At the beginning of this textbook, in Chapter 1, we discussed several conceptual changes that are the hallmark of the new urban sociology. These include a shift to a global perspective on capitalism and the metropolis; the inclusion of factors such as class exploitation, racism, gender, and space in the analysis of metropolitan development; an attempt, when possible, to integrate economic, political, and cultural factors of analysis; special attention to the pull factors of real estate investment and government intervention; and the shift to a multicentered, regional approach to cities and suburbs. In the preceding chapters we have used these concepts, which we call the sociospatial approach.
In addition to a change in perspective, the new urban sociology involves important theoretical changes in the way human environments are analyzed. The previous chapter discussed classical and current urban sociology of a traditional kind. This chapter considers the new theoretical ideas that have recently invigorated the urban field.
Since the 1970s, a great deal of creative work has been accomplished by numerous writers who have challenged orthodox ideas of city development. One of the most interesting observations about this effort is that much of it has been carried out by people in other fields and even in other countries. Only recently has US urban sociology been affected by new theories. Second, regardless of the international scope and intellectual diversity, most of the new approaches have their origin in the application to city environments of Max Weber’s, Karl Marx’s, and Friedrich Engels’s writings regarding the analysis of capitalism. This chapter concerns this “political economy” approach. While this perspective represents a considerable advance over those discussed in the previous chapter, mainly because the ecological perspective simply ignores the important role of economic and political interests, it has its own limitations. Sociologists have tried to tailor the approach of political economy to the needs of their discipline. In the concluding sections of this chapter, we will discuss such attempts, especially the sociospatial approach of this text.
The classical sociologists Karl Marx and Max Weber turned to historical analysis to explore their ideas regarding the general laws of social development. Both understood that societies were organized around integrated systems of economics, politics, and culture. Marx emphasized the dominance of economic considerations in analysis, while Weber sought to show how cultural and political factors also affected individual behavior and social history along with economic activity. The two approaches served to complement each other.
While Marx wrote extensively about the new social classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) created by industrial capitalism, he did not believe there were only two social class groups, as is commonly thought. In his analysis of the failure of the 1848 revolution in France, Marx identified seven social class groups and discussed why each group supported (or opposed) a new government. Industrial workers and small shopkeepers in the cities might support the revolution, for example, because their economic and political interests would benefit from a change in the government, whereas farmers in the countryside and large merchants in the cities might oppose it because their economic and social interests were dependent on maintaining the current government (Marx, n.d.). In this sense, Marx’s view of social classes may be seen as a precursor to modern-day thinking about interest groups competing within the political arena.
Marx also recognized that the interests of capital and labor are not one and the same—a radical departure from the economic theory of his time, and the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Because profit results from the difference between the costs of production (raw material, machinery, and labor) and the price for which a commodity can be sold in the market, capitalist producers will look for any way possible to reduce the costs of production (Marx, 1967). Marx’s analysis is as relevant for the monopoly capitalism of the present day as it was for the industrial capitalism of his time; in just the last several decades, we have seen the displacement of workers by automation, a dramatic increase in immigration, and the movement of manufacturing to countries in the developing world—all of these the consequence of corporations seeking to lower their labor costs, and all having a tremendous impact on the people and the built environment of urban and suburban settlement space across the world.
Marx wrote very little about the city in his classic Capital (1967; originally published in 1867), while Weber included some passages about the nature of the city in a much larger text, Economy and Society (1968; originally published in separate pieces beginning in the 1880s). For Marx, the early history of capitalism was a struggle between social relations located within urban areas and those situated in the countryside within feudal manors. For Weber, the city developed because of its political powers—in particular, the independence of city residents and their local government from feudal relations of authority. In both cases, Marx and Weber showed how modes of social organization, such as feudalism or capitalism, work through a form of space—the city—and social relations situated within that spatial form. It is this perspective that informs the approach of political economy to settlement space.
For example, Weber argued that during the feudal period in the European Middle Ages, traders and craftspeople set up towns and bargained for protection from the king against the activities of local feudal lords. In these towns, capitalism began to thrive through trade in goods and eventually overtook the feudal economy. Thus, as capitalism became a dominating force in Europe, it also created the modern city. The political economy perspective studies social processes within urban space and links them to processes occurring at the general level of society.
While Marx and Weber had comparatively little to say about the industrial city of capitalism, Friedrich Engels devoted some time to the topic. We already mentioned his study of the working-class situation in nineteenth-century England and his field observations of the “great towns,” Manchester in particular. For Engels, the large industrial city was the best place to study the general aspects of capitalism as a social system, just as the factory was the best place to study the specific details of the relationship between capital and labor. Engels picked the city of Manchester because it was built up as capitalism developed in England, as opposed to other cities, such as London, which had a longer history.
Engels observed several aspects of capitalism at work within the urban space. First, he noted that capitalism had a “double tendency” of concentration. It concentrated capital investment, or money, and also workers. This centralizing process made industrial production easier because of the large scale and close proximity of money and people. Second, Engels noticed that as Manchester developed, investment moved away from the old center and extended farther out to the periphery. Unlike Burgess, but very much like Harris and Ullman and the sociospatial approach, Engels pictured growth as a multiplication of centers. For him this followed no particular plan, and he observed that capitalism unregulated by government planning produced a spatial chaos of multiplying minicenters.
Third, among other important observations, Engels focused on the social problems created by the breakdown of traditional society and the operation of capitalism. In Manchester, he noticed examples of extreme poverty and deprivation: homelessness, orphan beggars, prostitution, alcoholism, and violence. For him this misery was the result of exploitation at the place of work, which went largely unseen in the factory itself, along with the failure of capitalism to provide adequate housing for everyone. He thus connected conditions in the workplace with those in the living space, or what Marxists call the extended conditions of capital accumulation and the process that Lefebvre conceptualizes as the “reproduction of the relations of production,” which involve the reproduction of social relations that ensure the continued use of the working class across the generations. For example, if problems such as poverty and homelessness become too severe, they can threaten the ability of working-class families to produce new generations of workers. This would then threaten the future of the capitalist system. Hence, neighborhood or living-space relations and the quality of daily life are just as important to the survival of capitalism as are relations at the place of work.
