sociology

URBAN FORTUNES THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLACE

John R. Logan Harvey L. Molotch

UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

2 Places as Commodities

For us, as for many of our intellectual predecessors, the market in land and buildings orders urban phenomena and deter­ mines what city life can be. This means we must show how real estate markets actually work and how their operations fail to meet the neoclassical economists’ assumptions. In short, we will find the substance of urban phenomena in the actual operations of mar­ kets. Our goal is to identify the specific processes, the sociologi­ cal processes, through which the pursuit of use and exchange val­ ues fixes property prices, responds to prices, and in so doing determines land uses and the distribution of fortunes. Since eco­ nomic sociology is still without a clear analytical foundation (Stinchcombe, 1983:6), we must begin our work in this chapter by laying a conceptual basis for the empirical descriptions that will be presented later.

Special Use Values

People use place in ways contrary to the neoclassical as­ sumptions of how commodities are purchased and consumed. We do not dispose of place after it has been bought and used. Places have a certain preciousness for their users that is not part of the conventional concept of a commodity. A crucial initial difference is that place is indispensable; all human activity must occur some­ where. Individuals cannot do without place by substituting an­

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other product. They can, of course, do with less place and less desirable place, but they cannot do without place altogether.

Even when compared to other indispensable commodities— food, for example— place is still idiosyncratic. The use of a par­ ticular place creates and sustains access to additional use values. O ne’s home in a particular place, for example, provides access to school, friends, work place, and shops. Changing homes disrupts connections to these other places and their related values as well. Place is thus not a discrete element, like a toy or even food; the precise conditions of its use determine how other elements, in­ cluding other commodities, will be used. Cox (1981:433) speaks of “home” as a vested interest “spilling out of the individual household and its dwelling and projecting itself onto neighbors, streets, local businesses, schools and other institutions.” Any in­ dividual residential location connects people to a range of comple­ mentary persons, organizations, and physical resources.'

The stakes involved in the relationship to place can be high, reflecting all manner of material, spiritual, and psychological con­ nections to land and buildings. Places represent “the focusing of experiences and intentions onto particular settings . . . full with meanings, with real objects, and with ongoing activities” (Relph, 1976:141). Numerous scholars— from Anderson (1976) to Whyte (1943)— have shown that given places achieve significance be­ yond the more casual relations people have to other commodities. Although the connection to place can vary in intensity for different class, age, gender, and ethnic groups, individual relationships to place are often characterized by intense feelings and commitments appropriate to long-term and multifaceted social and material at­ tachments.

This special intensity creates an asymmetrical market relation* between buyers and sellers. People pay what the landlord de l mands, not because the housing unit is worth it, but because the property is held to have idiosyncratic locational benefits. Access I to resources like friends, jobs, and schools is so important that residents (as continuous consumers-buyers) are willing to resort

1. These linkages are analogous to the mutually reinforcing advantages that businesses gain from their special relations to complementary land uses— “ag­ glomeration economies." Roger Friedland drew this analogy from an earlier draft o f this chapter.

PL A CES AS C O M M O D I T I E S 19

to all sorts of “extramarket” mechanisms to fight for their right to keep locational relations intact. They organize, protest, use vio­ lence, and seek political regulation. They strive not just for tenure in a given home but for stability in the surrounding neighborhood as well.

Location establishes a special collective interest among indi­ viduals. People who have “bought” into the same neighborhood share a quality o f public services (garbage pickup, police behav­ ior); through these forms of “collective consumption” (Castells, 1983), residents have a common stake in the area’s future. Resi­ dents also share the same fate when natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes threaten and when institutions alter the local landscape by creating highways, parks, or toxic dumps. Individ­ uals are not only mutually dependent on what goes on inside a neighborhood (including “compositional effects”); they are af­ fected by what goes on outside it as well. The standing of a neigh­ borhood vis-&-vis other neighborhoods creates conditions that its residents experience in common. Each place has a particular po­ litical or economic standing vis-a-vis other places that affects the quality of life and opportunities available to those who live within its boundaries. A neighborhood with a critical voting bloc (for example, Chicago’s Irish wards in the 1930s) may generate high levels o f public services or large numbers of patronage jobs for its working-class residents, thereby aiding their well-being. A rich neighborhood can protect its residents’ life styles from external threats (sewer plants, public housing) in a way that transcends personal resources, even those typically associated with the afflu­ ent. The community in itself can be a local force.

