponsored by the United Automobile Workers. The projects illustrate how the postwar strategies of growth liberalism and the urban growth machine, which facilitated private investment and racial segregation in the service of economic development, simultaneously expanded and checked municipal and labor union priorities.

Anti‐Communism, The Growth Machine and the Remaking of Cold‐War‐Era Pittsburgh

AbstractThis article develops a new perspective on urban growth machines through an analysis of the relationship between Pittsburgh's Renaissance and cold‐war‐era anti‐communism. In order to facilitate urban (re)development, growth machines foster a shared sense of metropolitan citizenship and a corresponding ideological belief that coalitions of business, government and other elite actors can renew regions for the collective good of their residents. During the early years of the cold war, anti‐communism was a key means by which growth machines could create this shared sense of metropolitan belonging. The members of Pittsburgh's widely celebrated growth coalition used anti‐communism to advance their interests in four key ways: (1) by encouraging residents to see the Renaissance as part of the larger struggle against communism; (2) by eliminating a deeply rooted radical political culture; (3) by, in the process, curtailing opposition to their effort to remake the region into a post‐industrial economy based on free capital mobility; and (4) by having it serve as a shared tactic and ideology that stitched together and legitimated capitalist development at all scales from the factory to the globe. Pittsburgh's Renaissance provides an important example of how growth machines not only produce space, but also citizenship and the conditions of political possibility.

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation.

This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century--most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes--hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment--intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.

Justifying Redevelopment ‘Failures' Within Urban ‘Success Stories': Dispute, Compromise, and a New Test of Urbanity

AbstractLarge‐scale waterfront redevelopment projects, an urban development phenomenon that originated in the 1970s, are attractive to a growing suite of cities worldwide. But why? These mega‐projects are full of pitfalls, broken promises, cost overruns, disappointments and are often accused of promoting inequality. In this article, we consider the specific case of Melbourne's Docklands, which local popular opinion has roundly judged a failure despite the countervailing judgment of success in the revival of ‘liveability' of the adjacent Melbourne central business district. We use the Docklands case to illustrate the utility of a ‘critical pragmatic' framework of analysis to get behind dominant explanations of the demands of the urban growth machine and postmodern neoliberal capitalism. Without denying the existence of these dynamics, nor their hegemony, we nevertheless explicate how a critical pragmatic analysis can reveal the social dynamics driving the judgments and justifications offered by actors in urban redevelopment. A pragmatic analysis of these dynamics of argument and action at critical moments in the long process of an urban redevelopment can reveal new kinds of compromises and tests by which these projects are judged. In other words, what counts as failure and as success in the work of city building will shift, depending on what actors do and how they talk about it, and on how well these actions and justifications hold up to public challenges about the true character of a successful city. By gauging how these challenges are constituted and settled, we can better understand the evolution of the urban value proposition, and the new notion of justice grounded in urbanity that is emerging at the urban redevelopment frontier.

The end of scarcity? Water desalination as the new cornucopia for Mediterranean Spain

Summary In this paper we explore the new orientation taken by Spanish water policy since the beginning of the 21st century and very specifically the shift towards desalination as an alternative to other water supply options such as river regulation or inter-basin water transfers. Desalination has been seen as the cure for everything that dams and inter-basin water transfers were unable to solve, including droughts, scarcities, social conflicts, environmental impacts, and political rivalries among the different Spanish regions. Desalination also means a new and powerful element in water planning and management that could provide water for the continuous expansion of the urban and tourist growth machine in Mediterranean Spain and thus relax possible water constraints on this growth. However, by 2012 most new desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast remained almost idle. Focusing on the case of the Mancomunidad de los Canales del Taibillla in South-eastern Spain, our aim is to develop a critical, integrated and reflexive perspective on the use of desalination as a source of water for urban and regional growth.

Civic Paternalism in Political Policymaking: The Justification for No-Vote Stadium Subsidies

Direct democracy practices such as initiatives and referenda are increasingly ignored or circumvented by political leaders who allocate subsidies toward new professional sport stadium developments. In a democracy, such a means of governing may be problematic if the outcome is unreflective of the public will. The existing literature makes several theoretical connections for this line of political decision-making, including urban growth machines and trustee–delegate representation. In this paper, these concepts are integrated with empirical evidence to support the conceptualization of civic paternalism, a term that provides partial description of the political decision-making process. Civic paternalists justify their decisions by arguing that a city’s continued vibrancy and growth optimize community benefit while remaining acutely aware of their decisions’ political consequences. We illustrate the concept of civic paternalism by drawing from interviews with political leaders associated with one of the most recent cases of the no-vote subsidy.