In addition to the problems of poverty, Engels observed that the city of Manchester was a segregated space. Rich and poor lived in segregated neighborhoods. Engels concluded that capitalism produces this spatial isolation of the classes. The sum total of all these social problems is described by the term uneven development, which conveys both the disparity between rich and poor and their segregation in space by capitalism. We will use this concept frequently in subsequent chapters.
Urban and suburban settlement spaces grow and develop because of capital investment. The ebb and flow of money determines community well-being. Not only are jobs created, but economic activity also generates tax revenue. The latter is used partly by local government to fund public projects that improve the quality of community life. But spending, both public and private, is not uniformly distributed across metropolitan space. Some places receive much more investment than others. Even within cities there are great differences between those sections that are beehives of economic activity and those that seem scarcely touched by commerce and industry.
Within any given business, there are also great disparities between workers who are well paid and those who receive the minimum salary. Wages are carried home to neighborhoods, and a significant portion is spent in the local area. Hence, the well-being of a place depends not only on the amount of investment it can attract but also on the wealth of its residents.
In the metropolitan region, the variation in the affluence of particular places is called uneven development. It is a characteristic of our type of society with its economic system of capitalism, but, as we will see in Chapters 12–13, it is also characteristic of other societies, some of which have communist rather than capitalist economies. People with money seek to invest in places and enterprises that will bring them the highest rate of return. Profit drives the capitalist system. But this profit making is usually expected to occur in a short time period and with the largest return possible. Consequently, investors look carefully at opportunities and always try to switch to places where money will achieve its greatest return. This process also causes uneven development. As capital becomes increasingly mobile, it can shift money around more easily with corresponding effects on the quality of life. At present, capital is more mobile than ever before and has the ability to move operations from one country or region to another in search of the lowest costs or highest profit margins. This process, of course, can have immense consequences for individual places.
The changes since the late 1960s in Silicon Valley, the high-tech showcase of California, illustrate this pattern. In the 1960s, when the printed circuit industry was first expanding, all operations, including manufacturing, research and development, and marketing, were located within Silicon Valley. By the late 1960s, one of the leading manufacturers, Fairchild, transferred its manufacturing operations to plants in Mexico, leaving thousands of US workers jobless. Soon after, other electronic assembly plants followed Fairchild’s lead, and by the 1970s most of the manufacturing operations of Silicon Valley had been transferred to other countries with cheaper labor. By that time, too, owners of corporations had discovered that operating in Mexico was not as cheap as production in the Orient. Hence, many plants were shut down and work was transferred to Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore, then to Malaysia and Indonesia, and more recently to Sri Lanka and China. In Chapter 6, we will see that at present, Silicon Valley residents lament the rapidity with which the boom-and-bust cycle played itself out in their region. But other areas of the world are caught in a similar process because of the increased mobility of capital.
Silicon Valley residents are well-educated, and they hope that eventually a new round of investment will occur in their space from companies seeking their skills. At that time, their area of the country may once again prosper. When a place is poor, however, such as an urban ghetto, and its people have limited education, it is highly unlikely that capital will come there and invest, especially when cheaper labor is available in other countries. This remains so even for “small” capital ventures, such as grocery stores. Ghetto areas, such as the Watts section of Los Angeles, have comparatively few places where residents can provide for their needs. Most often, they must travel out of their community to shop because local convenience stores charge excessive prices.
As a result of the inherent desire not to invest in places that are already depressed and offer little incentive for profit, uneven development usually becomes more acute over time. This pattern increases the polarization between those places that are poor and those that are thriving. But places are made of people, so the spatial disparities result in different life chances for metropolitan residents. As Engels observed in Manchester, inequities create a problem of social justice as the less affluent members of the working class find it difficult to raise families that will acquire a reasonable, productive status in society.
Because of uneven development, the society would degenerate into a two-tiered structure, with a select group of people and places that are thriving amid a sea of poverty, except that the US government has stepped in with a safety net of programs that tries to prop up the bottom stratum. Unemployment insurance, welfare, and job training are but a few of the ways government agencies use tax revenues to fight the inherent tendency of capitalist activities to produce uneven development. Over the years, however, despite periods of prosperity, the problems of the poor have been little affected by government programs (Jencks, 1992). New techniques of public policy therefore are sorely needed.
Metropolitan areas today are besieged by the uneven nature of capitalist development. Job security and planning for the future are jeopardized for people in communities across the nation. Extremes of poverty and wealth characterize metropolitan life. This clash between rich and poor in the city was also observed over a hundred years ago by writers in the industrial towns of England. What is new and different today is the global reach of such uneven development and the way in which the cyclical nature of growth affects people and places across the world.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Marxian tradition was revived in social science. Urban analysis was affected minimally at first in this country but greatly affected in France by the philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre is without question the seminal source of new thinking on the city from a critical and Marxian perspective (Lefebvre, 1991). His accomplishments can be broken down into four areas:
Lefebvre argued that the way capital investors or businesspeople and the state think about space is according to its abstract qualities of dimension—size, width, area, location—and profit. This he called “abstract space.” In addition, however, individuals use the space of their environment as a place to live. Lefebvre called this interactively used space of everyday life “social space.” For him the uses proposed by government and business for abstract space, such as in the planning of a large city or suburban development of new houses, may conflict with the existing social space, the way residents currently use space. Lefebvre said that the conflict between abstract and social space is a basic one in society and ranks with the separate conflict among classes, but is often different. With this view, he also departed from Marxian analysis because the latter stresses class conflict as the basic force in the history of capitalism.