Neighborhoods organize life chances in the same sense as / do the more familiar dimensions of class and caste. Giddens 1 (1973:108-10) notes the importance of spatial segregation as a I “proximate factor o f class structuration . . . an aspect of con­ sumption rather than production which acts to reinforce the sepa­ rations” produced by unequal market capacity. Richard Peet em­ phasizes that “each social group operates within a typical daily ‘prism,’ which for the disadvantaged closes into a ‘prison of space and resources.’ . . . Deficiencies in the environment— limitations on mobility and the density and quality of social resources— must clearly limit an individual’s potential” (Peet, 1975:484-85, cited

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in Dear, 1981). Like class and status groupings, and even more than many other associations, places create “communities o f fate” (Stinchcom be, 1965:181). Thus we must consider the stratifica­ tion o f places along with the stratification of individuals in order to understand the distribution o f life chances. People’s sense of these dynam ics, perceived as the relative “standing” of their neighborhood, gives them some o f their spiritual or sentimental stake in place— thus further distinguishing home from other, less life-significant, commodities.

Contrary to much academic debate on the subject, we hold that the material use o f place cannot be separated from psychological use; the daily round that makes physical survival possible takes on emotional m eanings through that very capacity to fulfill life’s cru­ cial goals. The material and psychic rewards thus combine to cre­ ate a feeling o f “community.” Much of residents’ striving as mem­ bers o f com munity organizations or ju st as responsible neighbors represents an effort to preserve and enhance their networks of sustenance. Appreciation of neighborhood resources, so varied and diffusely experienced, gives rise to “sentiment.” Sentiment is the inadequately articulated sense that a particular place uniquely fulfills a complex set o f needs. W hen we speak of residents’ use values, we imply fulfillment of all these needs, material and non­ material.

Hom eownership gives some residents exchange value interests along with use value goals. Their houses are the basis of a lifetime wealth strategy (Perin, 1977). For those who pay rent to land­ lords, use values are the only values at issue. Owners and tenants can thus sometim es have divergent interests. When rising property values portend neighborhood transform ation, tenants and owners may adopt different com munity roles (see chapter 4); but ordinar­ ily, the exchange interests o f owners are not sufficiently significant to divide them from other residents.

Although residents are the forem ost example of people who pursue use values through property, others also pursue use values through property, and these people also operate in a manner dif­ ferent from what the market model would imply. Retailers, for exam ple, depend on geographical context and often develop en­ during connections to a given location. Proximity to customers

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 2 1

can be their m ost im portant locational resource. Moreover, their prospects are affected by some o f the same factors important to residents: physical am enities, community services, and a social network supporting the makeup o f the neighborhood, including the shops. A retailer may depend not only on a substantial number of people nearby but on a certain type o f residential enclave. A kosher butcher needs Jews; an exclusive boutique needs the trendy rich. Thus merchants have an ongoing stake in a particular social makeup o f place. Retailers, like residents, may or may not wel­ come nearby developm ent, which could mean new competitors as well as an expanded m arket. These indeterminacies cause retail­ ers, as a group, to have mixed interests; they may serve an inter­ mediate social role in conflicts that arise between residents and place entrepreneurs. T heir role is not easily predictable, however, since it is contingent on the specific form o f retailing and whether or not the present residential population will enhance or inhibit future profit making (see chapter 4). Retailers may also own ex­ tensive property themselves, further complicating their interests in a neighborhood.

