For the Symposium on Richard Schragger, City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (2016).
I
think it’s safe to say that, even if he didn’t intend to, Schragger wrote City Power for people like me – folks who
are highly educated, have higher than average incomes, who care about and more
than likely live in cities, and who more than likely voted for Hillary Clinton
for president. And between the time that I started writing this review – on
Monday, November 7 – and now – on November 11, as I am finishing it – my
liberal big city bubble has been burst, and Schragger’s book has taken on a
somewhat different meaning.
Before
I explain how I think the meaning of Schragger’s book has changed, let me say
that I think overall it is a great achievement. It brings together a broad and
diverse body of scholarship to make a new and important argument regarding the
redistributive potential of cities (mostly in Chapters 5 and 6, which I see as
the real core of the book). Even if it did not make a new argument, the wealth
of scholarship that Schragger weaves together would still make this a valuable
contribution.
I
am guessing that the title of Schragger’s book is a response to Paul Peterson’s
1981 book City Limits (and here let
me add the shallow critique that Schragger could have taken a lesson from
Peterson and not used a subtitle – “Urban Governance in a Global Age” doesn’t
add much and is a bit misleading). Peterson’s book stirred controversy in
urbanist academic circles because it proposed – during a time that the American
city was one of the primary subjects of the social sciences – that urban
politics simply wasn’t very interesting. Since cities had to compete with other
cities for labor and capital they couldn’t realistically pursue redistributive
policies, and since the developmental policies that were designed to attract
labor and capital benefited all city residents (and here Peterson, reflecting
the conservatism of his time made an explicit “trickle down” argument) they
were largely consensual and not generally subject to debate. City politics thus
focused on the relatively uninteresting patronage struggles regarding who got
employed to perform basic housekeeping functions such as policing, fire
protection, and picking up the trash.
Schragger’s
primary argument is that cities’ fortunes rise and fall as a result of larger social
forces over which they have little control, and thus the traditional argument
that cities are constrained – or “disciplined” by the marketplace of
municipalities – simply doesn’t hold. In fact, city-level policies in pursuit
of development (such as business improvement districts, property tax abatements,
or tax increment financing) are more often the effect rather than the cause of
economic growth. And the big development projects that city officials and
growth interests so often like to pursue often end up being notably bad
investments, as many others have argued, most recently perhaps Heywood Sanders
in Convention Center Follies (2014).
If
city-level policies don’t actually have much of an effect on city fortunes,
cities are thus free to pursue whatever policies they like, including
redistributive policies – or, at the very least, you can’t blame redistributive
policies for the failing fortunes of some cities. There is in this argument an
echo of Peterson’s argument that urban politics is ultimately not very
interesting. That is of course not the direction Schragger intends to go, and
so as to not go there, he has to show that in fact the relatively limited
impact of current city policies could be made more impactful. In this I think
he has mixed success.
Schragger
argues that, since cities do better in periods when agglomeration becomes a
more important factor in production – as with the “meds and eds” and other
high-end service industries that have caused at least some cities to “resurge”
– and capital that depends for its value on agglomeration is by definition
relatively immobile, the current urban resurgence is a uniquely opportune time
for cities to pursue redistribution, as indeed some have. Schragger examines in
particular the use in cities of labor regulation through land use policy,
community benefit agreements, and mandatory wage floors. He extends this to
imagine cities that engage in import substitution strategies to become even
less reliant on exports and mobile capital. He concludes that the agglomeration
economies that have led to the resurgence of cities creates at least the
potential for more autonomous cities that might grow a new middle class and
foster a richer form of democratic participation.
And
then we elected a new president, which in some respects has revealed cities’
resurgence as one end of a tremendous political, class, and racial divide
between the densest parts of metropolitan areas and the rest of the country.
And under the incoming administration, and with the current national dialogue,
it does not look particularly likely to me that bridges are going to be built
across these interlocking chasms in the near future. If cities do indeed
currently have the opportunity to gain more autonomy, I hope that autonomy
leads to new waves of municipal consolidations and annexations, giving us
bigger cities with greater influence in their state legislatures, and once
again becoming important forces in national politics.
Richardson Dilworth is Professor of Politics and Director, Center for Public Policy at Drexel University. You can reach him by e-mail at rd43 at drexel.edu