In sum, Lefebvre is responsible for a large number of the ideas that inform the sociospatial perspective used in this text. He also heavily influenced a number of critical and Marxian urbanists to develop ideas of their own. In the following sections, we will discuss some of the most contemporary urban approaches and indicate how the ideas of Lefebvre in some cases or those of the classical thinkers Marx, Engels, and Weber in other cases have influenced new theories of urban development.
A class conflict approach to urban development was introduced by the economist David Gordon (1977, 1984). He suggested that the locations chosen by capitalists for factories were affected not only by economic needs but also by the desire to remove their workers from areas of union organizing. According to Gordon, owners of businesses prefer to locate in places where workers are not as militant as they are in cities with a long labor tradition.
To prove his point, he studied a period in US history when workers were especially militant: the latter part of the 1800s to the 1900s. He calculated the number of workers engaged in strikes during those years and matched it with the number of times owners of factories decided to relocate to the suburbs or to more isolated cities. The matchup was significant for the years between 1880 and 1910. Hence, the need to control labor conflict by relocating to the outlying areas of large cities was a very early reason that urban development assumed a regional, multicentered form because it led to the suburbanization of factories (see Chapter 6).
Two geographers, Michael Storper and Richard Walker, have expanded Gordon’s approach (Storper, 1984; Storper and Walker, 1983). They view labor force considerations as the principal locational variable. By doing so they argue against the received wisdom of traditional location theory, asserting that businesses choose to locate in a specific place because of marketing and production costs (including transportation), a view that is similar to that of urban ecologists (see Chapter 3). Walker and Storper’s “labor theory of location” argues that the commodity, labor, is unique. Its quality depends not only on the physical attributes of the worker but on his or her training and interest in being a part of a union, that is, in organizing against capital for rights and benefits.
For example, studies of the shift in manufacturing to Asia note that it is caused predominantly by labor force considerations (Peet, 1987). These include not only the presence of cheap labor but also the particular qualities of the workers. In the case of the electronics and garment industries in Asia, the workforce is overwhelmingly female, young, and unmarried. These laborers are advertised by development officials as providing a docile, easily controlled workforce (Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1987). According to one Malaysian government brochure, “The manual dexterity of the Oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small, and she works fast with extreme care” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1987:205). Reports on the condition of these women describe a world where they are kept bound by the conditions of work from living productive family and social lives.
According to the class conflict approach, then, any given nation has regions that vary with regard to the quality of labor. In part, the quality of schools and training facilities is responsible for this. However, the presence of a union tradition in the local area is also considered. Finally, particular cultural conditions, such as extreme patriarchy that subjugates women workers, are also important for creating a docile labor force. Storper and Walker use these ideas to explain the shift of industry to the Sun Belt in the United States, which occurred because the southern and western regions of the country have weak or nonexistent unions. They also suggest that their approach is applicable to the entire globe and that location decisions of multinational companies follow what has been called the “international division of labor” (Frobel, Heinrichs, and Krege, 1980); that is, multinational corporations decide where to locate their activities by choosing places around the globe that have cheap and compliant labor. In short, for these theorists, the qualities of labor are the determining factors in industrial location.
For example, although the garment industry was a staple of employment for many decades in New York City, during the 1960s many factories closed down and moved to the southern states because there were no unions and labor was much cheaper. In another case, the assembly of electronic devices beginning with solidstate TVs vanished quickly from the United States in the 1960s and became a basic industry, as it is today, in Southeast Asia where, among other factors, cheap labor is supplied by young women who are controlled by a patriarchal society. Today, purchasers of low-priced electronics from such chain stores as Walmart or Target, in particular, have no concept of the working conditions in far-flung Asian factories where these products are produced, mainly by young women.
In broadest terms, the contentions of class conflict theorists have merit, especially for the case of shifts in the location of manufacturing in recent years. Since the 1970s, the advanced industrial societies have lost over 8 million manufacturing jobs. At the same time, Latin American and Asian countries have experienced a 6 million job growth (Peet, 1987). During this period, the average hourly earnings for the United States was $8.83; for Mexico, $1.59; for South Korea, $1.35; and for India, $0.40. These wage differences provide considerable incentive to invest global capital in less advanced countries. Regions with low class struggle and a docile labor force are also attractive.
Class conflict theorists make a mistake common in traditional Marxian analysis. They try to explain everything by economic factors alone. In the previous chapter we saw that some traditional ecologists, such as Amos Hawley, commit the fallacy of technological reductionism; that is, they explain everything in terms of changes in technology. Similarly, traditional Marxists such as Storper and Walker are economic reductionists. Thus, while class conflict and the global search for low-wage labor pools may indeed explain many of the moves owners have made to outlying areas of the world since the 1960s, it cannot explain relocations during other periods, and there are certainly additional reasons for such moves, such as the structural factors we discussed in the case of suburbanization: cheap land, distribution considerations that often override the need for cheap labor, low taxes, and other government incentives that subsidize capital.
There is no doubt that labor-force considerations are a major reason for the transfer of manufacturing activity to less developed countries such as Mexico or Malaysia. This approach, however, cannot explain why many multinationals continue to build plants and offices in the United States, Germany, and Japan, which have comparatively high wages. Factors including relative government stability and the desire to remain close to markets are also important considerations. For example, Japanese companies such as Honda, Toyota, and Mazda have recently opened plants in the United States. Most of the popular models from these two companies are made in Ohio, Tennessee, and even Michigan, the traditional stomping grounds for the United Auto Workers and General Motors, where they are close to the important US markets. These factors also play a role in the well-being of places within a global economy. Thus, while the cost and quality of labor count for much in location decisions, other factors, such as government subsidies and distribution considerations, are also relevant.
When sociologists discuss economics, they usually think in general terms and focus on individuals such as wealthy businesspeople who own companies. Class conflict theories go beyond individuals to discuss group behavior—particularly the clash between the capitalist class of owners or investors and the class of workers who sell their labor for a wage. In this section we consider other urbanists who use economically based ideas to explain city development, but with a great deal more detail than traditional sociologists.
