For the Symposium on Richard Schragger, City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (2016).
Where does a city’s power come from? What does it consist of? How can it best be deployed? These questions lie at the heart of Rich Schragger’s intriguing and powerful (pun intended!) new book. In this post, I will suggest that we cannot understand city power without recognizing that the term “city” carries two very different meanings. Both of these meanings relate tightly to Schragger’s analysis, which can be usefully cast as navigating the space between them.
First,
a city is a legal entity, a municipal corporation. On this meaning, a given metropolitan area
contains not just one city, nor even one city and “its suburbs” but rather many
cities clumped together in close geographic proximity. This vision of the city emphasizes
multiplicity and local autonomy, and it lies at the heart of Charles Tiebout’s
hypothesis
that residents shop for jurisdictions much as they shop for other products,
choosing the jurisdiction in which they will reside from the smorgasbord of nearby
local offerings. The city, on this account, is a product, a choice, a basis for
sorting.
Second,
however, a city is a magnetic force, a place in which agglomeration economies
and diseconomies are constantly generated. When ordinary people (as opposed to local
government law scholars) refer to cities, they often mean metropolitan areas
more broadly, using the central city’s name either as a popular identifier or synecdoche
for the area as a whole, or as the
city that exerts centripetal force over the metro area. Either way, this idea of the city emphasizes
connectedness, interdependence, and the attraction of urban centers. It
explains why people are choosing to
cluster together geographically -- for employment, idea generation, social
interactions, education, shopping, entertainment, and more.
These
two versions of the city, “the legal city” and “the magnetic city” coexist in
some tension (as do the sorting and agglomeration processes with which they are
respectively associated, as David
Schleicher has argued).
The legal city gets its market-segmenting
power from the state. The magnetic city gets its power from market forces that
compel people and firms to cluster together in urban centers. These two source of power often operate at
different scales, and they face different threats. The magnetic city may draw people to a metro
area, but they will settle in a legal city that offers a particular package of
taxes, amenities, land use policies, and so on.
So strong is the power of the magnetic city that residents and firms
might accept certain personally disadvantageous policies—such as redistribution
in favor of others—in order to enjoy large agglomeration benefits. But the magnetic city is not a political
entity, or at least not one with jurisdiction over the entire area in which
agglomeration economies can be enjoyed.
Multiple legal cities offer the chance to unbundle the experience of
agglomeration from certain related costs, including redistributive ones.
This
may be changing. One way to understand
the resurgence of the central cities is that the kinds of agglomeration
benefits that are most important today may have less to do with proximity to
physical production centers (to which one might commute) and more to do with
consumption of experiences and production of ideas (that might require a more immersive
presence in a particular portion of the urbanscape). If this were so, the power of the magnetic
city might be leveraged to achieve social goals that have eluded fragmented
local governments.
There
are some obstacles, however. One is the
politics that influence land use policies and can impede growth. As Bill Fischel has
hypothesized,
suburbs are politically dominated by “homevoters” who are keenly focused on
protecting the value of their homes, and whose risk aversion about their single
largest asset may cause them to reflexively oppose even positive value gambles
on growth. They may also be inclined to suppress housing supply to increase the
value of their own homes. Finding ways
to reduce the
stakes
that homeowners have in their homes is one alternative. Others might be housing policies that operate
at a regional level to override supply constraints, or broader land use reforms
to counter the
antigrowth forces that can dominate even within central cities.
Another
obstacle that Schragger usefully underscores is the differential mobility of
certain individuals and firms relative to others. The magnetic city has a firmer hold on some
of its citizens than others. Beyond
that, people may develop their own personal ties and networks that embed them
in the community and make mobility less attractive. Efforts to attract and
retain firms and residents can unravel if the core sources of attraction in the
city, such as employment opportunities, flee or fail to enter in the first
place. There is a great deal of path dependence here, as Schragger emphasizes:
agglomeration builds on itself, as do failures of agglomeration.
How
to overcome these challenges to city magnetism?
Here, we might seek insight from some of the work now being done on the
nature of agglomeration—and especially the role of interacting clusters of
firms in generating benefits (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Of course, clusters cannot form unless there
is both the physical potential for complementary uses to assemble together, and
a land use regime that permits those complementary land uses at appropriate
densities. In other words, there may be a certain lumpiness to city magnetism,
and a stickiness that impedes its realization.
Addressing that stickiness may require rethinking land use controls, and
perhaps even the
nature of property rights.
Empowering
cities to leverage rather than undermine the attractive force of agglomeration
is a core challenge that is becoming increasingly pressing. By illuminating how and why city power
matters, Schragger’s timely book offers an important entry point into this crucial
enterprise.