Producers o f goods, o r capitalists in our terminology, derive their own use values from place. W hatever the basis for corporate locational decisions (conventionally described as maximizing ac­ cess to raw materials, m arkets, and labor), firms do not, in prin­ ciple, depend on intensification o f adjacent land for the success of their own operations. They may benefit from a nearby assortment o f business support services that will deliver “agglomeration economies,” but there is no inherent need for land-use intensifi­ cation per se. O f course, such firms can also simultaneously own land and buildings; and this ownership may eventually override other considerations. Corporations principally involved in pro­ ductive enterprise may later find their real estate holdings their greatest asset. At that point their interest shifts from the use values of a place to its exchange value, once again blurring the neatness of our distinctions (see chapter 6 for a case description).

In contrast to our extensive information about residents (based on hundreds o f ethnographies and mountains o f survey results), we know little about corporations’ attachments to place. There is substantial research on the business image o f various places and

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on factors considered important by executives when choosing a site. But the study o f “corporate culture” has only recently gained much attention and has rarely included an analysis of that culture in relationship to specific places (but see Galaskiewicz, 1985). We have legends about the loyalty o f plutocrats to a particular place: John D. R ockefeller’s M idwest boosterism , for example, was sup­ posedly behind his creation o f the University of Chicago (Storr, 1966). But we know little about how such factors enter into deci­ sion m aking, how sentim ent and “culture” might coexist with m a­ terial strategies to sustain allegiance to particular places. We know that “other factors” besides dollar efficiency do indeed m atter (ex­ ecutives’ social networks may determ ine the location o f new plant sites), but research on such topics is still in an early, although prom ising, stage (see Gordon, 1976; Pred, 1976, 1977, 1980; Walker, 1981).

We can therefore proceed only tentatively, but we make three general observations about capitalists’ attachments to place. First, com pared to those o f residents, the satisfaction that capitalists d e­ rive from place is less diffuse. Their param ount interest is the prof­ itability o f their operations; concerns with place turn heavily on how well land and buildings serve that overarching goal. Second, capitalists, at least com pared to residents, have greater opportu O nity to m ove to another place should conditions in one place cease i to be appropriate. Free o f at least some o f the constraints holding* residents, such as sentimental ties to family and access to schools and jo b s, corporations can exit more easily. Firms that have not com m itted m ajor facilities to a given location (sunk costs) are par­ ticularly m obile. Finally, capitalists’ use o f place is less fragile / than that o f residents. Capital can adapt to changes such as noise, I odor, and ethnic succession, whereas the effect of such change on ) residents is more imm ediate and more serious. O f course, som e| forms o f capital do have specific locational needs, but these are ordinarily upset only by the m ost extreme changes (for exam ­ ple, the closing o f a port or the destruction o f a communication line).

Although residents vary in their attachm ent to a neighborhood (Janowitz, 1951), capitalists’ attachment to place is much weaker overall. This adds to the difficulties o f those, like government of-

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 2 3

ficials or neighborhood leaders, who might try to control them. At the other extrem e are residents like the elderly poor who are per­ manently and intensely tied to the place they use. The most vul­ nerable participants in place markets are those with the fewest alternatives.

Special Exchange Values

Exchange values from place appear as “rent.” We use the term broadly to include outright purchase expenditures as well as payments that hom e buyers or tenants make to landlords, realtors, mortgage lenders, real estate lawyers, title com panies, and so forth. As with use values, people pursue exchange values in ways that differ from the m anner in which they create other com modi­ ties. Suppliers cannot “produce” places in the usual sense of the term. All places consist, at least in part, o f land, which “is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man” (Polanyi, 1944:72) and obviously not produced for sale in a market. The quantity is fixed. It is not, says Harvey (1982:357), “the product of labour.” This m akes the com modity description o f land, in M arx’s word, “fictitious”; Storper and Walker (1983:43) describe land, like labor, as a “pseudocommodity.” Even conventional economists acknowledge that “the urban land market is a curious one” (Dowall, 1984:111).