David Harvey, a well-known geographer from England, started out as a mainstream member of his field, concerned with mathematical modeling techniques. During the late 1960s, however, he was greatly influenced by events in the United States, such as the ghetto riots, and by the writings of Henri Lefebvre. In the 1970s, he wrote a book and a series of articles that applied Marxian economic analysis to the condition of the cities. He was especially influenced by the earlier writings of Lefebvre on the urban analysis of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Harvey, like Lefebvre, systematically applied the categories of Marxian economic analysis to the study of urban development. He asserted four things. First, he stated that the city is defined in the manner of Engels as a spatial node that concentrates and circulates capital. Second, he applied a conflict perspective to discuss the way the capitalist and the working classes confronted each other in the city (1973, 1976). According to Harvey, and unlike the general way sociologists usually speak about classes, this basic conflict takes many forms as both the capitalist and working classes split up among themselves into various groups or fractions as a consequence of protracted struggles for advantage. The capitalist class, for example, can be divided among financial investors (finance capital), owners of department stores and other marketing assets (commercial capital), and owners of factories (manufacturing or industrial capital). Workers can also be split—for example, among factory laborers, white-collar salespeople, and professional financial analysts, all of whom still work for a wage. Each of these factions may want different things from urban development, so that conflict and coalition building are always a part of urban life. However, the basic struggle is still between capital and labor, as Gordon, Storper, and Walker also suggest (pp. 86–88). As Harvey suggests, “Labor, in seeking to protect and enhance its standard of living, engages in a series of running battles in the living place over a variety of issues that relate to the creation, management, and use of the built environment” (1976:268).
Third, Harvey discusses how the volatile urban mix of economic interests brings about government intervention as a means of quieting things down so that planning can take place and capitalists can get back to their principal task of profit making (1975, 1976). As Harvey suggests, “Capital, in general, cannot afford the outcome of struggles around the built environment to be determined simply by the relative powers of labor, the appropriators of rent and the construction fraction” (1976:272). Therefore, the capitalist class requires government to intervene and aid the profitmaking process within cities.
Sometimes, however, investment simply will not flow into districts of the city because they are so run-down or unattractive economically. In such cases, Harvey argues, government must step in to make the areas profitable again. Usually this form of state intervention involves the tearing down or destruction of existing buildings to make way for new construction, such as in the example of government-supported urban renewal programs (see Chapter 13). According to Harvey, “Under capitalism there is, then, a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time” (1982:14). For Harvey this process of boom and bust, or new construction and urban decay, is basic to urban change in a capitalist system.
Finally, Harvey took a detailed look at the capitalist class and how it made money within the space of the city. He borrowed the concept of circuits of capital from Lefebvre and elaborated on the latter’s ideas. In particular, Harvey argued that capitalists involved in the first industrial circuit are principally interested in location within the urban environment and in reducing their costs of manufacturing. Capitalists in the second circuit hold a different set of priorities relating to the flow of investment and the realization of interest on money loaned or rent on property owned. These differences are reflected in the different ways capital investment circulates within the two circuits.
While investment in factories is often located in places with cheap housing, capitalists in the second circuit often refuse to invest in poorer areas and seek out only the higher-rent districts of the city. As a consequence, areas of the city can become run-down and abandoned not because of the actions of industrial capital, the faction that we usually think of as determining city fortunes, but because of actions taken by investors in real estate, as the sociospatial perspective suggests. In the Baltimore study, both suburbanization of the population and central city decay were linked to the priorities of the second circuit of capital as assisted by government programs. Harvey’s work bears out the importance of Lefebvre’s ideas on the real estate industry and of Engels’s central insight into the production of uneven development under capitalism.
In sum, both the class conflict and capital accumulation approaches of the new urban sociology provide impressive improvements over more traditional perspectives. The world today is a volatile one where the predictable accommodations of work, shopping, and residential living characteristic of the industrial city have been shattered. Economic factors such as the ebb and flow of real estate investment and the changing structure of manufacturing in a global system affect the sociospatial features of daily life. So do the activities of workers involved in the struggle lying at the heart of the capital/labor relationship, and the residents of communities who are concerned about maintaining their quality of life. Each of these aspects helps determine the pattern of sociospatial organization.
Until the development of the new urban sociology, the effects of special, powerful interests (such as transnational corporations) on the pattern of growth were ignored by the traditional approach that emphasized biological factors of species competition over territory. But the work of geographers and Marxian analysts places greater importance on economic than on social factors in sociospatial arrangements. As we have discussed, there are several limitations to both the class conflict and capital accumulation approaches. In recent years, therefore, sociologists have added to the new perspective on the city by showing how social factors are also important in the production of settlement space.
This approach is most closely associated with the work of Harvey Molotch and his recent collaboration with John Logan (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Molotch was dissatisfied with the traditional ecological approach to urban development and highly influenced by new work carried out among French urbanists inspired by Lefebvre and Castells (Pickvance, 1976). Molotch was especially taken with the studies by the Frenchman Lamarche (1976) on the role of property development in the city, although since then this analyst has not been considered important. The focus of urban change involves the activities of a select group of real estate developers who represent a separate class that Marx once called the “rentiers.” According to Lamarche, who wrote from an historical, European perspective, it is this class that both prepares land for new development and pushes the public agenda to pursue growth.
For Molotch, the intentions of the rentier class mesh well with the needs of local government. This is so because government is in constant need of new tax revenue sources. As increasing numbers of people enter an urban area, their demand for services strains fiscal budgets. Without new sources of revenue, city governments cannot maintain the quality of life, and the region is threatened with a decrease in prosperity. Property development is a major source of taxes. New people also bring in new demands for city goods and services, which aids the business community and, in turn, increases revenues to local government. In short, according to Molotch, cities are “growth machines” because they have to be. Pushed from behind by demands for community quality and pulled from the front by the aggressive activities of the rentiers, city governments respond by making growth and development their principal concerns.
