February 25. City as Polity and State: Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of Power and Fragmentation
Workshop: Toby Irving and Adam Sachs
Theory
John Mollenkopf, 1992. “How to Study Urban Power,” chapter 2 in A Phoenix in the Ashes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rachel Weber, 2002. “Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment,” Antipode 34:3 (June): 518-540.
Margaret Weir and Desmond King, 2018. “The Anxieties of Local Democracy in an Era of Rising Inequality,” Workshop on Political Geography and Inequality, Watson Institute at Brown University, November 27.
Dolores Hayden, 1997. “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” chapter 9 in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Approaches to the Case Study: Neighborhood Commercial Districts
Michael B. Teitz, 1989. “Neighborhood Economics: Local Communities and Regional Markets,” Economic Development Quarterly 3(2): 111-122.
Stacey A. Sutton, 2010. “Rethinking Commercial Revitalization: A Neighborhood Small Business Perspective,” Economic Development Quarterly 24(4):352–371.
Lisa Servon, Robert Fairlie, Blaise Rastello, and Amber Seely, 2010. “The Five Gaps Facing Small and Microbusiness Owners: Evidence from New York City.” Economic Development Quarterly 24(2): 126-142.
Rachel Meltzer and Jenny Schuetz, 2012. “Bodegas or Bagel Shops? Neighborhood Differences in Retail and Household Services,” Economic Development Quarterly 26(1):73–94.
Workshop
We will discuss how neighborhoods fit into the larger borough, city, regional, state, and national political jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks.
Race, Architecture, Activism, Gender:
I wanted to alert you to three events in the last week of February. This is a set of rich offerings, three in a row, extraordinary even in our city which is rich in them:
Tuesday, February 26, Museum of Arts and Design, 5:30 pm: “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities,” directed by Stanley Nelson, film screening and panel discussion, moderated by Elizabeth Alexander, director of Andrew Mellon Foundation. Nelson directed the acclaimed documentary on the Black Panthers.
Wednesday, February 27, 6:00 pm: Bard Graduate Center: “Race Work Made Material: An Archaeology of African American Women’s Social Activism in the Twentieth Century,” Anna S. Agbe-Davies will present at the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Seminar on New York and American Material Culture. Archaeological fieldwork at two sites (the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls, in Chicago, and the childhood home of rights activist Pauli Murray, in Durham, NC) provides new insights into settings where race, gender, and civic activism are front and center. The former was a charitable institution run by African American women to aid others navigating the Great Migration northward. The latter housed the multigenerational family that profoundly shaped Murray’s sense of justice and human rights. This presentation brings together material and archival evidence to consider the circumstances under which ordinary people, day in and day out, responded to the challenges posed by the patriarchal and racist ideologies of their day.
Thursday, February 28, 6:00 pm: “Harlem School 1970,” Screening and talk, CCNY Documentary Forum, Shepard Hall, part of Made in Harlem: Class of ’68. This film was made by a school teacher in Harlem, 1970. I’ve seen clips, but not the entire film; it gives a unique and important window into the everyday lives of students in Harlem, teachers, and their environments in 1970.
I’ve registered for all of them—urge you to do so ASAP if you’re interested in attending.
Here’s the workshop presentation schedule:
Class 4, Toby Irving, Adam Sachs
Class 5, Rebecca Krisel
Class 6, Joanna Dressel, Shan Shan Li
Class 7, Caroline House
Class 8, William Chan
Class 9, Emily Holloway
Class 10, TBA
Class 11, Ally Smith
Class 12, Xui Zhong
Class 13, Chris Ryan
Class 14, Ryan Brunette
Hi everyone – hope you have a great long weekend. Looking forward to class next week. In the meantime, here are some of my thoughts regarding the Amazon decision, also responding to Christopher’s blog post on the home page.
As we reflect on Amazon’s retreat from bringing HQ2 to LIC, I have a few questions spinning around in my head. I wonder if there has been a shift in how we think about and demand corporations’ responsibility in sustainable and equitable development in cities. Will it now be that more often going forward, activists and locally based organizations will be able to uphold a set of conditions on the proposal’s impact on housing affordability, environmental impact, and transportation before there is an approval? If this is an example of the push against uneven decision making from bringing Amazon to New York, what can holding these corporations accountable look like, for those that are already here? More broadly, capitalism in the U.S. has a track-record of blind decision-making to celebrate and embrace development/profit at all costs, and the activism and protest considering a host of other community needs and rationale, in spite of the prospective job opportunities, demonstrate that economics alone isn’t enough anymore.
