For illustration I have chosen some photos from an amazing series by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, 'The Ruins of Detroit'. I think they suit the topic of the post and I hope you find them as striking as I do.
TITLE: "Ironically,
the suburbanization dynamics that had been entrenched during the postwar years
of Keynesianism ... would establish the conditions of existence for the rise of
a distinctly suburban-secessionist mode of neoliberal governance…" [Peck,
2011, p.901]. Discuss.
“I’ve begun
recently to think that neoliberalism
is poised to replace globalization as
the next popular metaconcept in the social sciences. The literature on
neoliberalism as a concept has exploded in recent years … States, provinces,
policies, eras, people, countries, and institutions have all been deemed
‘neoliberal’ or ‘neoliberalizing’ … It is used broadly to characterize the
right wing; to mean the guiding light for the ‘Washington consensus’; to mean
anything related to business; to mean anything related to capitalism; to mean
anything related to liberals in the US. Neoliberalism is everywhere and,
apparently, everything.” [Hackworth, 2007, pp. xi-xii].
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The academic
literature around neoliberalism with regard to urban form and the evolution of
cities is large, diverse and politically charged. There is nevertheless a
consensus between left and right that one can broadly distinguish between two
eras in the political economy of the post-World War II developed capitalist
world: a “managerial Keynesian” era from 1945 to the early 1970s and a “neoliberal”
era post-1980. The eras were divided by an interregnum of “stagflationary”
economic crisis, political turmoil and intensified political conflict during
the 1970s. A central tenet of the Keynesian critique of neoliberal urban
planning policies is that the redistributive role of city planning has been
abandoned. As one critic puts it, “[t]he belief that markets could regulate the
allocation of housing as the most rational means of resource distribution … has
led public policymaking towards the abandonment of the conceptual meaning of
housing as a social good, part of the commonalities a society agrees to share
or to provide to those with fewer resources: a means to distribute wealth.” [Rolnik,
2013, p.1059].
This paper
argues that this criticism, harking back as it does to the perceived success of
managerial Keynesianism in the post-war era, is misconceived for a number of
reasons. First, that the political preconditions for neoliberalism’s success – as
a “distinctly suburban-secessionist mode of … governance” – were themselves the outcome of a “spatial
fix” dominated by managerial Keynesian policymaking. Second, it poses the
question of what exactly “planning” should aim for in the context of the city –
in particular whether it can realistically aim for redistributive outcomes or should
rather seek to provide universal benefits. Third, to what extent planning at
the city level can overcome fundamental economic, technological and demographic
trends at the national level: in other words, that cities as social organisms
are inherently flexible, prone to shrink and decline as well as expand, and
that therefore in some circumstances city planning should aim primarily at
mitigating the impact of decline.
The
managerial Keynesian system emerged in 1945 led by the US (and to a residual
degree the UK) as an outcome of the impact on governments, elites and
policy-makers of the market failures of the Great Depression and the successful
experience of large-scale planning during the New Deal and WWII. It was
characterised in policy terms by activist Keynesian government intervention in
the economy with a commitment to maintaining consistently high aggregate
demand, a cross-party political consensus that government planning was central
to improving peoples’ living standards, education levels, housing, health and
access to infrastructure. Industrially, advanced capitalist economies were
characterised by large, vertically-integrated oligopolies and similarly large
industrial trades unions and labour movements. Globally, trade barriers were
slowly dismantled, but global capital flows remained limited by capital
controls. The ‘Bretton Woods’ currency architecture established a system of
fixed but adjustable currencies dominated by the US Dollar as a global reserve
currency pegged to gold.
How did this
political and policy world relate to the evolving world of urban form and
cities? Writing about the US from a Marxist perspective, Harvey developed the
notion of a “spatial fix” to the Great Depression, rooted in the mutual
dependence of the state and real estate capital [Harvey, 1989]. He argues that
the great post-war transformation of the US urban landscape from one
characterised largely by high-density industrial/commercial cities into one
dominated by car-dependent suburban sprawl was driven by fundamental underlying
characteristics of the capitalist dynamic – namely, to avoid or postpone an
inherent tendency towards “overaccumulation”. “Within the US the radical
transformation of metropolitan economies (through the suburbanization of both
manufacturing and residences), as well as the expansion into the South and
West, absorbed vast quantities of excess capital and labour” [Harvey, 1989, p.185].
