For the Symposium on Richard Schragger, City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (2016).
I want to thank Richard, Scott, Lee, Nestor,
Kathleen, and Audrey for their generous and insightful posts about City Power
(and Jack Balkin for agreeing to publish them on Balkinization). In this short
reply I will be unable to do their comments justice. My goal is simply to add
one more reflection with the hope that readers will view these collective
comments as an invitation to pay increased attention to cities. As I argue in City Power, cities should be at the
center of our collective political, constitutional, economic, and legal
thinking.
A number of commentators read City Power against the backdrop of the recent election results—and
how could they not? One irony of the
election is that Donald Trump—a man who grew up in New York and made his
fortune building there—ran a campaign that was shot through with anti-urbanism.
County-level election return maps show how stark is the geographic and cultural
divide between city dwellers and those who live in rural and exurban
places. Richard, Nestor, and Scott all
point with some urgency to a divided nation—one that seems to pit
“cosmopolitans” in big cities against “traditionalists” who live in less dense
and less globally connected places.
The phenomenon of blue cities in red states is in
large part a product of residential racial segregation combined with
legislative gerrymandering. The divide between failing, rustbelt cities in the
Upper Midwest and prospering “new economy” cities on the coasts seems to be a
feature of globalization—though we should be wary of resorting to abstractions
when specific national policies have aided and abetted that divide. What is
shared across this political/economic geography is rising economic inequality coupled
with a palpable dissatisfaction with the status quo.
City
Power argues that cities are able to address economic
inequality, much more so than conventional economic theory would predict. Whether
they are permitted to do so is
another question altogether. We have seen how red states have clamped-down on
municipal efforts to adopt minimum wage ordinances or other labor-friendly
regulations, not to mention local LGBT anti-discrimination laws. The preemption
rush will only intensify as Trump challenges other city initiatives, whether
environmental or economic. As Nestor observes, Trump has already threatened
“sanctuary cities” with sanctions—the withholding of federal funds—if they do
not comply with his deportation mandate. Defenders of local power will need to
invoke NFIB v. Sebelius to fend off financially
“coercive” national mandates.
I have always been wary of centralized power even
when it was deployed in my favored policy direction. City Power adopts the old Brandeisian notion that nation-states are
too large for effective democratic governance. The Brexit vote and the American
presidential election seem to be a reaction to a global democracy deficit.
There is a perception that power is shifting away from democratic institutions
and toward transnational corporations and centralized bureaucracies. But, as
Kathleen so perceptively argues, we have forgotten how to tend to our local
communities—we have failed to teach our students the importance of local
institutions. This may make us vulnerable to charismatic strongmen who promise to
fix what we can’t fix in our own backyards. As Robert Dahl famously observed, “City-building
is one of the most obvious incapacities of Americans.”
Cities are agglomeration economies—Lee calls this
the “magnetic city” (a truly felicitous phrase)—and spatial economies will chug
along no matter what. The “legal city,” by contrast, has been and continues to
be disempowered by (1) state-based federalism (chapter 3 of City Power) and (2) the cross-border
constitutional rules and government policies that encourage footloose capital (chapter
4). As Audrey points out, local economic development is about “capital
accumulation for some at the expense of others.” The same perhaps could be said
of the entire global economy—an argument that those who advocate a “right
to the city” have long been making. President-elect
Trump has been the beneficiary of local economic development races (in New
York, Atlantic City, and elsewhere), collecting subsidies for his real estate
projects even as he now rails against the “rigged” economic system.
City
Power can be read as even more important for progressives
seeking a post-election site for political and territorial resistance (as
Nestor argues). Resort to principles of
federalism or localism is always the strategy for national political losers. One
can also read City Power skeptically,
pointing to the failures and inequalities inherent in the global urbanizing
project and reemphasizing the need for national anti-poverty and pro-labor
policies (as Scott tentatively suggests). On this score, smug liberals
ensconced in their gleaming Trump Towers in fast-gentrifying cities are
dangerously out-of-touch, pushing rents higher even as they advocate for municipal
plastic bag bans. The recent urban resurgence could simply be a reflection of
the economic processes that have always divided us by class and race (see Richard’s
post). Whatever redistribution the city does is just a scrap left by a global economy
that invariably produces inequality.
I am not particularly sanguine about the direction
of national or global politics, but I am hopeful about the direction of city
politics. Here I share Jane Jacobs’s sometimes naïve belief in the city’s
capacity to build the middle-class. New Deal-style urban liberalism helped turn
immigrants into citizens. Municipal services—clean water, decent schools,
subways, and hospitals—paved the way for working people to share in the
country’s post-war prosperity.
I also want to heed Frederic Howe’s 1905 call to
treat the city as “the hope of democracy”—asserted in the midst of the machine
era, when all around him intellectuals and policymakers were arguing that
municipal government was a conspicuous failure. It was not true then and it is
not true now. In 1967, another time of crisis for the American city, Dahl
argued that cities were the optimally-sized democratic institutions and the
places where all our best ideas should be brought to bear on the country’s worst
social and economic problems. We face serious challenges today. I think that cities
are capable of addressing those challenges, if we just let them.
Richard Schragger is the Perre Bowen Professor and
Joseph C. Carter, Jr. Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia.
You can reach him by e-mail at schragger@virginia.edu.