I really appreciate Christopher’s comparison of the usage of “community” and the misaligned definition of who/what the term is actually referring to. It seems like the holistic purity of the term is used as a vessel through which the ideal of collaboration in urban decision making is held up and aspired to, demanded even, yet rarely ever met.
This post is in response to Amazon’s announcement that it is no longer going to build its HQ2 in Long Island City. In addition to Christopher’s comment about the misuse of the term community and Alise’s point about accountability for powerful of corporations, another dimension that sticks out for me is the lack of recognition of the strength of NYC’s labor unions and community coalitions. It is surprising that Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, who should understand the political landscape of their constituents, did not engage various and powerful stakeholders in the process of making the bid and negotiating the deal ahead of time. It is likely that Amazon may never have chosen New York if it had to face these coalitions in the first place. But it would have saved NY and Amazon the embarrassment of a deal falling through the cracks had all stakeholders been brought to the table.
Amazon will be better suited to move to a city that is in need of jobs and where the labor unions are weaker.
– Rebecca Krisel
Week 4: Where are the people in urban political theory?
As Professor John Mollenkopf states in A Phoenix in The Ashes: “[The] tendency to trivialize politics removes a way to explain why outcomes vary even though capitalism is constant” (36). This statement speaks volumes. As Mollenkopf discusses in the chapter “How to Study Urban Power,” theorists of urban politics — including pluralists, constructivists, and neoliberals — have tended to underplay the importance of politics in the governance of cities. While the forces of capitalism can often feel all-encompassing, especially in cities, it is critical to remember that democratic governments are not just subject to market forces but also to political accountability (such as through contested elections). While Paul Peterson argues that economic forces constrain urban governments that lead cities to compete for business capital through laissez faire neoliberal policies, his argument makes the government seem devoid of power – which is obviously not the case. Similarly, constructivist theorists perceive city government as “systematically favor[ing] business interests” (34). Though it is important to consider that the constraints on the legal authority of the city to raise tax revenue (largely limited to property taxes in the U.S.) places an imperative on cities to be an attractive place for businesses, these constraints cannot become an excuse for limited political intervention.
Another dimension that is missing from these urban political theories is a consideration for the residents who constitute and create the fabric of the city. These macro-level theories about politics vs. market forces seem to forget that the city is not just a political unit, but also a place where people live and create culture. As Dolores Hayden says in “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space:” “People’s experiences of the urban landscape intertwine the sense of place and the politics of space” (133). For the past five years, I have lived in, or adjacent to, neighborhoods in Brooklyn that are predominantly Caribbean. Every year on Labor Day weekend, Eastern Parkway shuts down in celebration of the West Indian Day parade. Given that these largely Caribbean neighborhoods such as Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts, Flatbush, and East New York are currently facing soaring rents causing the displacement of members of their community, the parade is at once a cultural celebration and a political statement. It is a way for these communities to say: We are still here and we are a part of this city.
In thinking about Amazon’s recent reversal on its decision to build a second HQ in Long Island City (LIC), I was reminded of this article in Curbed (see below) describing how weeks after the initial announcement local residents made pilgrimages to the waterfront to photograph the old warehouses and the abandoned remnants of the Water’s Edge restaurant along the Anable Basin. As an outsider to LIC who doesn’t find industrial landscapes aesthetically pleasing, I thought it was peculiar how attached people were to the Basin. But after reading Hayden’s piece, it’s clear this is an issue of memories, space, and politics.
Who has the political right to change spaces that are filled with cultural memories?
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/29/18117309/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-new-york-anable-basin-photo-essay
– Rebecca Krisel
Although I agree with the primacy of politics and governance over economic determinism, I think the most interesting cases emerge by teasing out the peculiar and highly specific ways in which politics are inflected by social and economic forces. Or, to quote from the epigraph in “How to Study Urban Political Power,” “Power…is the capacity to shape and take advantage of a set of arrangements that will produce an ongoing flow of favorable actions.” Weber’s article on mobilizing land use potential to achieve ends in all three realms (political, economic, social) offers a solid general foundation for analyzing urban change. In the case of Anable Basin and Long Island City (though this may be a moot point soon enough), the state government was entitled to override city land use policies (ULURP and community review) through the use of a GPP (General Project Plans). The land around Anable Basin that was selected as the site of HQ2 and owned by Plaxall is zoned M1-4 – light manufacturing. In order to redevelop the site for commercial office space, the land would have to be “upzoned” to commercial.
