Mike Davis
• What City is Davis talking about?
• Why does he describe this city as a
fortress?
Fortress Las Vegas
Repressions in space and movement
• Private security
• Surveillance
• Barricade streets
• Militarization of city life
• Policing social boundaries
• Fortress cities divided between “fortified cells” of
affluent society and ‘places of terror’
• System that calculates the interests of the
urban poor and the middle classes as a
zero-sum game.
• Policies not related to personal safety but
rather personal insulation from unsavory
groups and individuals, even crowds.
The destruction of public space
• Elimination of parks, privatization of parks
• New class war
• Pedestrian democracy: Traditional
pedestrian links to certain parts of
downtown were removed
• Police failings – leads to spatial security
• “Redevelopment” reproduces spatial
apartheid
From rent-a-cop to Robocop
• Gated communities,
• closing of parks, privatization of parks,
block off streets
• high tech security systems in private and
public areas
• Panopticons shopping malls
• Space police: Racial profiling (city of hope)
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES
AND SUBURBS
Natural factors
(Edward C. Banfield)
Demographic - population growth (cities need to expand outward to find
housing for their citizens. migration in & out of the city led to the massive
growth of cities, overcrowding and eventual decline and out migration of
urban central cities. This in turn lead to the growth and prosperity of
suburban areas but also eventually led to congestion, urban sprawl and
other problems faced by central cities.
Technological (street cars, automobile, highways, sky scrapers) allows citizens
to live outside of the central city but still work there.
Economic- Manufacturing jobs moving oversees. Service sector industries
don't need to be located in central city. ATT telephone operators,
telemarketing can be housed almost anywhere. low skilled clerical work.
Good blue colar jobs are gone. Unemployment increases, tax base
decreases. Middle class migrates out.
Natural resources - (oil, water, canals, etc.)
Unnatural factors
Mumford and Bickford – cities, their
structures and makeup are not natural
but rather a product of decisions made by
government and economic elites.
• Federal Housing Policy: FHA and VA
insure home loans (like our insured
student loans).
• Discriminatory policies: redlining poor
and minority areas. Maintaining
segregated communities through loan
practices and restrictive covenants.
• Providing loans to safe bets.
• Why? did a government agency do this? A lot of
government agencies and most politicians come
from the business community. They are not
political science academics, or community
activists or constitutional law scholars. They are
businessmen who are concerned with profit and
benefiting their business partners.
• Bureaucracies have a life of their own and are
often CAPTURED by business interests.
• After the urban riots in the 1960s the FHA
started to reform its practices and a majority of
its loan guarantees were in central cities.
Highways:
The highway act of 1944 gave hundreds of millions of
dollars to build highways.
The National Defense Highway act of 1956 paid for 90%
of highway construction costs. This makes the creation
and growth of suburbs possible
The building of highways were always through poor
neighborhoods. This destroyed ghettos but also viable
working class neighborhoods (the Cross Bronx
Express). Up on high rises example.
The Military: Twenty-nine palms, Vegas
Local Policies
1) Zoning and land use policies (Yonkers suburb of NY
would not allow the building of low or moderate income
housing.)
2) Segregated public housing
3) Residential and business segregation (making it
necessary to own a car)
4) Urban renewal (with federal funds and legitamacy that
comes from federal backing) local elites used the term
"urban renewal" to kick poor minorities out of the
central cities. Mayor Loveridge and the motels).
Competition between Cities
• Richard Wade’s article examines city behavior in
the 19th Century (Pittsburgh, Lexington,
Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis)
• Each one was trying to promote growth, growth
of the population, of the economy, at the
expense of other towns and cities.
• Mostly through advertising and propaganda
since they had little collective governmental
capacity.
Private Power
We can’t forget the incentives that private
investors have to shape the environment.
Owners of mills and industries sent
recruiters to the South to hire poor black
tenant farmers luring them to the city with
promises of prosperity.
Private cities: Hershey, PA, City of Industry, CA; Levittown
(PA-NY-NJ); (Levitt and Sons firm) - despite the
popularity of some types of housing units these firms
built them a way that made it easier to sell and to
manage.
Banks and Realtors: Redlining, racial steering, blockbusting
and panic selling, manipulation of FHA loans
Community reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 provided
information about where their loans are going to (public
disclosure). Free market efficiency - full information
Urban Renewal: eminent domain - take land from the poor
and give to the rich at a fraction of the cost;
Gentrification (kicking out the poor for the upper-middle
class.
POLITICAL ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF CITIES
The interaction of private power and
government, the public sphere with the
marketplace.
Mercantile cities - Trading centers; Dominated by small
group of elites. Early role of government: promote
business opportunity. - how to do that: help remove
physical barriers. Erie canal, railroad
Machine politics; industrial revolution, changes in voting
requirements, immigration changed the politics of cities.
More democratic in a sense, but lots of corruption (late
19th Century to Mid 20th Century)
Reform politics: Take power away from city hall. Insulate
political institutions from electorate - reduce democratic
influence. Run government like a business. But if you
give business interests the power that government
institutions have they will abuse it. (early 20th Century)
What do urban scholars study?
Urban Literature in Political Science?
The City-State: Aristotle polis
Political machines in the early 1900s
Influence and democracy in the 1960s
(Dahl; Banfield; Hunter)
Race relations in the 1970-80s
Redefining Urban Politics
Steady decline in urban areas
Host of new suburban jurisdictions/overlapping
limited polities
By 1990 one in two Americans live in suburbs
Outward movement of jobs, economic activity, public
investment, football teams (NY Giants – New
Jersey)
Political Science in the 1980s
and 1990s
Explaining urban decline:
massive population shifts
staggering job losses
racial strife
fiscal crisis.
Skewed Understaning?
What about rural areas?
Regional Government?
Preoccupation with big cities
New Trends in Urban Political
Science: old wine in a new bottle
• What does urban scholarship look like in
the new millennium?
• Taking the politics out of city government
• Treating cities as corporations
• Privatization of services
• Implications?
• What’s good for business is good for the
city