The convening power of food as growth machine politics: A study of food policymaking and partnership formation in Baltimore

Why do some partnerships form successfully while others fail? Much has been written about the conditions for successful partnership formation, however the qualities of the policy issue itself have rarely been central to this debate. Drawing on qualitative research about a food policymaking initiative in Baltimore, Maryland, this article explores the ‘convening power’ of food as a policy topic, and the relationship between civic capital and the politics of urban growth in horizontal partnerships. Drawing from Nelles’ framework for inter-municipal cooperation, and Logan and Molotch’s urban growth machine model, the article presents a set of conditions for successful partnership formation that elaborates on the underlying urban growth consensus that drives civic capital in the city. Baltimore’s food policy efforts suggest that a policy issue may show greater ‘partnerability’ when an initiative can generate both exchange and use value, thereby appealing widely to the local growth coalition and other stakeholders.

Urban Economic Governance, Business and Globalisation: Australasia's ‘Committee‐for‐[City]’ Phenomenon

AbstractThis article explores the nexus between urban economic governance, business and globalisation in light of new empirical research about the emergence of ‘Committee‐for‐[City]’ entities in Australasia. It critically reviews key claims of the international literature on business‐mediated urban economic governance from both structural and post‐structural urban political economy, business mobilisation and globalisation perspectives in order to test these largely northern hemisphere‐centric theories against new research findings on business as emergent political and policy actor in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. On the basis of a conceptualisation that contemporary ‘at‐a‐distance’ urban economic interventions are essentially discursive public–private partnerships, the paper highlights the important role of business interests in the context of a co‐opting and partnering state. Although it is found that established notions such as ‘urban growth machines’ and ‘entrepreneurial governance’ are (still) relevant to explain the nature and work of these new business governance actors in Australasia, the influence of globalising processes and the constitutive nature of the institutional and socio‐economic context must be more thoroughly acknowledged. The hybrid nature of the governing objectives pursued and the multiplicity of political projects at work mean that governance and investment outcomes resulting from business‐mediated urban economic interventions cannot be assumed but must be traced and evaluated in careful empirical investigations.

The Growth Machine and the Everglades: Expanding a Useful Theoretical Perspective

We propose four ways that the urban growth machine theoretical perspective can be expanded for social scientists whose focus is not necessarily urban. First, we believe the thesis is useful for analysis at larger and smaller geographic scales than the city. Second, once focused on a goal and set in motion the growth machines have inertia. This leads to continuity over time and also leaves records which are useful in analyzing how particular outcomes occur. Third, the processes growth machines set in motion can lead us to practices that are on the edge of our ability to control, potentially resulting in unanticipated and even disastrous consequences, having relevance for the study of disasters. Finally, the very success of the growth machine, particularly when growth is centered on the exploitation of land based resources can lead to the exhaustion of the very basis of its success and thus to collapse.

The urban growth machine, central place theory and access to open space

The provision of urban open space occurs through political and economic mechanisms that could marginalize racial minority groups. In this research, we explore two competing hypotheses of marginalized access to open space (greenways, parks, and natural areas). The first hypothesis couples Logan and Molotch’s “growth machine” theory with the concepts of laissez-faire racism and White privilege. Urban space is conceptualized as contested terrain being sought after by local elites who utilize their political and economic will to co-opt government decision making authority. The second hypothesis—central place theory—posits that access to open space is determined by the spatial patterns of economic agglomeration. Analyzing Raleigh, North Carolina as a case study, the results do not support either the growth machine theory or central place theory. Rather, urban growth is found to have very localized social consequences, seen through variations in different racial/ethnic groups’ level of access to open space.

A perspective of primelot on urban political economy: The buildings of urban regime and growth machine

As a phenomenon of urban political economy,urban primelot is an inevitable consequence of the development of urban political economy in China recently.Firstly,this paper reviews the theory of urban political economy at home and abroad;then explains the phenomenon of primelot through theories of urban regime and growth machine by analyzing the mechanism of each interest group behind this setting.It reveals that urban primelot is an urban political economy aftermath of the interactions between different political economy groups in the area of land development.This study also indicates that there are four features in this urban setting.(1) Local government is the core in this growth coalition that dominates other parts or agents/agencies,for the local offices need not care too much about their parochial civilian as well as their superior in Chinese appointed bureaucracy system.(2) The central government not only has the absolute,but final macro controls over the growth coalition as well,however,these leaders are hesitating to disorganize the local growth machines or coalitions since it may jeopardize national economic locomotive which has been lasting for over three decades since Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up policy started in 1978.(3) Growth coalition and anti-growth coalition constitute a kind of cooperate-collide continuum.The more peripheral individuals or organizations who are distributed away from the center of core-benefit in the building of growth machines might be more inclined to throw themselves into the lap of anti-growth coalition.(4) The category of urban growth machines or urban regimes might differentiate within the development of national citizenship in historical scale and the economic capacity of local governments in geographical scale.In the areas open wider to the ourside world,such as Beijing and Shanghai,the municipalities would rather build somewhat concessionary regimes/federalist regime than conserving regime/elitist entrepreneurial regime in which the local governments are hungry for development capital and dream for achievements.Therefore,according to the structure of building,dynamic machine and self-organization of growth coalitions,the nationalization process of land market might be necessary to disconnect the coalition through pumping more investment capital into local authorities from the central government or deducing the social consumption responsibility of local governments by the central government.