But New York City’s land use review process, however problematic it may be in practice, still serves the vital symbolic function of requiring formal community input, community board approval, borough president approval, and City Council approval. This provides numerous opportunities for intervention and input. Empire State Development (New York State’s economic development agency), as the primary conduit for Amazon’s bid process, can legally circumvent public review and scrutiny of local land use decisions through the mechanisms of GPP. Weber’s observation that obsolescence is often socially constructed to achieve a desirable rent gap for the property.
In this case, the low-rise, low-density manufacturing and warehouse buildings, perhaps still retaining their use value, were deemed “obsolete” for Anable Basin’s transition to a postindustrial economy. Rebecca pointed out with the photo essay on the area, there are significant affective attachments to this place, despite their deteriorating exchange (and perhaps even use) values. It’s not surprising that Cuomo wanted to avoid public land use review; ULURP is a famously contentious and politically polarizing process. Community advocacy groups and anti-displacement coalitions (among others) have become increasingly savvy over the last few decades in intervening in land use review and organizing opposition to top-down restructuring efforts. The efforts of groups like these, in tandem with labor groups and political allies, created a unique “working alliance” to oppose the executive plans for HQ2. I’m not familiar enough with the minutiae of the protest groups’ backgrounds or visibility nor do I fully understand what the precise tipping point for Amazon’s decision was, but I think examining the controversies over the land use process in Long Island City (there’s another, larger rezoning underway right now too) may reveal a rich example of how political alliances are forged over land use changes.
DCP’s website on GPP: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/about/cpc-recommendations.page
LIC rezoning: https://citylimits.org/2018/04/23/map-near-potential-long-island-city-rezoning-fate-of-waterfront-draws-concern/
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/long-island-city-core/long-island-city-core.page
Professor Mollenkopf posted an interesting question in the article “How to study urban political power?” Can “urban politics” be the independent explanation in urban studies? For me, urban politicians might not be the only key actors in urban process, but the conceptualization and political perspectives of negotiation and coalition do help me understand “how city become possible”. Through this week’s readings, I’m interested in two main questions which also related to my concern about Amazon issue.
1. accumulation or legitimation
It’s always difficult to balance these two, as “the conflict between attracting electoral support and extracting revenues from private investment”. For the politicians, who say “yes” to Amazon ? who say “no”? what are their “reasons”? Of course, we cannot simply categorize the supporters as market-centered, and the opponents as political-centered, but pro-growth and social justice seems to main argument in the urban renewal process.
2. “abstracting” space or meaningful place
For private investment, “space is more malleable and potentially more valuable to investors when it is empty”, “land that is devoid of improvements is more recognizable to the abstracting, utilitarian logic of capital markets” (Weber, 2010). Amazon, as the kid spoiled by political entrepreneurs, doesn’t want to deeply communicate with local communities. “If higher degrees of local knowledge are required, either profits will have to be higher in order to compensate for these inflexibilities” (Clark and O’Connor, 1997). But for the city and its people, the influence would brought by the economic decision is not only the number of jobs and tax creation, but also the social, racial and ecological influences.
It’s hard to say whether it’s a victory or failure, to label the different opinions. But NYC as the most diverse city in the world, shows the possibility to go beyond pluralist or structuralist, the way to talk about “dominant political coalition” .
This week’s readings brought up quite a few connections for me.Regarding the development in LIC, largely a product of the Koch administration and shift toward neoliberal development across the city. As Rebecca reflects on in her discussion of the “attachment” to industrial sights or to untraditionally sentimental spaces across the city, I am thinking about the limited perspective on alternative values of space in the city, and how “value” is highly racialized and class-based, and has been applied in situations that explicitly devalue the lives and communities of the working poor, POC, and (im)migrants, all in favor of the (white) corporate state.
Connecting this week’s readings to the failed Amazon site, one of our fellow GC colleagues recently wrote this article (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/23/amazon-new-york-headquarters-corporate-power-balance?fbclid=IwAR0emFUFi1mzA7M3pO15OYytierhICh-WKHzdEGLzOBmKBBA5wFS5WEKZXQ), and I think it also highlights shifts in the real estate market and the tension between urban citizens, corporations, and the state, with rising frustrations over the “real estate state.” The article also gets at the sentiment Weber introduces, in her discussion of the justification of urban “blight”: “blight means defining an neighborhood that cannot effectively fight back, which is either an eyesore or is well located for some particularly construction project that important interests wish to build (Weber 528). LIC’s response to Amazon demonstrates that while the deindustrialization of the space in a sense was defining the neighborhood as ripe for continued redevelopment, it did not fit the prerequisite that the neighborhood not “fight back.”
