DETROIT AFTER BANKRUPTCY: A CASE OF DEGROWTH MACHINE POLITICS

Seth Schindler

Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

My recent article entitled Detroit after bankruptcy: A case of degrowth machine politics focuses on urban governance in the context of the city’s longstanding crisis. It examines a coalition among some of the city’s civic and political leaders that emerged after the city declared bankruptcy in 2013. The main argument is that this coalition envisions a future for the city whose emphasis is on making the city liveable rather than rejuvenating its manufacturing base. This has fostered a freedom to imagine the future and experiment with policy not seen in Detroit for years, and it demonstrates that crises do not necessarily result in the intensification of neoliberalism.

As a native Detroiter I have watched with interest the growing scholarly and media attention paid to the city. Hardly a week passes in which a major news outlet does not publish a collection of photos documenting the city’s crumbling built environment. I wrote this article in an effort to counter some commonly held assumptions about Detroit’s relationship with ‘cause and effect’ neoliberalism. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that the city was plunged into crisis by neoliberalism, and that the crisis has resulted in the intensification of neoliberalism. Instead, Detroit’s crisis dates back to the 1960s and I argue that its bankruptcy represents a failure of neoliberalism. The city’s longstanding crisis has shaped the lives of Detroiters for decades. It determined their occupations and life courses, depending on their skin colour and class. People have responded in ways that produced the sprawling metropolitan area with deep divisions (i.e. moving to suburbs in successive waves). The border separating city from suburb is marked by 8 Mile, a wound that is etched into the geography of the city and is emblematic of the decline of the great American city. It demarcates the city, as both a frontier and threat that must be contained. This narrative of containment looms large in the imagination of suburbanites. For as long as I can remember, there was a perception among suburbanites that Detroit was in terminal decline, and that this decline threatened to spread like a cancer and engulf the inner suburbs. The answer for working-class whites was to stay one step ahead and move farther north.

Many European-Americans who began their lives as factory workers in the heyday of Fordist manufacturing moved to northern suburbs in the 1960s. Their children followed suit and moved farther north and their own children now work in the tertiary sector. Many Metro Detroiters have a love-hate relationship with Detroit. Indeed, the word ‘Detroit’ conjures up feelings of nostalgia, reverence, fear, hope, guilt and resignation. These complex feelings are a result of the city’s decades-long decline, of which the 2008 crisis was only the latest chapter. The municipal government was already faced with a shrinking tax base and ballooning debt when the financial crisis began. It was clear to everyone that borrowing money to simply keep the traffic lights on and the city’s ambulances limping along was untenable. The question was who would take the financial loss when the city finally declared bankruptcy? Common wisdom among urban scholars is that neoliberalism is intensified during times of crisis, and in a neoliberal regime the public sector assumes risk while the private sector reaps rewards. Ultimately extra-local bondholders failed to recoup the lion’s share of their investment, and this is why Detroit’s bankruptcy represents the failure of neoliberalism. By declaring bankruptcy the city was able to shed some of its crippling debt, and this has allowed local civic and political leaders to re-envision the city’s future.

 

Urban transformation interrupted in the wake of the financial crisis

 

I hope that this article makes us think critically about neoliberalism and cities in crisis. In the case of Detroit local leaders have recognized that further degrowth is likely. They have articulated a plan that acknowledges the end of Fordist manufacturing in the city, and instead focuses on quality of life issues. It also aims to construct ‘blue’ and ‘green’ infrastructure and make the Detroit one of America’s greenest cities. This transition is scheduled to take five decades, and indeed, it necessitates difficult choices and trade-offs. It would be illogical not to recognize the very real fiscal constraints faced by the municipal government and to simply dismiss any and all budget cuts as evidence of intensified neoliberalism. Ultimately this article demonstrates that we need a more nuanced understanding of how crises unfold in cities that have been in decline for decades. It is unclear why policy makers in these cities would turn to out-of-the-box neoliberal policies since no amount of fiscal austerity is likely to jumpstart economic growth. This explains why these cities may be fertile ground for the emergence of degrowth machine politics. Depending on what happens in Detroit, local political and civic leaders in other cities may view bankruptcy as a viable way to escape unrealistic financial burdens imposed by extra-local bondholders. Bankruptcy is just one option that is related to a more fundamental question in Detroit and a host of other cities whose degrowth seems inevitable: how can degrowth be managed equitably in ways that make cities liveable?