Whether or
not one subscribes to Harvey’s wider Marxist critique of capitalism’s
propensity to crisis, an overarching model focusing on the confluence of
technological, organisational and policy factors (and the dynamic interactions
between them) to throw light on the evolution of the built environment is
central to understanding the postwar growth of suburbanization. In
technological terms three elements are generally accepted to be key: the
transformation of the car industry by the Fordist system of standardised mass
production based on the production line, and the consequent virtuous cycle
between high consumer demand and falling price; a similar process that was
applied to industrial-scale suburban single-family house construction,
pioneered by the Levitt brothers; and the adoption of the limited-access
highway pioneered by Robert Moses. In policy terms, the Federal State
intervened heavily and consistently in industrial policy, macroeconomic demand
management through fiscal and monetary policy, in social security and
education, the subsidisation through the tax system of private housing, and
through public investment in infrastructure, the key choice from the
perspective of suburbanization being the huge investment in the national
freeway system. Overall, “[t]his arrangement was ‘spatial’ not least because it
entailed a massive physical expansion of cities, and it was a ‘fix’ because it
revived real growth in the national economy.” [Hackworth, 2007, p.78].
Within this
large and complex area of study, I will make a general point before focusing on
three interconnected areas to try to understand the nature of the transition to
a neoliberalized polity in the 1980s. The general point is that “spatial fixes”
can be seen as systemic to human and urban history, and driven by the same
interaction of technological (particularly transport) breakthroughs,
organisational change (particularly the division of labour and trade) and
central government policy. Therefore in the industrial era the massive
expansion of cities in the ‘first wave’ of suburbanisation in Europe and
America along steam railway lines, and later using electric tram networks, as
well as the mid-19th century transformation of the American economy
via the canal- and steam train-driven settlement of the mid-West, can be seen
as earlier transformative templates for the mass car-dependent suburbanization
of the mid-20th century. So while the impact on physical landscape
of car-dependent suburbanization since 1945 is indeed profound, perhaps in a historical
perspective it is merely one (and perhaps not the most significant) of the
transformations that have, and will continue, to shape the urban environment.
The first
aspect to consider is the degree to which the characteristic urban form of
car-dependent sprawl in the US, detached single family homes (on plots and in
neighbourhoods defined by zoning restrictions) was itself the intended result
of federal government planning, developed with the rapid expansion of direct
federal government involvement in the US residential housing and mortgage
markets during the New Deal and massively expanded post-1945. Specifically,
this planning took the form both of broad subsidies for “middle class” home
ownership (notably via the tax-deductibility of mortgage interest payments) and
specific and detailed design parameters embedded in the criteria by which the
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) judged mortgage applications. The FHA was “in
essence, a government created and controlled insurance company functioning to
insure certain kinds of loans made by private lenders, which are deemed to be socially
or economically desirable.” [quoted in Whittemore, 2013, p.622]. It “codified … assumptions [on desirable
residential urban forms] through standards for the mortgages on which they
would provide insurance. Developers wanted to meet these standards so they
could get the FHA insurance, essentially a subsidy as it removed much risk from
lending. Local planners wanted FHA-insured development because it represented
socially desirable and fiscally beneficial growth, and local legislators
quickly saw their case, adjusting zoning accordingly. This had long-term
impacts beyond development directly backed by the FHA because the FHA set the
tone for safe practices throughout the private sector and because FHA-inspired
zoning guided non-FHA-financed developments as well.” [ibid. p.621]. The FHA
criteria for mortgages suitable for federal insurance went beyond zoning by use
to require a specific urban format of generally single-family, low-density
housing by mandating minimum lot sizes and widths, lot coverage, and front and
side setbacks. It “effectively banned construction commonly associated with
traditional urbanism: it eliminated the row-house building type, set buildings
back from the street, and spread out development by requiring open space to
surround buildings on all sides.” [ibid. p.630]
A second factor
was that, once suburbs had developed as coherent entities with their own
localised social identities and political interests, the impulses towards
segregation (by race, income and building use), initially driven by road and
car technology as well as FHA regulations, were increasingly reinforced by
local legal and fiscal activism. As opposed to the “top-down” federally-imposed
criteria of the FHA, there was also a significant “bottom-up” process in US
politics and legislation which also acted to reinforce the single-family house,
exclusionary-zoning version of urban morphology. For example, the framework for
zoning established by the Supreme Court in the 1926 Village of Euclid vs. Amber Realty decision [Batchis, 2009]
explicitly formalised the principle of zoning as a vehicle for social
exclusivity, extending as it did to neighbourhoods the right to protect local
property values by excluding particular housing forms and densities rather than
merely specific industrial and commercial activities. Moreover, local autonomy
in property and sales tax collection incentivised local suburban governments to
maximise tax policies to attract investment and employment in competition with
both the central cities and other suburbs.