The growth machine approach fails as an explanation for three reasons: (1) Theoretically it depends totally on hypothesizing the existence of a separate rentier class, which is the source of action and behavior in leading urban development. However, in the United States, no such class has ever existed. Logan and Molotch borrowed this term from Lamarche, as we noted, an analyst who has not been influential since writing in the 1960s. In the United States, a free market in land allows all people with money to invest and even speculate in real estate development. The latter quality is an important contention of Lefebvre’s theory that sees the boom-and-bust cycles of growth coming from this feature of capitalism. Therefore, and unlike the ideas of Logan and Molotch, the pursuit of growth is as much a danger to the well-being of place as it is a blessing. (2) Logan and Molotch borrowed a simplistic version of Lefebvre’s theory of space. They argue that the urban environment can be dichotomized into a social space versus an “abstract space,” with the former category encapsulating all behaviors of residents who live in an urbanized environment. This is a simplistic reduction of a more complex Lefebvrian idea concerning a threefold distinction about environments. They contain lived spaces, spaces of representations, and, third, representations of space (see below). (3) Logan and Molotch’s approach is obsessively concerned with growth and the agents of growth and fails to explain periods of decline, deindustrialization, and the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism, the structural contradictions or problems of capitalism. They simply assumed that growth would proceed when pushed by the rentier class or growth machine elites in a smooth fashion. They initially ignored the obvious possibility of conflicts produced by growth and change, not to mention the all too real aspect of urban decline and the overreaching, speculative structure of the real estate industry that always leads to boom-and-bust cycles. Later on they attempted to add the possibility of growth conflict to their approach, but they are not convincing, nor is their modified theory useful. Conflicts exist not only between proponents of growth and citizen opponents, as they claim, but also within coalitions that push for it, as Harvey shows. These internal conflicts point out clearly why a separate rentier class does not exist and why their so-called growth machine is a temporary phenomenon that conceptually misses the deeper understanding that Lefebvre’s theory of the second circuit of capital—real estate investment—provides.
In the United States, real estate development is often a contentious matter and there are many factions that conflict when it is proposed. Often these warring parties are mixed and include developers and speculators who are in competition with those who have proposed growth as well as different classes that have joined together to argue for or against development. In short, much of the important political conflicts associated with a changing urban environment cannot be grasped by the growth machine perspective.
How can we make sense of the various ideas offered by new urban theories? This text adopts the sociospatial perspective (SSP), which takes what is best from the new ideas while avoiding the endemic reductionism characteristic of both traditional ecology and recent Marxian political economy. It does not seek an explanation by emphasizing a principal cause such as transportation technology (Hawley), capital circulation (Harvey), or special “rentier classes” that control growth. Rather, it takes an integrated view of development as the linked outcome of economic, political, and cultural factors. At one time, it might have been suggested that such an integrated view derives from the tradition of Weber. However, since the 1950s, even Marxists have looked for ways to advance an integrated perspective (Althusser, 1971), and this is especially important for the understanding of space (Lefebvre, 1991).
The sociospatial perspective is inspired by the work of Lefebvre and can be distinguished from other approaches by the following characteristics. First, it considers real estate development as the leading edge of changes in the metropolitan region. While other approaches tend to focus only on economic changes in industry, commerce, and services, the SSP adds to these important dimensions an interest in the way real estate molds metropolitan growth, including how real estate declines. Growth and decline are the seesaw operations of Lefebvre’s second circuit of capital, and they affect the general business and economic well-being of their surroundings in periods of bust as well as boom but in different directions. Second, the SSP considers government intervention and the interests of politicians in growth as a principal factor in metropolitan change. Traditional urban ecology and the newer approaches of urban political economy either ignore completely the role of government in channeling growth or treat the state as simply derivative of economic interests. The SSP considers the state as relatively autonomous—with officials having interests of their own—and, more specifically, considers politics as being strongly linked to the concerns of property development (Gottdiener, 1986). Lefebvre’s later writings will link government intervention after the crisis of the Great Depression to what he calls the state mode of production.
Third, the sociospatial perspective considers the role of cultural orientations as critical for an understanding of metropolitan life. Because of the importance of this subject, culture will be considered in more detail in Chapter 7.
Finally, the SSP takes a global view of metropolitan development. Most local ar eas today are tied to the activities of multinational corporations and banks. Changes in the way they invest affect each of us. By emphasizing global economic changes, however, the sociospatial perspective also seeks to understand how local and national factors interrelate with international links. All spatial levels of organization are important in understanding metropolitan development. In the following section, let us review some of these features while keeping in mind the differences between the SSP and other sociological perspectives discussed in the previous two chapters. In particular, we will see how the sociospatial perspective is a much more sophisticated and useful approach than either the growth machine or traditional ecology.
According to Kleniewski (2002:43–44):
The sociospatial perspective is similar to political economy in some ways, but it emphasizes visible space and how space can be manipulated to affect urban life. In contrast with the growth machine perspective, for example, 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. Further, in contrast with Harvey’s emphasis on the mode of production as affecting city change, the sociospatial perspective emphasizes people’s understanding of space, including the ways in which local cultures differ in the symbolic meanings attached to different spaces. Thus, rather than confining the analysis to political and economic factors causing urban change, the sociospatial perspective adds cultural factors such as symbols of meanings to the analysis of urban life.
From the earlier chapters on urbanization in the United States, we have seen that interest in real estate profits played a central part in urban development. George Washington was not only the first president of the country but he also participated in the innovative scheme to develop the swampland that became the site of the nation’s capital. During the 1800s, great profits were made by businesses as the country industrialized, but they were also made through investment in land. Cyrus McCormick earned millions from the manufacture of his famous reaper, but millions more from his activities in real estate. Railroad tycoons competed with one another by building the infrastructure that opened up the great landmass of the United States to development, but they also established towns and developed real estate as they went along. Finally, over the last few decades, we have seen that the shifts to suburbia and the Sun Belt were fueled in part by the phenomenal expansion of the single-family home industry and the development of lands outside the large central cities of the Northeast and Midwest.
