1.1: Shaping City Development
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- To gain an historical understanding of how cities come together.
- To understand how public and private entities come together to allow cities to function.
- To understand how the public can be a guiding force in a cities direction.
- Understanding the importance of public approval in city decisions.
- How to evaluate a city from a ‘market condition’ perspective.
- Understanding popular control systems of cities
- Understanding current city design with emphasis on sustainability.
- Understand the role of suburbia and its commercial contributions.
- How to think about a place from a ‘value and worth’ perspective.
The Beginning of the Urban Transformation
Source: Charles Robinson’s The Improvement of Towns and Cities; the Practical Basis of Civil Aesthetics (1901).
The transformation from village to city was initiated by the old components of the village carried along and incorporated in the new urban unit; but through the action of new factors, they were recomposed in a more complex an unstable pattern than that of the village – yet in a fashion that promoted further transformations and development. The human composition of the new unit likewise became more complex: in addition to the hunter, the peasant, and the shepherd, other primitives entered the city and made their contribution to the existence: the miner, the woodman, the fisherman, each bringing with him the tools and skills and habits of life formed under other pressures. The engineer, the boatman, the sailor arise from this more generalized primitive background, at one point or another. The city created a higher unity out of this complexity.
This new urban mixture resulted an enormous expansion of human capabilities in every direction. The city effected a mobilization of workers, a command over long distance transportation, an intensification of communication over long distances in space and time, an outburst of invention along with a large-scale development of civil engineering, and not least, it promoted a tremendous further rise in agricultural productivity.
The archaic village culture yielded to urban “civilization” that peculiar combination of creativity and control, of expression and repression, of tension and release, whose outward manifestation has been the historic city. From its origins onward, indeed, the city may be described as a ‘structure’ specially equipped to store and transmit the good of civilization; sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in a minimum space. It is also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage. The invention of such forms as the written record, the library, the archive, the school, and the university is one of the earliest and most characteristic achievements of the city. The transformation of the urban environment, seen from the vantage point of our own age, seems to indicate something like same general shift that occurred with our own industrial revolution, with the same sort of emphasis on economic activities. This obscures rather than clarifies what actually occurred. The rise of the city, so far from wiping out earlier elements in the culture, actually brought them together and increased their efficacy and scope. Even the fostering of non-agricultural occupations heightened the demand for food and probably caused villages to multiply, and still more land to undergo cultivation. Within the city, there were very little of the old order exclusions: agriculture in the summer, for example, was a continuing practice on a large scale by those who lived permanently within the new walled towns.
What happened rather with the rise of cities was that many functions that had before been scattered and unorganized came together within a limited area, keeping the components of the community in a state of dynamic tension and interaction. In this union, made almost compulsory by the strict enclosure of the city wall, the already well-established parts of the new city – shrine, spring, village, market, and stronghold – participated in the general enlargement and concentration of numbers, and underwent a structural differentiation that gave those forms recognition in every subsequent phase of urban culture. The city furthered not merely a means of expressing in concrete terms the magnification of sacred and secular power, but in a manner that went far beyond any conscious intention, it also enlarged all the dimensions of life. The city became the symbol of what was possible.
There is nevertheless one outstanding difference between the first urban epoch and our own. Ours is an age of multitude of socially undirected technical advances, divorced from any other ends than the advancement of science and technology. We live in fact in an exploding universe of mechanical and electronic invention, whose parts are moving at a rapid pace ever further and further away from their human center, and from any rational, autonomous human purposes. This technological explosion has produced a similar explosion of the city itself: the city has burst open and scattered its complex organizations over the entire landscape. In short, our civilization is running out of control, overwhelmed, but driven by its own resources and opportunities.
Shaping City Development
What the people want
Often the most effective way of making city officials legitimize their actions is using "popular control" - the citizens of a community become deeply involved with the actions of their leaders. Development projects end when they lack a compelling public rationale and generate significant community opposition. Is popular participation a "loose cannon" that can only have a negative influence and lead to veto groups? The consensus answer to that question is 'not entirely.' Most of the experts feel that popular opinion can also be a strong resource for local leaders. Thus strong citizenry input can certainly hinder projects the public deems bad for the community in general, however, a united populous can play a large role in moving worthwhile projects forward.
If popular control is to be effective, a number of conditions must be satisfied. To begin with, public approval is a direct connection to the capital investment process. This is not easy to accomplish because investment decisions often fall outside local government. The use of non-profit corporations, whose boards are appointed and whose revenue sources are independent, insulates development from public accountability. Nevertheless, even public benefit corporations must hold hearings, entertain popular motions, and justify their actions. Quite often issues spill over their ordinary boundaries and into public arenas. When this occurs, elected officials gain bargaining advantages by putting together coalitions that can play a vital role in the urban development game.
Next, public authorities must have the managerial and organizational capability to muster political support for business. Credible bargaining requires a stable and active constituency, whose collaboration can extend to business in a 'quid pro quo' process. In the United States and Canada, non-profit organizations have filled the gap between public and private sectors and have served as a vehicle for low- and moderate-income housing. Great Britain, Austria, France, and Nordic countries rely on forms of corporatism to bring about negotiated settlements, and 'mixed corporations' carry out certain kinds of developments.