On a related note, in one of my jobs as an educator at the Tenement Museum in the LES, we often think about the 1930s-1950s bulldozer approach and slum clearance mechanisms applied to neighborhoods that served (im)migrants and the poor, leading to street widening and stalled developments of the 30+ acres intended for the Seward Park Extension housing, that is now — 50 years later — being developed into the luxury Essex Crossing development (https://essexcrossingnyc.com/about), each of its three main phases in varying states of completion. While there was an extensive process of community input and it will be 50% affordable of the 1000 units of housing, the motivations and market for the new development is clear (with condo sales ranging from $1.6-7 million). Only now that the neighborhood has been marked as “safe” for redevelopment after decades of displacement and disinvestment despite resistance and active “place-keeping” measures by long-time residents, and politicians actively preventing anything, specifically affordable housing, from being built on the cleared land after the demolition and subsequent financial crisis/austerity measures coming out of the 1970s.
Transitions from white rule in Atlanta and Durban
– Ryan Brunette
Some of my more coherent thoughts these last few days have had to do with certain divergent developments in the United States and South Africa, here considered through the cases of Atlanta and Durban.
Margaret Weir and Desmond King offer a useful overview of efforts by white Americans to maintain local electoral majorities, and therefore control over local regulations and revenues, in face of the growing demographic and electoral strength of people of color. They argue that an old strategy of “defensive localism” has been superseded, especially from the 1990s, by a new strategy of “segmented localism.” In the post-war years, white minoritization in the great cities led to their widespread flight into the suburbs, the incorporation of suburban municipalities there, and their curtailment of in-migration of non-white people by restrictive land use and other, often explicitly racist, regulatory mechanisms. More recently, Weir and King argue, the institutions of defensive localism have been eroded, explicit racism has been restrained, whites are increasingly threatened with minoritization even in the suburbs. They have often responded by establishing private governments for the provision of services, in the form of say homeowners’ associations, or by using municipal incorporation procedures to secede from wider municipalities and counties.
In the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, between 1990 and 2017, generally wealthier and whiter residents orchestrated eight such secessions. In 2005, when Sandy Springs was incorporated out of Fulton County, Vincent Fort, State Senator for parts of the area, declared that “You’re going to have this different tax distribution that is going to have an impact… That’s nothing but apartheid.” (in Weir and King, 2018: 16) The comparison is apposite. It is also worth noting that the evolution of local government in Atlanta Metro bears the imprint of the relatively incomplete success of the civil rights movement in transforming local government in Georgia and the United States. A pertinent point of contrast is the Durban Metropolitan Region, abutting the Indian Ocean, in South Africa.
The Georgia Constitution fixes a maximum for the number of counties, but allows consolidations, divisions, and boundary adjustments by the passing of a general law followed by a vote within the affected counties. Municipal incorporation is easier. The Constitution enables municipal incorporation by local act of the General Assembly. Georgia Code § 36-31 requires only that the resident population of the proposed municipality be 200 persons and per square mile and that 60% of the total acreage is divided into lots and tracts and used for commercial, industrial, institutional, recreational, or governmental purposes. Although the City of Atlanta has been under black majority rule since the 1970s, black people have remained a minority in the State of Georgia, which has exercised largely untrammeled powers in granting relief to separatist demands for municipal home rule in the broader Atlanta Metro. As Weir and King argue for the United States as a whole, and as shown also in their statistics for Atlanta, this has militated against the advance of redistributive local government.
Durban Metro’s post-apartheid experience is the reverse. The South African Constitution, 1996, provides for municipalities covering the whole of the territory of the Republic. It requires national legislation establishing a regulatory body and the rules and principles by which it is to determine the various categories of municipalities and demarcate their boundaries. The Constitution lays the groundwork for technocratic and redistributive municipal determinations and demarcations, requiring that the regulatory body be institutionally independent and that it make decisions on grounds of equitability and sustainability in the provision of municipal services. The resulting Municipal Demarcation Board was early politicized in accordance with the Lenin-inspired realpolitik of South Africa’s African National Congress. Its decision remained, however, under threat of adjudication by independently-minded courts and the Board’s members were broadly committed to the transformative principles laid out in the Constitution and consequent legislation, principles which dovetailed with a real interest in breaking the white political hold over South African local government.