Place as Monopoly

Perhaps the fundamental “curiosity” is that land markets are inherently m onopolistic, providing owners, as a class, with complete control over the total com modity supply. There can be no additional entrepreneurs or any new product. The individual owner also has a monopoly over a subsection o f the marketplace. Every parcel o f land is unique in the idiosyncratic access it pro­ vides to other parcels and uses, and this quality underscores the specialness o f property as a commodity. Unlike widgets or Ford Pintos, more of the same product cannot be added as market de­ mand grows. Instead the owner o f a particular parcel controls all

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 2 9

their separate urban goals. A given market is their tool or their encumbrance; it is not, as orthodox economics would imply, their guide.

A Social Typology of Entrepreneurs

Place entrepreneurs, the people directly involved in the exchange o f places and collection o f rents, have the jo b o f trap­ ping human activity at the sites of their pecuniary interests. The special qualities o f the real estate commodity distinguish their ac­ tivities from those o f other business operators. Place entrepre­ neurs are a special group among the privileged: m odem urban rentiers, somewhat analogous to their feudal landholding prede­ cessors. Not merely a residue o f a disappearing social group, as the classic M arxian position would imply, rentiers persist as a dy­ namic social force.

We identify three types o f contemporary place entrepreneurs, each with different social relationships to the place commodity and each generating different kinds o f rent; we discuss each entre­ preneurial type in turn.

Serendipitous Entrepreneurs

Some rentiers are only very marginally entrepreneurs at all, having become rent collectors by inheriting property or by some other fortuitous circum stance. Thus they derive returns from a product not “made” by anybody, and not even brought under control by any o f their own efforts. Or again, the real estate may have been acquired for one purpose (for example, farming) but was found to be more valuable when sold or rented for other uses. The farm er may have worked hard on the land, but the real fortune grew while the farm er slept. Quite often, o f course, the farm er is bilked by the m ore sophisticated operator (“city slicker”), who better understands the nature o f changed property values (the In­ dians’ “sale” of M anhattan to the Dutch is an apocryphal case in point). The serendipitous entrepreneur (common in recent years even among ordinary homeowners in some areas) is essentially

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passive, following the behavior of the classic rentier, who lived off family entitlements.

Active Entrepreneurs

Some individuals seek out the right place to be in the future. These entrepreneurs, who anticipate changing use values from place, speculate on the future o f particular spots. Such active entrepreneurs seek rent by gaining control over locations likely to become more strategic over time. They strive to capture differen­ tial rents by putting themselves in the path o f the development process. This is active speculation, based on predicting develop­ ment trends (regardless o f their source) and gambling on accurate predictions. Once again the needed business talent is special: the entrepreneur needs skill, not in the production of a good or ser­ vice, but in the estimation of the geographical movements of oth­ ers, including those who do produce goods and services. Small- scale or medium-scale investors are the prototypical actors; they try to monitor others’ investments, using local social networks to learn who is going to do what and where. The more sophisticated among them may also use principles of human ecology or urban economics in their efforts to discern future growth patterns.

Structural Speculators

Some place entrepreneurs do not rely solely on their ca­ pacity to estimate future locational trends; they supplement such intelligence by intervening in that future. These entrepreneurs speculate on their ability to change the relationships of a given place to other places— that is, they attempt to determine the pat­ terns through which others will seek use values from place. Like the commodities traders who speak o f their market-rigging activ­ ities as “creating a situation” (Copetas, 1984), place entrepreneurs seek to alter the conditions that structure the market. Their strat­ egy is to create differential rents by influencing the larger arena of decision making that will determine locational advantages. They may attempt, for example, to influence the location of a defense plant, to alter a freeway route, or to encourage government sub­ sidizing of a private business that is likely to move to their prop­

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 31

erty. They lobby for or against specific zoning and general plan designations.

Given the extraordinary price impacts of government actions, structural speculators realistically seek redistributive rents. They may also strive for monopoly rents, again often through the use of government to fix for themselves a unique locational advantage (e.g., monopoly zoning). Like other forms of successful struc­ tural speculation, monopoly rents help minimize the risks related to the vagaries of urban development. But it takes substantial skill, resources, and ongoing vigilance to sustain political decisions that preserve a given set o f spatial relations.