The third,
and perhaps decisive factor, was the degree to which expanding economic
opportunities, growing prosperity and the evolving political consciousness of
an increasingly middle class electorate, in no small part the outcome of
decades of successful Keynesian intervention in infrastructure and housing
markets, itself fed back into a backlash against the perceived failures and
inadequacies of Keynesian planning. In her work comparing those developed
countries in which radical neoliberal political movements were electorally
successful (the US and UK) with those in which it remained a marginal influence
(Germany and France), Prasad concludes that “the main story of Thatcherism, as
of Reaganism, is of politicians mobilizing an increasingly prosperous majority
that had moved across the class divide of … adversarial policies” [Prasad,
2006, p.100]. There were of course substantial tactical differences between the
US and UK in terms of mobilization of electoral support for neoliberal policies
(tax reduction and anti-welfare slogans in the US; opposition to the perceived
excesses of trade union power and the privatisation of council housing and
nationalised industries in the UK) as well as very divergent spatial and
political-economic structures (decentralized, suburbanized in the US; centralized
municipal-socialist in the UK). She concludes nevertheless that “[f]ree market,
or neoliberal, policies did not result from any pragmatic or rational analysis
showing that they were the best way to manage the crisis … Rather, they arose
where the political-economic structure was adversarial. States in which the
political-economic structure defined labour and capital as adversaries and the
middle class and the poor in opposition to one another … provided the potential
to ally the majority of voters with market-friendly policies” [p.38] … “When
the majority of citizens become taxpayers and move out of the working class …
support for redistribution to the poor … is fragile. If politics is
particularly competitive, politicians will take advantage of this fragility in
their quest for power.” [p.39]
CONCLUSION:
in many respects, the redistributive aims of the Keynesian managerial era of
urban planning in the US and UK (admirable though they were) contained the
seeds of their own demise. The Keynesian “spatial fix” to the Great Depression,
manifested particularly in the US by the technologies of car-dependent suburban
sprawl and by the federal-level planning of the suburban form through, for
example, FHA insurance criteria, mortgage tax subsidies, and freeway construction,
provided the spatial context for a new, decentralised suburban politics
dominated by a middle-class, property-owning, aspirational (and largely white)
electorate that was easily mobilised against explicitly redistributive policy. In
the UK, a similar, though less spatially-distinct, process took place as
council tenants voted for a Conservative party that enabled them to buy the
houses in which they had lived as subsidised tenants.
It is
arguable therefore, that explicitly redistributive goals are fundamentally
inimical to successful long-term planning in cities. Cities are “merely” the
physical manifestation of the agglomeration of individual citizens who choose
close connectivity for the economic and social benefits that connectivity
brings, plus the technical infrastructure that makes such agglomeration
possible. Even more than nations, cities need to competitively attract, retain
and develop citizens capable of maintaining a flexible, resilient and
high-value economy, and willing to pay the taxes necessary to build and
maintain the city’s infrastructure. Individuals in a democratic society can opt
out of a city, either to another city or to the suburbs, whether the underlying
transport technology is cars, streetcars, railways or canals. Typically, a
downward spiral of decline was driven by the collapse of concentrated nodes of
heavy industry (cars in Detroit, shipbuilding on the Clyde), loss of employment
and tax base, collapse of housing values, middle-class flight to the suburbs,
population decline and further inability to fund infrastructure. In many cases,
it is hard to imagine how cities could have overcome such profound economic shocks
as the decline of the Detroit car industry or Scottish shipbuilding; or massive
demographic waves such as the movement of population to the US South and West;
or the post-WWII migration of rural African-Americans to northern industrial
inner cities. In many cases, therefore, long-term population decline is
probably inevitable and “planning” should be geared to accepting that fact, and
mitigating the impact.
In the
Keynesian managerial view (to be a bit polemical) such fundamental economic and
social change is seen as a “failure of planning”, to be combatted by even more
“planning”, as if the eternal competitiveness of car or shipbuilding industries
that underpinned a city’s glory days could be ensured by city (or if not city,
then national) Keynesian planners. In general terms, planning in cities will
perhaps be more successful if, rather than aiming for redistribution, it
pursues “universalist” goals on the model of France and Germany in Prasad’s
study: bipartisan commitment to decent and affordable public infrastructure
such as schooling, security and transport, some degree of legislative
protection for housing tenants and structures to allow new building, as well as
a commitment to promoting good design and urban form: basic good city
management in other words. Not difficult in theory; harder in practice.
REFERENCES
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(2009). “Enabling urban sprawl: revisiting the Supreme Court’s seminal zoning
decision Euclid v. Ambler in the 21st
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and Theodore, N. (2005). “Neoliberalism and the urban condition.” City
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(2011). Triumph of the City: how our greatest invention makes us richer,
smarter, greener, healthier and happier. The Penguin Press.
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(2007). The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American
Urbanism. Cornell University Press.
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