Territory, the State and Urban Politics

A Critical Appreciation of the Selected Writings of Kevin R. Cox

Andrew Wood, Andrew Jonas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754679981
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317046080
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Following its rise to prominence in the 1990s work on territory, the state and urban politics continues to be a vibrant and dynamic area of academic concern. Focusing heavily on the work of one key influential figure in the development of the field - Kevin R. Cox - this volume draws together a collection of prominent and well established scholars to reflect on the development and state of the field and to establish a research agenda for future work.

Chapter 1
Territory, the State and Urban Politics in Critical Perspective

Andrew E. G. Jonas and Andrew Wood

This book is centered on how capitalist societies organize state territory, why ensuing struggles often converge around the urban scale, and how geographical difference can be incorporated into abstract knowledge of processes of capitalist development. These considerations can be condensed into the single overarching theme of ‘territory, the state and urban politics’. In thinking around this theme, we have chosen to highlight the work of British-born geographer Kevin R. Cox. His work stands out both in terms of its analytical rigor and enduring spatial sensibility. On a more personal level, Kevin was our academic supervisor when we undertook doctoral dissertation research at The Ohio State University in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We – along with the contributors to this volume – have been profoundly influenced by Kevin’s critical approach to questions of territory, the state and urban politics. Yet to provide a comprehensive review of Kevin’s insights and contributions over the years would be an impossible task. Instead, the theme of territory, the state and urban politics offers a useful way of focusing the book and bringing coherence to what are quite diverse individual chapter contributions. Before we get into the contents of the book, we offer a brief summary and interpretation of the main theme.

Alongside such concepts as space, place and scale, the analysis of territory occupies an important position in the social division of geographical knowledge (Jessop et al. 2008). From the vantage point of urban political geography, territory is usually taken to reference the ways in which human society organizes and controls space. The state is often instrumental in the political organization of territory, and hence our interest in connecting territory to struggles around the state. Nonetheless, the term territory itself has a rich and complex history which cannot be reduced solely to questions of state sovereignty and control (Elden 2009). Moreover, our use of the term territory is not to be confused with territoriality, although the former usually presupposes the latter (see, for example, Sack 1986; Cox 2002, 1-6). As Delaney (2005, 15) puts it, whereas territory is a “…bounded meaningful space”, territoriality draws attention to “…the relationship between territories and some other social phenomena” [emphasis in original]. We are certainly not advocating an ecological perspective on territoriality. Even if at some basic level nature and human labor are co-dependent there is nothing natural about the way societies organize themselves into territories. From our perspective territorial organization reflects and embodies the dominant social relations, struggles and actions of powerful social agents at a given moment of history. The time period which concerns us here is the period from World War II to the first decade of the twenty-first century, which broadly covers the transition from monopoly capitalism to advanced or late capitalism.

Throughout his academic career Kevin has sought to understand how capitalist society organizes territory and to account for the political interests and social processes adhering to particular spaces of capitalism and the state. An important theme running throughout this work is how the state, under capitalism, becomes enrolled in the politics of territorial organization. Through its territorial structure (by which we mean the allocation of powers and responsibilities to different levels and branches of the state), the state is a key player in how capitalist social relations and power struggles are expressed in a territorial manner. The state can be both the object of political struggle as well as an agent of territorial organization in its own right. We are especially interested in those conflicts and struggles which occur around state territorial structures that are more or less at the urban scale, recognizing that the urban is one among a number of state hierarchies, social networks and power structures. With respect to the wider spatial context, the book also speaks to debates about geographical scale and the politics of globalization, debates to which Kevin has been a significant contributor.

The remainder of this chapter provides a brief introduction to Kevin’s work on state, territory and urban politics and sets the context for the contributions that follow. The book is divided into three main sections, which broadly correspond to the evolution of Kevin’s work and provide a structure for grouping individual contributions around key conceptual ideas. In the first section (Part I) we show how Kevin’s initial contributions to knowledge of state, territory and urban politics came through his pioneering work on elections and locational conflict in the 1960s and 1970s. Here we also get a sense of how Kevin’s philosophical and epistemological treatment of space evolved, embracing such diverse methods as quantitative analysis and, in due course, critical realism. As we shall see, Kevin eventually came to the conclusion that realism had certain limitations when it came to historical-geographical explanation. Nevertheless it was formative of his approach to questions of territory, the state and urban politics.

The second section (Part II) examines Kevin’s work on urban politics and local economic development. The concept of local dependence, which he developed with Andrew Mair, proved highly influential in theorizing local material interests and the strategies deployed by growth coalitions to ensure conditions conducive to local economic development. This section also examines how the urban question led to Kevin’s key interventions on scale and the politics of globalization. The third and final section (Part III) puts Kevin’s work in a broader, comparative context and considers how his ideas have been translated to settings outside North America and Europe. For Kevin and many of his students, South Africa’s apartheid system and racial labor control policies brought into sharp focus the importance of geographical difference, identity and social context in explaining how capitalism develops and produces inequality. This section also touches on Kevin’s response to post-structuralist and feminist critiques of Anglo-American Marxist geography. In the final chapter, Kevin offers a rejoinder to a number of critical issues raised by the respective contributors to the book.