Adaptive Behaviour in Urban Space;

Residential Mobility in Response to Social Distance

Sako Musterd¹, Wouter P.C. van Gent¹, Marjolijn Das² and Jan J. Latten^1,2

¹ Urban Geography, Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam

² Statistics Netherlands

Urban populations often show a high diversity in wealth or income. This is reflected in contrasts between affluent and poor neighbourhoods. Such contrasts feed policy and academic debates on housing market regulation and welfare arrangements. Generally, it is supposed that more liberal policy regimes give greater freedom for people to choose their residential location, which can lead to higher levels of segregation and homogenous neighbourhoods. This notion also often surfaces when differences in urban inequality between Northern American and Western European cities are discussed. The assumption is that European cities have a welfare state legacy of housing market regulation which assuages social segregation. Furthermore, social mixing policies try to bring a mix of different social strata into neighbourhoods in order to prevent unwanted patterns of segregation and accumulation of problems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So, rather than just choice, mobility is also structured by institutional arrangements like social housing waiting lists. Also, because income inequality is less pronounced and residential environments tend to be more mixed, people may not find it necessary to take the social composition of their neighbourhood into account.

Yet, despite regulation and interventions and lower inequality, Western European cities do exhibit patterns of social segregation with conspicuous concentrations of wealth and poverty. While acknowledging that segregation patterns within a city are produced and reproduced by a range of factors, we were interested in the role of individual residential moves in the continuous existing reality of contrasting affluent and poorer neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Do we see that ‘birds of a feather flock together’? In other words, do people show a preference for living among ‘equals’ in their mobility behaviour? Even weak signals of this selectivity behaviour may help to understand why segregation at neighbourhood level survives, even if policy measures try to counteract it.

This article focuses on ‘socio-economic distance’: the discrepancy between households’socio-economic positions and the socio-economic profile of their neighbourhood. We analysed large-scale longitudinal register data for all residents of the four largest cities of the Netherlands that were available at Statistics Netherlands.

We found that, despite government regulation, the socio-economic distance to the neighbourhood is an important driver of socio-economic segregation. Both households that are more affluent than the neighbourhood average and households that are poorer more often move out of that neighbourhood. Moreover, movers tend to select destination neighbourhoods in which the residents resemble their own socio-economic position more closely. So, notwithstanding household change such as moving in together or separation, households who move tend to adapt to, and thereby sustain, the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods.

Our findings offer new input for debates and policies relating to segregation and social mixing, and pose challenges for policy makers and politicians who believe that segregated neighbourhoods will eventually have negative effects on the whole society. Our findings suggest that economic segregation in neighbourhoods cannot be counteracted by housing market rules and regulations alone. Individual choices of residents lead to more homogeneous neighbourhoods, either low income neighbourhoods or high income neighbourhoods. However, residential mobility is not always a matter of individual choice alone. There are many limitations related to access and affordability when there is scarcity on the housing market. Also, regulations may produce several constraints. The economically stronger households will more easily find a place that fits their position. The economically weaker may be more or less forced to move, for instance when the character of a neighbourhood changes significantly, as some of the gentrification literature claims.

Our research may trigger new investigations into the ‘functioning’of neighbourhoods. Not every neighbourhood will function in the same way. Some neighbourhoods with substantial social mix may stay attractive to a wide range of households. It might be worth investigating under what circumstances socially mixed neighbourhoods are sustainable, what the main characteristics of such neighbourhoods are in terms of location, tenure, housing type, demographic, cultural and other compositions, and why people decide to stay in such environments.