These three ways o f generating material gain from place (ser­ endipitous, active, and structural entrepreneurship) reflect differ­ ent degrees of intentionality and institutional control, and a range of social consequences. Compared to structural speculators, when serendipitous entrepreneurs acquire their land, they are ignorant of its eventual use and do not envision government authority play­ ing a role; active entrepreneurs represent a middle case. There is also a difference in the degree of parochialism; the serendipitous entrepreneur’s habits and fortunes are most closely tied to a spe­ cific local parcel, whereas the structural speculator has the most cosmopolitan field o f operation. Again, the active entrepreneur falls between these two. Finally, there is also a range of rent types sought. The structural speculator ambitiously strives for monop­ olistic and redistributive rents, not merely rents that are serendip­ itous or differential. Precisely because they do understand the social nature o f property prices, sophisticated entrepreneurs are driven to the organizational manipulations that will boost their returns. Each type o f entrepreneurial activity tends to affect differ­ ent sorts o f neighborhoods and to involve distinct kinds of orga­ nizational efforts.

Organizing for Exchange and Use

Among the entrepreneurial types, the structural specula­ tors are the most important; their behaviors reverberate through every aspect of the urban scene. People out to structure markets tend not to work in isolation; they work together in organized

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groups. Let us here consider how the collective efforts to pursue exchange values are carried out; then we shall turn to the larger economic and governmental contexts o f such attempts. Finally, we shall discuss how community organization becomes a counter- response on behalf of use value goals.

Growth Machines

Those seeking exchange value often share interests with others who control property in the same block, city, or region. Like residents, entrepreneurs in similar situations also make up communities of fate, and they often get together to help fate along] a remunerative path.

Whether the geographical unit of their interest is as small as a neighborhood shopping district or as large as a national region, place entrepreneurs attempt, through collective action and often in alliance with other business people, to create conditions that will intensify future land use in an area. There is an unrelenting search, even in already successful places, for more and more. A n apparatus of interlocking progrowth associations and governmen­ tal units makes up what Molotch (1976) calls the “growth ma­ chine.” Growth machine activists are largely free from concern for what goes on within production processes (for example, occupa­ tional safety), for the actual use value of the products made locally (for example, cigarettes), or for spillover consequences in the lives of residents (for example, pollution). They tend.to oppose any intervention that might regulate development on behalf of use values. They may quarrel among themselves over exactly how rents will be distributed among parcels, over how, that is, they will share the spoils of aggregate growth. But virtually all place entrepreneurs and their growth machine associates, regardless of geographical or social location, easily agree on the issue of growth itself.

They unite behind a doctrine o f value-free development— t notion that free markets alone should determine land use. entrepreneur’s view, land-use regulation endangers both society large and the specific localities favored as production sites. Just as markets in neoclassical reasoning are, in general, the only legiti­ mate mechanisms for choosing what is to be produced (with no need for collective evaluation), so markets should also be the in­

nt— the 7 i. In the x iety at I

PL A C E S AS CO M M O D ITIES 3 3

visible hand that determines where and how production should occur. When the two value-free doctrines are joined at the local level, communities forfeit control over both the content and loca­ tion o f production. Communities do not evaluate a product by its social worth, a machine in terms of its human value (Goodman and Goodman, 1947), a locational decision by its social conse­ quence. Instead they invite capital to make virtually anything— whether buttons or bombs, toasters or tanks— in their own back yards. Aggregate growth is portrayed as a public good; increases in economic activity are believed to help the whole community. Growth, according to this argument, brings jobs, expands the tax base, and pays for urban services. City governments are thus wise to do what they can to attract investors.