In Durban Metro, white politics initially reacted to these developments by attempting to carve off from the expansive metropolitan government then taking shape. In 1994, for instance, the Mayor of the Borough of Westville commissioned a feasibility study into, and sought to mobilize wider support for, the idea of Westville remaining a separate municipality, in anticipation of rising taxes and to maintain the borough’s “local character,” a euphemism for its whiteness. The movement, accompanied by similar efforts across white local governments along the metropolitan region’s outer west, was quickly contained by the now black controlled provincial and national governments. Ultimately, rather than following the pattern of Atlanta’s segmentation, what was in 2001 named the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality amalgamated 65 distinct, racially-segregated, and territorially distinct local government bodies into a single metropolitan government, covering an area that was mostly rural . White flight – from property rates increases that in some cases were as high as 700% in FY 1997 alone – was rendered practically impossible.
Maps 1 and 2 below show the very distinctive political geographic forms that Atlanta and Durban Metros have taken.
The City of Atlanta has been at the center of efforts to understand urban politics. Whatever the political intentions of the City, however, this remains an important way in which the City remained dominated by Georgia.
______
The maps aren’t ideal for various reasons, but they’re the best that I could find on the internet in a limited amount of time.
Map 1: Municipalities and counties of the Atlanta Metropolitan Area.
https://imgur.com/6byIXAL
Map 2: The eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, with major place names.
https://imgur.com/a/X14MaKf
I wanted to include a brief follow-up to my post about Amazon and LIC because I do feel that one of the readings provided some answers and clarification to my post on defining community regarding economic development. Teitz (1989) describes the neighborhood as an economic unit and describes both growth advocates (p. 113-114) and “proponents of neighborhood and community economic develop” (p. 114). For the first group of growth advocates, their emphasis is on economic growth, increasing business, sales, purchasing power, and property values for residents of an area. The second group might include some of these components (perhaps through hiring locals), but their emphasis is on increasing equity in the local population. Focus is placed on unemployed and underemployed populations, grassroots neighborhood organizations, local businesses, and community development corporations. While both groups may be focused on economic improvement, the nature of their conversations and the position of their outlook is quite different.
Rebecca’s blog post about the coalitions in New York City affecting the deal made me think of Mollenkopf (1992) and his description of how a dominant political coalition functions and can be conceptualized as including both structural and pluralist components. Such coalitions serve simultaneously as public and private sector actors, as well as representing their constituency. They become a “working alliance among different interests that can win elections [… and] secure the cooperation […] from other public and private power” (p. 38). Perhaps Amazon had not considered the complex political landscape in NYC fully prior to making their initial decision to come to LIC.
I also wanted to follow-up on Ally’s blog post from this week describing the development of Essex Crossing on the LES. Weber (2002) describes the function of blight in fueling economic redevelopment, often in contrast to the socioeconomic nature of the area and with justification for destruction of existing property regardless if it is truly obsolete in function. With a history of urban renewal projects in the 20th century, I do think it presents an interesting case study where the ‘renewal’ project manifests over half a century after the clearing of the area. Such a delay presents many questions for both the political and economic gains that such a renewal project can generate, even on a long temporal scale. Furthermore, when considering the way in which communities very rapidly evolve and change in a city-context, the temporal scale also brings up questions of what communities are affected by such a long-term redevelopment project.
-Christopher Ryan
Mollenkopf accurately chronicles how the Koch administration gave rise to a pro-growth (neoliberal) coalition that has dominated New York City politics ever since. Certainly, continued by the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, one can even point to the one-term Dinkins mayoral term as mostly a keeping of the status quo, despite Dinkins having an electoral coalition that looked differently than the administrations the preceded and succeeded it.
It’s worth remembering the change that was promised by the de Blasio campaign when he secured an unlikely Mayoral win in 2013. The campaign was centered around a “tale of two-cities” and a promise to address income and racial inequalities. As his administration winds down, the Amazon deal is an interesting legacy that seems likely to be stuck to him for a long while. Is the de Blasio administration a failure despite it following through on some promises such as universal pre-K? Or is it just a bystander in an urban regime of corporate power that, as Mollenkopf describes, emerged from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to take power over public policy.