From Fan Parks to Live Sites: Mega Events and the Territorialisation of Urban Space

Professor David McGillivray and Dr Matt Frew

Our Urban Studies article is concerned with the relationship between major sporting events (particularly mega events), urban space and the extension of corporate brandscaping, with a focus on the (relatively) new phenomenon of World Cup Fan Fests and Olympic Live Sites (Frew and McGillivray, 2008; McGillivray, 2011).  The provision of specially designed, temporary venues located within prime urban civic space has been enshrined in host city contractual obligations since the Germany 2006 World Cup, designed to accentuate the vibrancy of the host cities, for residents and visitors, providing opportunities for those without tickets for matches or events to participate in a collective viewing experience.

 

In this short video we discuss how Olympic Live Sites are inseparable from the corporate-media nexus that increasingly defines the mega sports event phenomenon. We argue that instead of free-flowing festive spaces, Live Sites have themselves become carefully planned and orchestrated venues, which though free, are subject to extensive commodification processes. They are attractive to global corporate brands and the mass media industries because they provide these corporate actors with unfettered access to large audiences, facilitated by the resources of the host city in the form of security and promotional support. They now operate as part of the valuable real estate that the sponsor family gains access to as a feature of their sponsorship investment. Host cities are required to subsidise financially the hosting of Live Sites, in the process ceding sovereignty over urban civic spaces to external organisations for the purpose of brand extension. As parks, squares and buildings are opened up as commodities hosts are also required to introduce legislation to protect the rights (commercial and legal) of sponsors, whereby third party advertising and trading practices are tightly controlled across these zones during the mega event (and often beyond).

 

In this article we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and liken Olympic Live Sites to striated spaces which, like any spatial structure, possess what appear to be objective boundaries. Risk and security narratives are amplified to provide justification for search procedures, security and the segregation of space to organise activities within bounded walls and fences. Live Sites represent yet another institutionalised commercial sphere during mega sports events. Event zones (including, but not restricted to, Live Sites) see public squares, parks, roads, pavements and airspace cocooned, controlled and commodified under a gaze of governance afforded by exceptional legislation.

Professor David McGillivray holds a Chair in Event and Digital Cultures in the Creative Futures Institute, University of the West of Scotland. His research interests focus on the contemporary significance of events and festivals (sporting and cultural) as markers of identity and mechanisms for the achievements of wider economic, social and cultural externalities.

 

Dr Matt Frew is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Tourism at Bournemouth University. He came to academia with 15 years of industrial experience. His penchant for post structuralist theory takes him into the terrains of mega events, music festivity and the embodied impact of digital, social and transformational technologies.

SPECIAL ISSUE

Situating the Local in the Neoliberalisation and Transformation of Urban Governance

Ismael Blanco (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Steven Griggs (De Montfort University, UK)

Helen Sullivan (University of Melbourne, Australia)

 

The rise of the ‘urban’ has quite rightly turned our attention to the role of cities as spaces of creative destruction. It has brought to the fore the logic of the urban as a key determinant in the constitution of place-specific regimes of neoliberalisation. This logic of the urban, it is argued, has spread beyond the confines of the city itself, part of a wider urbanisation of social relations in and beyond the boundaries of the city. But, in elevating this logic of the urban, do we run the risk of pushing to the margins the alternative logic of the ‘local’?

The governance of cities remains conditioned to a greater or lesser degree by the proportion of public service spending channelled through local institutions. Local government continues to act as an important mediator of conflicts and strategies across cities because of its horizontal connections to other local stakeholders within and beyond the state, and its vertical connections with upper tiers of government. Locality is also tied to demands for democracy and citizenship politics, framed in part by narratives of proximity and of the relationship between decision-maker, service deliverer and citizen. In fact, the local conjures up the immediacy of the shared physical space within which citizens live and interact, articulating a chain of demands in which proximity equates with the democratic, community and common interests, active citizenship and public dialogue.