Many academic experts also hold this view, even those outside such fields as real estate economics (where developers and profes­ sors have notoriously close ties). The prominent political scientist Paul Peterson (1981:20-21) equates the “well-being” of cities with their levels of capital investment because such investment is to the “benefit of all residents.” It is, Peterson argues, “in the interest of cities” (as opposed to specific groups within cities) to avidly pursue developmental policies. Peterson equates virtually all capital growth projects (including those that must be publicly subsidized) as net gains— at least on the fiscal front. Otherwise, Peterson (1981:42, 43) implies, why would local officials ever have “judged” them a good idea? In his view small-time political corruption (e.g., hands in the till) is the only source of “econom­ ically regressive” policies at the local level; development pro­ grams, almost of any sort, have only positive consequences for a city overall. Thus Peterson concludes that problems of the type we raise (the costs of development) “have little theoretical rele­ vance” for the fortunes of places and their people.

Long before academics presented such arguments, local ren­ tiers had them down pat. Modem rentiers have long functioned as intermediaries between the corporate elite and the local citizenry, playing the stabilizing role of a “third tier” (Wallerstein, 1979: 223). For this reason, perhaps, a class that, as Marx said, can find no “morally edifying rationalisation for its continued existence” (Harvey, 1982:359) is nevertheless permitted to persist under cap­ italism. Rentiers not only perform the “ideological and legitimiz­ ing function” for private property generally (Harvey, 1982:360)

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but also coordinate the needs of corporate elites with the behavior of local government and citizens’ groups. Even though rent pay­ ments reduce capitalists’ profits, rentiers’ presence is useful in the accumulation process. Rentiers mute local opposition to capital­ ists’ projects. Any threat to the growth machine apparatus thus endangers the ongoing system through which sites are prepared for capital under more or less ideal conditions.4

Contrary to the arguments of such scholars as Peterson, we are certain that local economic growth does not necessarily promote the public good. Even in terms of helping the fiscal condition of the city, the long-term consequence of growth can be negative. We find much that is “theoretically relevant” in the regressive ef­ fects of development. Development projects that increase the scale o f cities and alter their spatial relations inevitably affect the distribution o f life chances. When capital moves from one place or economic sector to another, the “action” always has potential for redistributing wealth and changing the allocation of use and exchange values within as well as across places.

In other words, human activities generate costs and benefits, some o f which are borne by those who create them (they are “in ­ ternalized”) and some of which are not (they are “externalized”). People who share control of places try to trap growth. They join together in order to shift internal costs of activities to other areas or to others in their own area, and to capture the benefits of those activities, particularly rents, for themselves. This behavior, when replicated across the country, involves exploiting virtually every institution in our political, economic, and cultural systems. Actors from all these spheres participate in a complex “ecology of games” (Long, 1958) sustained by growth elites’ struggle for pri­ vate fortunes through the development process.

Government for Growth

Because o f the limited amount o f mobile capital, the growth apparatus in each area must compete with that of other areas to attract scarce investment. Coalitions of interest, recruited

4. For other conceptions of the “confused and confusing affair" of the analytic status of landed property under capitalism, see Harvey (1982:346, 359-67).

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 3 5

and organized along territorial lines, becoming working coopera­ tive units, even if on other grounds their members have divergent goals. Thus if one form of truly urban conflict is the internal struggle between use and exchange values, a second is the exter­ nal battle o f place elites against one another— the battle of the growth machines. This contest goes on at all geopolitical levels, with competitive systems nested within one another. Owners o f a commercial block compete against owners of the next block, but they unite when their business district competes against other business districts in the same city. The owners of all the business districts in one city stand together in competition with other cities.

Sometimes the arenas and units of competition correspond to formal government entities, such as incorporated cities, states, and nations. In other instances the entities are more informal, such as national regions, and only voluntary associations (for example, a local Chamber o f Commerce) act on their behalf. These varying degrees o f formal authority determine in part the influence of each level on the competitions on the lower tiers. Because the nation­ state is the strongest political unit in the modem world, the insti­ tutions o f this unit ordinarily determine the formal channels of competition o f places within the national system. In the interna­ tional system, where place competition is only loosely regulated by international constraints, capital operates in a different, more open, environment (see chapter 7).