The Infrastructural Limits to Growth: Rethinking the Urban Growth Machine in Times of Fiscal Crisis

Abstract Since the 1970s, centralized interventions into the infrastructural affairs of US cities have been in decline. As a result, local entities have been compelled to shoulder a greater share of the burden for developing the urban infrastructure networks and public works needed to support growth. Under conditions of neoliberalism, local officials and growth-machine participants have pursued this local infrastructural imperative by means of increasingly speculative and risky financing strategies deployed through the ‘back door’ of traditional democratic channels. The following analysis is empirically focused on three Californian cities — Emeryville, Oxnard and Vallejo — which achieved impressive levels of growth around the turn of the twenty-first century. However, these cities subsequently suffered precipitous economic contraction. As such, they demonstrate the unprecedented challenges now facing the urban growth machine in the wake of the current global economic crisis. Two emergent challenges, in particular, appear poised to challenge the historical resiliency of the growth machine: the ‘reverse infrastructural trap’ and nascent conflicts between municipal bondholders and municipal employees. The cases presented here thus raise important questions about the continued viability of the pro-growth agenda in the context of structural fiscal deficits, chronic infrastructural decline and extreme capital-market volatility. Résumé Depuis les années 1970, les interventions centralisées dans les projets d'infrastructure des grandes villes américaines ont nettement diminué. Les organes locaux ont donc dû assumer une proportion plus grande de l'aménagement des réseaux d'infrastructure urbaine et des travaux publics nécessaires à la croissance. En vertu du néolibéralisme, les responsables locaux et les parties prenantes dans la ‘machine à croissance’ ont cherchéà répondre à cet ‘impératif infrastructurel’ local au moyen de stratégies de financement spéculatives et risquées contournant les canaux démocratiques traditionnels. L'analyse s'intéresse ici, sur une base empirique, à trois villes californiennes, Emeryville, Oxnard et Vallejo, qui ont atteint des niveaux de croissance impressionnants vers le début du XXIe siècle. Or, elles ont ensuite souffert du ralentissement brutal de l'économie. De ce fait, elles présentent les défis sans précédents qui se posent désormais à la machine à croissance urbaine, compte tenu de la crise économique mondiale actuelle. Deux nouveaux problèmes, notamment, semblent menacer la résilience traditionnelle de la machine à croissance: le ‘piège infrastructurel inversé’ et les conflits d'intérêt naissants entre détenteurs d'obligations-recettes et employés municipaux. Les cas exposés soulèvent d'importantes questions sur la pérennité d'un programme axé sur la croissance, dans un contexte de déficits budgétaires structurels, de réduction chronique des infrastructures et de volatilité extrême des marchés financiers.

Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850—2000

In The Mystery of Capitalism , the darling of neoliberalism, Hernando de Soto posits that secure property titles explain “why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else.” While social scientists have taken him to task for an oversimplification of the causes and remedies of poverty, historians have contributed little to this important policy debate. Applying comparative methods across time and space, such a retrospective analysis exposes serious flaws in de Soto’s thesis. Case studies of Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City covering successive, fifty-year periods support his contention that property law was the single most important factor in determining the fate of rural migrants trying to find a place to live in these exploding cities. But in each case, residential property played a far more complex role in creating the social and physical geography of the city than its simple exchange value. This article illuminates some of these alternative economic uses and embedded cultural meanings of identities of place. It also shows how urban growth machines create capital value in property for some by creating environmental injustice of substandard conditions of everyday life for others.

The urban impossible: A eulogy for the unfinished city

This paper extends the debate on the right to the city through the idea of the urban impossible. The starting premise is the fundamental and age‐old question—what actually is a city, what do we want it to be and who should be involved in its making? The right to the city is not just a movement for material rights, but also the right to shape, intervene and participate in the unfolding idea of the city. Cities, then, are living organic, conflictual entities that are constantly remade and recast in thousands of ways through everyday encounters. In different moments, new possibilities for radically different cities open up. The city, then, is an unfinished, expansive and unbounded story. The urban impossible demands a much wider political imaginary to intervene in the unfolding story of the city and calls for a radical appetite for change to inform the work of urban researchers. The agenda becomes not so much about what the city currently is or what it was, but more about what it could become, what it has never been. I outline some directions that this kind of research agenda needs to take; in particular, the need to develop a broad critique of the urban growth machine and developing processes and mechanisms for more participatory and direct forms of urban democracy. This is the urban impossible: being simultaneously within, against and beyond the current urban condition. Like an Alice in Wonderland who has found herself in the city, we need to dream six impossible cities before breakfast.