Conversely, the failure of the Amazon deal begs the question, what went wrong? It’s tempting to see it as local opposition and activism winning over corporate interests but is it perhaps just Amazon choosing not to invest in New York City. Amazon chose to come here, and Amazon chose to walk away. It may be worth looking at the Amazon deal comparatively with the Hudson Yards development that is a signature achievement of the Bloomberg administration (and only now being completed). Both were massive and complex deals that exposed the limits of fragmented local governance. Both faced large neighborhood opposition. Hudson Yards proceeded along a more traditional path, weaving through Community Board and ULURP processes before ultimately moving ahead. Both deals faced challenges in the face of the obscure but powerful NY State Public Authorities Control Board, with newly appointed State Senator Michael Gianaris capable of vetoing the Amazon deal and, in the case of Hudson Yards, a powerful Bloomberg adversary in Sheldon Silver who was able to veto the original plan for a West Side stadium.
Does the failure of the Amazon deal reveal limitations of the de Blasio administration while Bloomberg was able to achieve his aims despite sizable opposition? If we are living in a neoliberal, pro-growth urban world perhaps there are just administrations that are good at it and those that are bad at it, claiming to be addressing inequalities when in reality just failing to successfully facilitate a pro-growth urban agenda they are powerless to change.
-Adam Sachs
This week, questions of structure, memory, intersectionality, and community came to the fore. Professor Mollenkopf’s essay, How to Study Urban Politics, provides an analysis of fragmentation present not only in the city itself but in approaches to its study. The failings of both structuralist and pluralist methodologies seem to lie on either side of the razors edge: structuralist approaches fail to account for those times when politics and government– particularly local government– does in fact act in local interest, while pluralist approaches throw their hands up to display the constellation of forces that impact the relationship between politics and capital.
It is easy to see the need for an approach that finds a balance between these two approaches. An approach that recognizes how capital creates “constraints and imperatives for local state” but also creates opportunities to be seized by political entrepreneurs. And, further, a new approach must go beyond structuralism to understand the feedback loop, where constituencies impact the political coalition agendas. The last part of this equation, however, gave me pause. “The organization of interests in the public sector.” As I was reading the Weir + King article, I found myself mulling over the role of the government in discriminatory, segregatory, and most of all contemporary practices. The organization of interests in the white public sectors of these towns, which then secede to become separate townships altogether, clearly supports a political structure that disadvantages lower-income and black communities. In these towns, is racism a force as directly impactful as capital? Or are capital concerns simply driving segregation? To what extent is government responsible to uphold morals, potentially at the expense of capital and constituency? Is this a revert to a Hobbesian-style political understanding, where the collective can do no wrong?
This brings me to the Hayden article, which seems to be calling for an intersectional understanding of city history with a careful attentiveness to overlooked and undervalued histories—such as the unpaid labor of women in the home, which is necessary to sustain economies and yet is left out of all numerical accounts. Rather than looking toward the future of political studies, Hayden’s article is tied up in issues of collective memory and community. But the thread of feminist history running throughout her essay brings issues of scale to the fore. Her understanding of women’s bodies themselves as a version of Lefebvre’s produced social spaces was an important microcosm that allows for a more nuanced understanding of gender politics as an impactful part of political constituencies.
Race in Urban Politics
Mollenkopf demonstrates that a conception of urban political power as determined ultimately by capital/private interests without any autonomous role for political factors and features (how local government is structured, the building and negotiated maintenance of coalitions, relationships among leadership, bureaucrats, constituencies provides a weak model for how urban politics actually works. At the level of a single city, especially one such as New York that is extremely complex and perhaps unrepresentative of cities in general, it is hard to imagine that anything other than a multi-factor conception that incorporates both private economic interests as well as the political aspects that structuralists tend to downplay would fit.
A comparative view such as the Weir and King study may pinpoint broader tendencies difficult to observe consistently in a single level. Fruitfully suggested by Ryan and Caroline’s posts above, the racial factor that seems to motivate the drastic reconfiguration of political boundaries and units, across the several dozen metropolitan sites (albeit with significant regional differences) covered by Weir and King (I appreciate their use of the term “secession” for reinforcing the racialized history), raises the question of whether race is yet another factor (not reducible to private economics or the other political factors) that a model of urban politics need to incorporate.
It is not obvious that the kind of racial attitudes and behavior that operate to cause population clusters (generally richer and whiter) to remove themselves from a larger unit (with a more diverse demographics) is simply reducible to economics (this gets into a larger debate about whether racism (and, historically, slavery) makes economic sense) or one of the political factors highlighted by Mollenkopf.