If a given territory has a government corresponding in jurisdic­ tion to the geographical borders of the territory, the elite can mo­ bilize the government to bolster growth goals. When residents’ claims on behalf of use values threaten to undermine growth, gov­ ernment can turn back the challenge, either by invoking police power or by distracting dissidents with payoffs (for example, re­ location allowances to displaced tenants). Governments can also help coordinate the roles o f diverse members of the growth coali­ tion, securing the cooperation o f local entrepreneurs in ambitious growth projects and even disciplining those who will not cooper­ ate. Similarly, government can help overcome entrepreneurs’ re­ sistance to accommodations with dissenting residents. Growth elites’ larger, long-term interests can sometimes be best served by selectively granting concessions to those in opposition, and public authorities are often ideally suited to do this.

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Finally, access to a government can help in generating re­ sources from tiers above. From the perspective o f a growth coali­ tion, it must have influence not only at the level of daily at-hand operations but also beyond the local level to the higher levels that determ ine large geographical patterns o f public investments, pol­ lution controls, and government procurement spending. Partici­ pants in a growth coalition must be concerned with both the sub­ stantive decisions m ade at those higher levels (for example, Will money be allocated for a freeway?) and the procedural questions (for exam ple, W hich jurisdiction— the city, county, or state— will make the routing decision?). If local elites have a government unit through which to operate, they have access to publicly paid staffs, consultants, and powers o f “home rule” to use against a higher authority. By working through a local government, moreover, the efforts o f an elite gain the appearance of a civic campaign waged on behalf o f a legal entity and its citizens, rather than o f a con­ spiracy o f vested interests. Nevertheless, elites are sometimes bet­ ter off operating independently, relying on informal mechanisms for influencing others. Optimally, both strategies should be avail­ able, to be used according to the issue at hand and conditions of time and place.

The degree o f authority found in each level o f a system is not static, but rather, as part o f the political process, varies according to the struggles am ong com peting interests. For example, rentiers who have good control over local government tend to favor “home rule” when it com es to land-use zoning; environmentalists who think they have a better chance of achieving their goals on a higher tier may strive to enact “state standards” that preempt local deci­ sion making. The lim its o f home rule thus expand and contract (Walker and H eim an, 1981) in response to the power shifts among com peting structural speculators, other entrepreneurs, and their use value opponents. The same dynamics also determine the de­ gree to which authority is centralized or dispersed among smaller geographical units. Thus there has been, within the United States and around the globe, a historical seesaw between calls for devo­ lution on the one hand and trends toward centralized institutions on the other (for exam ple, metropolitan authorities, common m ar­ kets, or w orld governm ent). These efforts represent strategic m a­

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nipulations of the sites o f decision making in order to influence distributional outcomes among and within places.

Although we obviously have an interest in such issues as gov­ ernment authority, centralization, and fragmentation, our focus means that our treatm ent o f these topics will differ from that in traditional political science. Rather than evaluate which institu­ tional format is m ore o r less efficient, more o r less democratic, more or less universalistic, we will examine how jurisdictional entities are purposively enacted and then gradually altered through the struggles over use and exchange. We argue, for example, that the great urban reform movements of this century, which brought us such innovations as the suburban towns and professional land- use planning, owe their existence more to entrepreneurs seeking higher investment returns than to residents trying to build better lives. Indeed, this is true for the way city boundaries were carved out o f the hinterland as well as for the administrative roles and land-use functions given to the city. The legal creation and regu­ lation o f places have been primarily under the domination o f those searching, albeit sometimes in the face o f use value counter- dem ands, for exchange value gains.