Extending the analysis of the processes of urban neoliberalisation to incorporate alternative logics of the local opens up new windows on the politics of place and ‘neoliberal localization’. It shifts our attention to how these different logics of the local and the urban interact in the arenas of cities, constituting one another such that the size and scale of cities shapes the ambition, capacity and influence of local institutions in the city and in surrounding areas, and the values of the local inform how cities are governed and services organised. With this in mind, how the logic of the local interacts with the logic of the urban, and with crisis narratives, and how articulated together the local and the urban, and other alternative logics, constitute the spaces that we call cities has to be pivotal, we suggest, to any inquiry into neoliberal regimes.

Meeting the demands of such an inquiry requires taking into account the study of local practices, in ways which recognise the multiple logics at play in different historical contexts, the role of ideology and affect, and the spaces such ambiguities and ‘messiness’ open up for different forms of situated agency. Indeed, we set out five focal points for the exploration of the local: understandings and dynamics of ‘crisis’; politics, meaning and affect; the role of agency and regulatory intermediaries in forging local responses to crisis; the turn to practice; and the role of place and comparison. By introducing the logic of the local as foil to investigate the urban, we thus seek to trigger new forms of inquiry into the everyday politics of cities.

Urban Studies Foundation

Take a look at the Urban Studies Foundation website (http://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/reports-publications/) to see video presentations from four of the Foundation’s Postdoctoral Research Fellows.  Sarah Barns, Marcin Dabrowski, Cecilia Dinardi and Michele Lancione discuss their ongoing research.

Special Issue - City-region governance, 10 years on

Special Issue - City-region governance, 10 years on

Edited by John Harrison & Michael Hoyler (Loughborough University)

J.Harrison4@lboro.ac.uk; M.Hoyler@lboro.ac.uk

The expansion of globalising cities into global city-regions poses key challenges for rethinking city-region governance. Often reliant on inadequate urban-economic infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements, these newly emerging metropolitan spaces have generated impassioned debate about more ‘appropriate’, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance. At the same time,  new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict have surfaced around issues relating to economic restructuring and increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the collective provision of services, and governmentalised remappings of state space. Our contention is that the challenge of city-region governance is more pressing today than ever before.

Some ten years on from Allen Scott’s original treatise on the rise of city-regions in globalisation (Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy), what we hope to achieve with this Special Issue is a furthering of our understanding of the main governance tasks facing metropolitan regions. In the introductory paper, Governing the new metropolis, we identify four central tenets of the metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These, we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the emerging new metropolitan paradigm. Drawing on situated knowledge from research conducted on Amazonia, Canada, India, Ireland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States, each theme is then unpacked and developed across 11papers. Exploring some of the main contentions and as yet unanswered questions in the metropolitan region/governance debate, each contribution examines how current and near-future research can proffer new insights into, and bring about advances to, understanding city-regions and city-region governance.

It is our hope that the lines of argument developed in this issue will prove useful for scholars researching globalising cities and city-regions; provide an important staging post for considering the challenges of metropolitan governance; and ultimately contribute to a healthy programme of city-region research for the next decade. By bringing together both familiar and emerging voices the issue provides an up-to-date account of the different perspectives being developed to illicit fresh understandings of city-region governance. In adopting this approach we actively encourage others to join us in taking forward this research agenda, by responding directly to the arguments proposed in this issue and offering their own insights into the challenges for rethinking city-region governance. For us this is an innovative and productive area of research, and we look forward to seeing what response the issue generates.

Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union

In 2013, to mark 50 years of Urban Studies, the Editors put together a Virtual Special Issue, bringing together articles from across the years. Fifteen articles were selected: the five most downloaded; the five most cited; and the five most important published prior to 1990 (as collectively decided by the Editors). These articles were made freely accessible on the Journal's website for six months during 2013 and readers were invited to vote for their three favourite articles.

Neil Brenner's article, "Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union", was the clear favourite, with by far the most votes cast. The article, published in March 1999 (Volume 36/3), is one of Urban Studies' most highly cited articles.

To access the article please click here
You can view the video by Neil Brenner talking about his article below!




For more information visit Urban Theory Lab