The sociospatial perspective argues that other perspectives have neglected the important role played by investment in real estate in the process of regional development. Traditional urban sociology or ecology, for example, overemphasizes the push factor of technology as an agent of change. Marxian political economy pays special attention to the activities of capitalists and the way changes in industrial investment patterns affect local spaces. The SSP acknowledges push factors such as changes in economic production and transportation innovations, but it also highlights the role of pull factors such as government intervention and the action of real estate—the second circuit of capital—as crucial to explanations of metropolitan growth. Both structural and agency dynamics are studied in their details.
The sociospatial perspective stresses the human dimension along with structural arrangements. It wants to know who the actors are and how they behave, not just the facts or figures about aggregate levels of growth and change. Agency involves people acting as part of social classes and class factions, or of gender, racial, and ethnic interests. How people come together to struggle over the patterns of development is an important question for the SSP, but this is not viewed as a growth machine.
Joe R. Feagin (1983), for example, discusses the variety of ways real estate developers and speculators create development projects and channel money to real estate investment. Agents of growth include financial conduits such as commercial banks and trust or pension funds, savings and loan associations, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and real estate investment trusts; real estate brokers and chamber of commerce members; and public utilities and other relatively immobile public service agencies that must work to maintain the attractiveness of specific places. Real estate, therefore, is composed of both individual agents and a structure of financial conduits that channel investment into land.
Gottdiener (1977) also demonstrates how both structure and agency are important for an understanding of real estate activities. A case study of suburban Long Island, New York, identifies the following types of social roles assumed by investors in the built environment:
The preceding list of institutional and private interests involved in the development of the metropolitan region reveals that growth is not simply determined by economic push factors of production, as both the class conflict and capital accumulation perspectives maintain, or by a special class of people called rentiers, as the growth machine approach emphasizes. Development is caused by the pull factor of people’s activities involved in the second circuit of capital, real estate. This sector is not simply a select group of investors, as the growth machine believes, but is composed of both actors interested in acquiring wealth from real estate and a structure that channels money into the built environment. The latter consists of a host of financial intermediaries such as banks, mortgage companies, and real estate investment trusts, which allow a large variety of people to put their money in land.
Because the second circuit of capital enables anyone, even individual homeowners, to invest money in real estate for profit, it is wrong to separate the people in society into a select few who seek to make money in real estate (exploiting its exchange value) and a majority who seek only to enjoy the built environment as a staging ground for everyday life (the exploitation of space’s use value). Instead, space can be enjoyed for its uses and for its investment potential by both business and local residents. In fact, that’s what makes the relationship of society to space so complicated. The latter is simultaneously a medium of use and a source of wealth under capitalist commodity arrangements.
Because developing the built environment involves so many different interests, growth or change is always a contentious affair. This criticism has vital theoretical and empirical implications for the study of urban sociology, especially the role of the state, as we will see next.
The sociospatial perspective suggests that metropolitan growth is the outcome of negotiations and contending interests, rather than the product of some well-oiled machine without conflict. Developers, for example, must negotiate with government planners and politicians, citizen groups voice their concerns in public forums, and special interests such as utility companies or religious organizations interject their stakes and culturally defined symbolic visions in metropolitan growth. The end result of these negotiations is a built environment that is socially constructed, involving many interests and controlled by the quest for profit.
The absence of a separate class of growth mongers means that the conceptualization of local politics by the growth machine perspective is limited. Feagin (1988) shows how powerful economic interests use the state to subsidize growth; hence development often reflects the direct interests of industrial and financial capital rather than some select, separate class of rentiers. Gottdiener (1977, 1985) indicates how local politicians are intimately involved with development interests. The purpose of this alliance is not growth and increased public revenues per se, as it is viewed by the growth machine, but profit. In this sense, growth interests represent both factions of capital involved in the accumulation process and also community interests concerned about growth and the quality of life. It is this melding of profit taking and environmental concerns that is most characteristic of settlement space development, and it involves a second source of complexity in the society/space relationship.
The interests aligned around issues of change in the built environment should be seen as growth networks rather than as the monolithic entities suggested by the concept of a “machine” (Gottdiener, 1985). The idea of networks captures the way alliances can form around a host of issues associated with development, often splitting classes into factions. The concept of network captures the diversity of people who may join, often only temporarily, to pursue particular growth paths. What counts is not necessarily the push for growth but both the way different community factions perceive the form growth will take and how they evaluate their own environmental needs. There is a rich complexity of people and interests involved in metropolitan growth and change that is captured neither by ecological or political economy perspectives, because they ignore particular agents, nor by the growth machine approach, which reduces conflict to a simple dichotomy of pro-and antigrowth factions.
For example, each community group may have its own interests that are manifested in local politics. They often join in coalitions to push for some version of growth while opposing other coalitions that have their own vision of the future. Growth is not the result of single-minded efforts by some machine. Rather, development is a contentious process involving many groups in society that push for a variety of forms: rapid growth, managed growth, slow growth, no growth, and so on. Local social movements arise not just because of economic needs but because of racial, religious, ethnic, and community interests concerned with the quality of life.
Development or change is a constant occurrence in the American landscape. Local politics consists of the clashes between all these separate interests as they play themselves out in the second circuit of capital and within the forum of local government.
Symbols and behaviors that have meaning are an important topic of study in order to understand life in the metropolitan region. In Chapter 7 we discuss culture in detail including the ways that locations have used symbolic resources to acquire an attractive image that appeals to tourists as well as real estate investors. For now, the present discussion addresses the importance of culture to our sociospatial perspective.