Community Organization

Because the competition for growth does not ordinarily work on their behalf, residents often use organization o f their own to sustain the places in which they live. M aintenance o f “hom e” in the largest sense o f the term motivates people to come together in block clubs, neighborhood groups, and other associations that have place-related use values as at least one o f their central con­ cerns. These organizations may take such diverse actions as pres­ suring the local planning commission to uphold zoning restric­ tions or blocking the sale o f a home to someone who is considered a threat to the neighborhood’s “good standing.” Community or­ ganizations that strive to alter the distribution o f exchange values and to influence the kinds o f use values that can be gained from place are, for us, “urban” phenomena. Their frequent clash with those striving for higher rents results in urban conflict. This is not simply one of many social stresses played out on the stage o f the

3 8 P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S

city, but a distinctive conflict over place values themselves. The traditional academic literature on the topic tends to equate

the “community organization” with progressive social forces gen­ erally and to see all such groups as analytically equivalent because they are from the “grass roots” and help “empower” local people. Castells’s (1983) recent version of this doctrine treats virtually all neighborhood groups— ethnic clubs, job-training programs, civil rights groups, peace activists, the YMCA, and so forth— as grass­ roots, spatially oriented “urban social movements.” But many of these movements and organizations are not essentially urban, re­ gardless o f their physical location, and it can be very misleading to reduce them to local conflicts over land use (Molotch, 1984). Similarly, there is no justification for treating progressive move­ ments as an urban phenomenon and simply ignoring reactionary ones (Are all reactionary groups “rural”?). Civil rights groups are no more or no less urban than anti-civil rights groups, ethnic as­ sociations no more or no less urban than religious cults. Even movements for welfare services, medical care, or other forms of collective consumption may have little to do with the social orga­ nization o f property and space; hence they may, depending on specific local circumstance, also lie outside our urban purview. Although there may be good reasons to cast the organizational net broadly, doing so undermines efforts to hold fast to an urban ana­ lytical object.

Movements found in the city may change their nature over time, in terms o f both their specific urban roles and their essential urbanness. Associations formed to oppose development may ac­ quiesce after entrepreneurs and political figures co-opt their lead­ ership. Sometimes community groups move from a concern with place-related use values to management of service delivery (for example, running mental health clinics), which would similarly remove them from our analytical interest. But our category of “ur­ ban” is wide enough to embrace social movements that are often excluded because they are not progressive. Even if most urban movements are “liberal” in that they frequently oppose entrepre­ neurs’ schemes, some are racist and reactionary (for example, ex­ clusive suburbs), but they do not therefore cease to be urban.

Just as there are different types o f place entrepreneurs, there are different kinds o f neighborhoods and neighborhood organizations

P L A C E S AS C O M M O D I T I E S 3 9

according to the kinds o f challenges they confront and the tools at their disposal. Rich neighborhoods, for example, are better able to protect themselves through “working within the system” ; poor neighborhoods are particularly vulnerable to disruptions from the, surrounding exchange system. 1

Residents' organizational efforts are greatly enhanced when their cause is joined by at least a portion of the entreprenurial sector, just as the entrepreneurs’ goals are facilitated when resi­ dents become part o f the development consensus. Efforts to achieve such effective coalitions (see Gamson, 1968) mobilize the full range o f instruments o f communication, education, and social control. The success or failure of entrepreneurs in their rent com­ petition with other places sometimes depends upon their ability to put a wide array of community units behind them. Similarly, the survival and prosperity o f neighborhood organizations may re­ quire them to join with at least some o f their potential entrepre­ neurial adversaries. Thus local growth machines may successfully mobilize, through the vehicle of neighborhood organization, the affectional ties o f a residential community, and do so on behalf of exchange goals. Conversely, communities o f sentiment may con­ ceivably enlist the aid of a segment o f land-based entrepreneurs, who may, for examples, conclude that the survival o f some “local color” will enhance their new development nearby. Part o f the tension of the urban drama consists in this making and unmaking o f coalitions among neighborhood and entrepreneurial actors.

Migration

Instead of expending energy on organizing the place they are in, people can move their residence or their investments. In­ deed, commentators like to describe urban life as fast paced and fluid. But a more useful description is that the basic ingredients of urban existence— money, labor, and investments in factories and land— move about with different degrees of ease and speed. Hol­ land (1975) has defined a continuum o f investment “velocities” that formalizes some o f the variations. “Portfolio” investments— assets in the form of money, stocks, and other financial forms— are the most mobile. Owners can transfer such wealth almost