Moral Panics and Urban Growth Machines: Official Reactions to Graffiti in New York City, 1990–2005

This paper analyzes the official response to graffiti writing in New York City throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. Drawing from a variety of documents, such as newspaper articles, political press releases, internal memos and government reports, I show that the city’s reaction to graffiti constitutes a moral panic and that the significance of this response can be discerned when interpreted in the context of theoretical insights developed by urban sociologists. On this basis, I argue that moral panics, or at least a sub-set of panics, may be central to negotiating the social conflict that accompanies the ways in which (urban) space will be put to use.

Public Use, Public Choice, and the Urban Growth Machine: Competing Political Economies of Takings Law

The Kelo decision has unleashed a tidal wave of legislative reforms ostensibly seeking to control eminent domain abuse. But as a policy matter, it is impossible to determine what limits should be placed upon local government without understanding how cities grow and develop, and how local governments make decisions to shape the communities over which they preside. This Article examines takings through two very different models of urban political economy: public choice theory and the quasi-Marxist Urban Growth Machine model. These models approach takings from diametrically opposite perspectives, and offer differing perspectives at the margin regarding proper and improper condemnations. But surprisingly, both models stand united in opposition to economic development takings and both view skeptically the current wave of eminent domain reform. By discussing why each model comes to this conclusion, this Article sheds additional light upon the substantive limits that legislatures should place upon eminent domain authority and procedural reforms that would help assure proper exercises of that power within this circumscribed scope. The Article also recommends greater cooperation between legislatures and judiciaries to develop these broad standards and to assure that condemnation authorities adhere to them in individual cases.

Mapping the Olympic growth machine

Theories of growth machines and urban regimes have informed the study of urban political economy for more than three decades, but these theories remain focused on intra‐urban processes. Using a case study of the bidding process and the planning of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, we explore the transnational dimensions of the urban growth machine and explore common aspects between the growth machine and regime theory literature and the literatures on the entrepreneurial city and transnational urban policy transfers. Through its evolving networks with other urban regimes, Vancouver’s growth machine provides a ready forum in which local elites can acquire specialized knowledge on new urban entrepreneurial strategies elsewhere. Actors situated in different parts of the local growth machine are establishing various connections with urban regimes in other cities, in what is best understood as a nascent growth machine diaspora. Growth machine and regime theories remain valid in their basic conceptualization and maintain their strength through their adaptability to various contexts, but can be enriched by analyses of policy circuits, travelling theories and learning networks.

Oil Booms and Boosterism

This article examines the intersection of oil industry interests and the growth strategy of local elites in the wake of Ventura, California's oil boom of the 1920s. It amends urban growth machine and civic boosterism theory by showing why cosmopolitan capital may exert influence over parochial politics even if it does not have a direct interest in population increase. The study also finds that oil development sustained long-term quantitative growth for this coastal community, much as Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien found in their study of five towns in the Permian basin of west Texas. Owing to the influence of outside companies, however, boosters failed to develop Ventura qualitatively as a tourist and recreational destination. Indeed, by the 1950s, Ventura more closely resembled inland California oil towns in terms of place than nearby Santa Barbara, which boosters had hoped to emulate.

Institutions and local growth coalitions in China's urban land reform: The case of Hangzhou High‐Technology Zone

Abstract: China's urban land reform is a gradualist process of transforming a planned land allocation system to an open land market system, while the ownership of the land remains under the control of the state. This process defines the relationships between local government and emerging non‐public interest groups in the land development process. These issues can be most clearly seen in the State‐Approved Development Zones, where municipalities have been encouraged to promote economic development and test out land policy initiatives. Using the institutionalist and urban growth machine analytical approaches to land development processes, this study examines the operation of development processes and the role of local government and its relationship with other interest groups. By employing a case study research strategy, focused upon the Hangzhou High‐Technology Zone, the study uncovered a local government‐led growth coalition which featured participation by other interest groups and revealed the applicability and variations when applying two strands of theories to a socialist economy in transition. Besides the land reform policy implications drawn from the case study evidence, the study concludes that the presence of interest groups and the missing community organisations unique to China give new theoretical implications and that both theories work much better with the economic domain than with the political domain largely because of a lagged political reform.