Since the 1970s, our lived environment in all areas of the metropolitan region and its rural hinterland have made an increasing use of symbolic markers by locations as a means of increasing value. Signs appealing to consumers denote places of retailing and attract mobile residents to distinct places like malls. Municipal locations increasingly resort to designing images that will register as attractive to developers and tourists. Areas also manufacture a sense of place for otherwise nondescript, newly built housing tracts by bestowing distinctive names on them, such as Heather Acres, Mountainview Estates, Eagles Trace, and the like. While the names themselves have no direct signifying connection to the places that are tagged, they do connote a certain symbolic value that valorizes a specific location for consumers of housing or investors in real estate. Research on such names that are quite familiar to suburbanites is one important way the dynamics of regional development can be understood (Gottdiener, 1995). The proliferation of signs makes the urbanized, multicentered region semiotic in both culture and character.
Henri Lefebvre, in one of his early books (1996), discusses the French style of semiotics, which owes a great deal to the work of Roland Barthes (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, 1986). Characteristically, he confines his remarks to the central city, while we argue that there is no reason to do so in the sociospatial approach.
Semiological analysis must distinguish between multiple levels and dimensions. There is the utterance of the city, what happens and takes place in the street, in the squares, in the roads, what is said there. There is the language of the city: particularities specific to each city which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the words and use of words by the inhabitants. There is urban language, which one can consider as a language of connotations, a secondary system and derived within the denotative system. Finally, there is the writing of the city, what is inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their images, in brief, the use of time in the city by its inhabitants.
More signifiers are spread across the metro region by franchise consumer outlets, like McDonald’s, by the land development activities of the real estate industry and by levels of government in planning and transportation schemes. The kinds of signs and “writing” that Lefebvre refers to above come from individuals and groups, such as gangs, who mark territory with signifiers that reflect their own meaningful narratives about space.
For decades global media advertising, especially via television, has leveled the kind of “utterances” that once made individual cities relatively unique. At the same time the media has established in the minds of ordinary people an equation between a suggested need, like the desire for food fast to satisfy an overwhelming hunger, and a particular business that satisfies that desire which can be visited anywhere in the nation through franchising and easily recognized by a few distinctive signs on the facade of the outlets. Branding, packaging, and media marketing are all brought to play at the precise point of consumer choice to promote profits while people line up within virtually the same kinds of environments to purchase food, clothing, or even significantly expensive electronics quickly and easily. The signs of franchised chains that have already become valorized from hours and hours of media advertising make the purchase in these places doubly meaningful—first, the purchased product validates the advertising for it and not a rival product; second, the visit to a particular chain store validates the choice of going there and not to another location. In short, signs work to grease the wheels of a consumer society and to elevate spending (and, by corollary, consumer debt) to ever higher heights.
Gottdiener has argued elsewhere (1995; 2000) that the embodiment of signs in this cycle of marketing and selling for profit, or distribution and realization of capital, makes symbols vehicles for organizing consumer society. Signs are also vehicles for the valorization of specific locations in the pursuit of profit by investors in land and developers of housing and commercial buildings. Intrinsic use of symbols in this way—to make a profit—means that meaning itself is part of the political economy of capitalism, as sign value (Baudrillard, 1981; 1993). Hence, the sociospatial perspective calls attention to this semiotic dimension of the material environment within which we live our daily lives.
From our perspective, in addition, there is another reason why signs and a semiotic landscape are important. The multicentered metro region, as the new form of urban space, spreads out over an area that loses the human, pedestrian scale of the historical, compact central city. It is the automobile rather than public transportation or walking that best characterizes how we experience and how we navigate through this environment. Signs are important to this process. In the metro region, which is multicentered, people are drawn to specific locations quite literally by visible signs (from the highway or commercial strip) that are acknowledged as important just the way locations throughout the increasingly dispersed and differentiated region attempt to draw people to them through the use of meaningful symbols. Perhaps the giant neon landscape of Las Vegas is the extreme case of this kind of signage that is engineered for consumers in cars. Consequently, the semiotic dimension of daily life not only figures into the political economy of consumer-oriented capitalism; it is also the symbolic mechanism that makes it possible to navigate around the metro region in order to provide for needs. In contrast, when people lived in compact, pedestrian-oriented cities—in the previous form of urban space—they went about satisfying their needs without the kind of constant aid from giant signs, franchise cues, and themed environments that have become so necessary to the functioning of the new form of urban space—the metro region—today. Yet such displays have not totally disappeared from the central city when we consider the Ginza district of Tokyo, the riot of neon signage that is Times Square in New York, or the similar burst of colored lights characterizing Piccadilly Circus in London.
Finally, the sociospatial approach agrees with all other perspectives that acknowledge the important role of the global economy, the new mobile or “flexible” arrangements in production, and their effects on the restructuring of settlement space. It argues, however, that the push factors of capital mobility and considerations regarding the international division of labor, discussed earlier, are not the only ones determining growth. Often perspectives identified with the “new” urban sociology simply stress the effect of the global system as the key determinant of metropolitan change (Smith and Feagin, 1987; Palen, 1991). The pull factors of state policies and the second circuit of capital are also important, particularly as manifested at the local, regional, and national levels.
Hence, the sociospatial approach has a more integrated view of push and pull factors associated with growth. The influence of the global system does have a profound effect on the fortunes of place, but unlike other approaches (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Sassen, 1991; Smith and Feagin, 1987), the SSP does not believe that it has a sole determining effect.
This feature was illustrated in Chapter 1 with the discussions of suburban and Sun Belt development. At that time, it was pointed out that while the US economy had become integrated into the world system, development patterns of deconcentration to suburbs and Sun Belt regions had been going on for many years, even prior to the 1960s when the restructuring of the global system began to be felt. The shifts to the suburbs and the Sun Belt are the two most important sociospatial changes in US history, but neither can be said to have been produced by the power of the global economy. They have their roots in growth trends that have been going on for years and that involve important aspects of both government intervention and the phenomenal draw of real estate investment.
For example, in Chapter 6 we will study the nature of suburban development after recognizing that the majority of Americans live in suburbs, not central cities. Suburbanization in the United States has been going on since the turn of the century. Development accelerated after World War II when the government initiated special loans to veterans and consolidated the income tax subsidy to homeowners, providing families with a cash incentive to invest in real estate. Suburbanization was also promoted by a variety of federal housing acts passed since the 1930s that revitalized the real estate industry and by the Interstate Highway Act in the 1950s, which promoted the construction of freeways. All of these factors fell into place long before the advent of global economic effects.