Last, sufficient 'social capital' should occur to bolster popular participation. As scholars have recognized, democratic institutions require an attitude of cooperation and trust among the citizenry. For democracy to work, citizens must share similar values and pursue common objectives. This depends upon the social culture of an area. The culture of a city expresses values and norms that underlie development priorities. Some distressed cities are characterized by persistent racial or class polarization, and this deeply affects the development agenda. Here, the popular call is for jobs and housing. Other, more affluent cities may embrace a more political culture. Here, an active citizenry puts a great deal of attention on environmental issues and collective benefit.
Public approval and involvement
Cities vary in their capacity to organize public approval. Some cities work through neighborhood councils that exercise discretion over land use. Other cities give expression to popular opinion through programmatic political parties. Still others, offer few outlets for popular participation and actually design institutions so that local democracy is discouraged with cohesive political party systems.
Some Western European cities combine neighborhood government with cohesive party systems. This combination stimulates popular expression, furnishes bargaining advantage, and influences development. In Paris for example, political control over major development rests on a system of neighborhood city halls and an organized party system stretches into central government. The result is a city filled with public amenities, collective benefits, and massive housing subsidies. Amsterdam tells much the same story. A system of neighborhood councils and disciplined political parties assures a strong popular voice. As a result, the city enforces stringent rent controls and establishes historic preservation districts.
In London, a system of borough governance connects to disciplined, highly competitive political parties. Given the political significance of development issues for British parties, it is difficult for non-party interests to offer inducements that split politicians away from their partisan agendas. Further, when it comes to negotiating with business interests, programmatic political parties are capable of providing a powerful, and united, bargaining resource to elected governmental authorities. The key is a stable base of political power that affords significant bargaining advantages in dealing with business organizations and shaping development priorities.
This previous discussion gives a basic synopsis of who participates in city development which sets the premise for Savitch and Kantor's (2002) discussion of the essentials of city bargaining. These authors define city bargaining as the ability of a city to garner resources in order to maximize its choices and ultimately realize its objectives in the capital investment process. Further, bargaining over city development turns on specific kinds of resources that have a cumulative impact on city choices and include market conditions, governmental support, popular control systems, and local culture.
Market conditions
Market conditions consist of the circumstances or forces that make cities more or less appealing to private capital. Such elements include:
- Geographic characteristics (Singapore as a gateway to Asia);
- Political reasons (Brussels as the seat of the European Union);
- A by-product of business circumstance (New York as a financial capital),
- Vital strategic roles (Houston as an oil center or Denver for its financial investments),
- Cultural reasons (New Orleans as a food city),
- Religious reasons (Jerusalem as a sacrosanct city).
Whatever the reasons, ‘market conditions’ make a city highly valued and constitute an inherent advantage for attracting investment and continuing attention.
As one might expect, favorable market conditions put a city in a stronger bargaining position and give it greater control over capital investment and development. Diversified cities with a varied employment base are usually in a better position to control capital investment.
By contrast, single-industry towns have difficulty turning down any kind of capital investment. This weak position is particularly acute in cities with resource depletions or circumvention of their particular geographic advantages. The flight of investment from cities as Detroit and older industrial cities have left them desolate and they are desperate to give away property or garner private investment at virtually any cost.
Market conditions are a composite of many different circumstances. They reflect larger economic fluctuations that put city investment at a premium (rejuvenating downtowns) or put city investment efforts at risk (the recent economic meltdown). The indicators of market conditions are dependent upon the state of a national or regional economy as well as how a city fares in a global market. Most cities can measure their market condition by the creation of a modern employment base, the increase or decrease in available jobs, the value of office space, and a willingness to invest in property within a jurisdiction. Interestingly, population growth or decline may or may not be associated with a city's market condition.
Governmental support
This form of support refers to practices used in conjunction with city, regional, or national authorities to intervene in the marketplace. Support mechanisms come into play in order to strengthen public control over development. They include planning, land-use controls, fiscal support, differential tax policies, and infrastructure or housing construction. These supports often carry out on a ‘metropolitan’ or ‘regional’ basis and usually involve the integration of functions or fiscal capacity between governments.
Governmental integration may be vertical and take place between higher and lower levels of authority such as city to state to national government. For example, a city may entice an out of state industry to move to their city by heightening the interest of the business by collaborating with the state to secure tax incentives as well. Integration can also be lateral and include cooperation among equal levels of government over a wider region. In either vertical or lateral integration, localities can 'borrow' bargaining resources or transfer negotiations with business into more-favorable arenas. Integration can also include more encompassing and irregular processes of governance that unite officials at all levels and incorporate public private partnerships. Professional sports franchises fit under this form of integration. Often state and regional efforts are required to secure business that garners national recognition and broad revenue. Governmental systems that are well integrated are better able to channel economic development and shape the marketplace. Poorly integrated or diffuse systems have less capacity, though such systems may hold other advantages and be better at economic stimulation.
A combination of qualitative assessments and quantitative indicators are useful to analyze governmental support. These include descriptions of governmental institutions and their impact, accounts of governmental cooperation on planning and development, explanations of housing policies, assessment of housing subsidies, and analyses of intergovernmental aid.
Popular control systems
Popular control systems refers to the means by which citizens express their preferences and make leaders accountable. Popular control also encompasses a larger process through which city development become legitimate This process may vary along several dimensions, including the scope of public participation, the extent to which participation is organized, and the effectiveness of electoral mechanisms in ensuring accountability in the process of legitimization. Cities may organize popular control around formal neighborhood governments or civic groups, they may work through mass-member or programmatic political parties, they may use voting to encourage widespread awareness and involvements, or they may organize legislative councils around small wards. Generally, electoral districts based on representation by neighborhood wards are more sensitive to popular expression than at-large representation.