We have also seen how the Sun Belt prospered as a consequence of government programs and real estate activity. Government military spending during World War II and later during the Cold War propped up the Sun Belt economy by transferring billions of dollars in tax money from the Frost Belt to this region. Real estate investment found riches in a host of Sun Belt schemes for the development of housing and industry. Other factors, such as the prosperity of agribusiness, also helped growth. In short, the most important spatial changes experienced by the United States are the consequence of many factors operating at all spatial levels, as the SSP suggests, rather than at the global level alone.
Of course, since the 1970s, changes in the global economy have had a profound effect on the built environment. The decline of manufacturing in the United States and the transfer of many production activities abroad have wiped out the traditional relationship between central city working-class communities and their capitalist employers. The economy of our largest cities has restructured away from manufacturing and toward specialization in advanced services and information processing, particularly those business services required by the finance capital faction that coordinates investment activity for the global economy (Sassen, 1991). The record high of the stock market and record low in unemployment through the 1990s have not altered this longer-term trend of restructuring of the urban economy and increasing economic polarization of urban space. All of these changes affect the nature of the local labor force and alter living and working arrangements. We will discuss some of these effects on the people of the metropolis in Chapters 8–9. Other effects of the restructuring initiated within the context of a global economy will be considered in Chapters 10–11 when we look at metropolitan problems and policies, respectively. Finally, in Chapters 10–11, we will discuss the effects of global restructuring on cities in the developing world and settlement spaces in European countries and Japan.
The sociospatial changes produced by the global economy have also been important because of the new spaces that have appeared in recent years. Prior to the 1970s, neither Santa Clara County nor the peripheral areas around the city of Boston were significant employment centers. During the last two decades, they proved to be world-class economic spaces, becoming Silicon Valley and the Route 128 high-tech corridor, respectively. These new spaces produced by high-technology industries earned disproportionately large sums of money on the world market for their employment size. At one time, these results prompted analysts to suggest that other countries follow suit and promote their own export-oriented high-tech corridors as the key to future prosperity (see Chapter 11). Today Silicon Valley and Route 128, along with other such spaces, are slowly recovering from a severe recession. The global economy is now shaky as the slow recovery becomes worldwide. According to the SSP, alterations and development of new spaces of production and consumption will be produced not by investment directed at the global level alone but also by the logic of real estate development and by other pull factors, such as the quality of government intervention, in addition to factors that operate locally, regionally, nationally, and globally—at all sociospatial levels.
The sociospatial perspective involves ideas that distinguish it from previous sociological approaches.
First, it incorporates a number of different factors, instead of emphasizing just one or two, that can account for development and change. It particularly seeks to provide a balanced account of both push and pull factors in metropolitan and regional growth.
Second, it considers the role of real estate in development as the combined activities of both agency and structure. Investment in land is a sector of capital accumulation with its own factions and cycles of boom and bust. The categories of political economy, such as profit, rent, interest, and value, are just as applicable to metropolitan development as to any other part of the economy.
Third, the sociospatial perspective strives for a detailed view of politics that emphasizes the activities of individuals and groups in the development process. The SSP focuses on the activities of certain growth networks that form coalitions interested in choices that must be made over the direction and effects of change.
The sociospatial perspective considers cultural factors such as race, gender, and the symbolic context of space to be just as important as economic and political concerns (see the following three chapters). It also deals specifically with the special qualities of spatial forms and their role in the organization of society. At present, metropolitan life is played out within the context of an ever-expanding multicentered region. We have discussed the historical significance of this form of settlement space in previous chapters and will discuss its significance for daily life in chapters to come.
Finally the sociospatial perspective, along with other approaches, adopts a global view of development but does not claim that the world economy alone is responsible for the restructuring of settlement space. Global changes are particularly relevant for an understanding of how cities, suburbs, and regions have been affected by the economy in recent years. New spaces of industry, commerce, and services have helped redefine settlement patterns as multicentered regional development. Historically, however, the pull factors of government intervention and investment in real estate have also played an essential part in the restructuring of space.
In the chapters that follow, we examine the development of metropolitan areas in the United States (Chapters 5–6) and then examine the role of culture in metropolitan life, addressing everyday life and social problems (Chapters 7–9). We then turn our attention to other countries to compare the US experience with growth and restructuring elsewhere (Chapters 10–11).
political economy
international division of labor
capital accumulation
uneven development
second circuit of capital
abstract space
social space
labor theory of location
growth machine
use value / exchange value
financial conduits
growth networks
sociospatial perspective
1. The new urban sociology has developed in part from earlier theoretical work in what is known as political economy. Who are some of the earlier sociologists identified with this theoretical perspective? What did they write about? How were their ideas incorporated into urban sociology and into sociological thinking more generally?
2. What is meant by uneven development? What causes uneven development to occur in a metropolitan region? What are the effects of uneven development on metropolitan growth? What are some examples of uneven development that you can see in the metropolitan region where you live?
3. Henri Lefebvre stands as the major theoretical figure in the development of urban political economy. What was his contribution to recent work in the new urban sociology? Identify three ideas that Henri Lefebvre wrote about and explain how they are used in urban sociology.
4. There are important differences between the class conflict and capital accumulation approaches of the new urban sociology. Discuss the work of one theorist from each of these approaches and explain the differences in their approaches to studying metropolitan regions.
5. John Logan and Harvey Molotch have suggested that urban development is driven forward by a growth machine that emphasizes the “exchange value” of urban property against the “use value” that local residents assign to their property. What are some of the limitations of this approach? How is the idea of the growth machine different from the sociospatial approach more generally?
6. What is meant by the sociospatial approach to urban sociology? Pick three features of this perspective and discuss how these are used to study metropolitan regions.