Conceptualizing Space and Territory: From Quantitative Geography to Historical-Geographical Materialism

In the first section of the book, we contextualize the underlying theme of territory, the state and urban politics by situating it in relation to wider disciplinary concerns about space. In recent years there has been a marked turn away from bounded notions of territory towards a relational understanding of space which seeks to unbound spatial theorization. This means, for example, that the urban is no longer to be examined as if it were a discrete and bounded political space; instead the urban political arena represents a territorial assemblage of processes, institutions and policies many of which originate from beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of the city. Thanks to important interventions by Doreen Massey (2005), amongst others, critical thinking about space continues to preoccupy discussion in human geography, suggesting that it is very much work in progress (Malpas 2012). The conceptualization of space has been very central to the evolution of Kevin Cox’s approach to questions of territory, the state and urban politics. For Kevin, space is more than a contingent effect or container of social processes; rather space is actively constitutive of capitalism, its mechanisms of accumulation, and the political interests attached to particular territorial configurations. We therefore start by tracing the development of Kevin’s critical approach to space: from his formative interests in voting behavior to subsequent work on the local state and the urban question.

In the 1960s, when Kevin left the United Kingdom to undertake his graduate training in the United States, human geography was becoming influenced by quantitative methods. Explanation was based on the identification of statistical relationships between dependent and independent variables. Strong correlations between spatially-situated variables commonly indicated the presence of a causal relationship; typically the task of explanation in geography involved the identification of empirical regularities of a spatial nature. As Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie point out in Chapter 2, Kevin initially honed his critical thinking skills on the analysis of voting behavior before turning to the study of welfare and locational conflict. It might therefore be suggested that at this point in time Kevin’s work was more about state and territory than urban politics. Specifically, he was interested in measuring and accounting for patterns in local and regional voting behavior, and deployed regression analysis to identify associations between variables of a spatial nature, as in his early studies of British elections (Cox 1968; 1969; 1970). As Johnston and Pattie suggest, the geographical dimension in electoral studies was often treated “…as either epiphenomenal (i.e. illustrating the outcome of deeper, non-spatial, processes) or residual rather than intrinsic to the explanation of observed patterns”. However, Kevin injected a stronger sense of spatial causation into the analysis of voting patterns, which became even more apparent in his influential work on the identification of neighborhood effects in voting behavior (1972a). This work pointed to role of spatial proximity in influencing the voting decision. As Johnston and Pattie argue, Kevin “…showed that geographers could offer much more than mapping of certain aspects of electoral behaviour and electoral practice. Geography – and its key concepts of place and space – is situated at the heart of understanding elections.”

Examining space and the geographic constitution of social life has been a constant in Kevin’s work. His 1973 book, Conflict, Power and Politics in the City, sought to develop a specifically geographical framework for examining the city and its politics. Space and spatial concepts – such as locational externalities – provide the tools for examining political conflict in the city. Furthermore, the problematic of securing positive externalities while avoiding the negative was sufficiently powerful to enable analysis to shift between geographical scales. Kevin’s discussion moves from the fiscal disparity between central city and suburb that structured the well-being of the US city to a focus on differences within jurisdictions as selected neighborhoods organize in order to secure positive spatial outcomes. While the book had a significant bearing on the discipline it also marked a transitional period in Kevin’s own work. Nonetheless, his pioneering studies of the neighborhood effect and, subsequently, jurisdictional fragmentation suggested that ‘space’ was not a contingent variable; instead space and territorial structure seemed to have causal effects, in this case on people’s voting behavior or patterns of fiscal redistribution by the state.

Kevin eventually became frustrated with the limitations of quantitative methods in terms of their ability to explain social processes, behavior and conflict. There was a brief encounter with the behavioral approach to urban locational problems but in the event this too proved unsatisfactory (Cox and Golledge 1969; Cox 1972b). In the late 1970s, Kevin turned to the writing of radical geographers such as David Harvey and Doreen Massey, both of whom in different ways had introduced human geography to Marxist theories of capital accumulation and uneven spatial development. In applying these theories to problems of welfare and locational conflict in the city, Kevin became interested in wider questions concerning the relationship between society and space. Notably, he was intrigued with the question of whether space could be said to possess its own properties or instead was the contingent expression of general social processes, namely, capital accumulation and social reproduction. This led to a formative engagement with critical realism which as Mark Goodwin points out in Chapter 3 heavily influenced Kevin’s subsequent writings on the local state and urban politics.

Critical realism has its origins in the work of the philosophers Roy Bhaskar and Rom Harré. It was brought to the attention of critical human geographers by Andrew Sayer. Sayer (1984) sought to translate critical realist ontology into a workable and practical set of methods which could be applied to empirical research of concrete events and outcomes. One of the reasons why realism was attractive to radical geographers such as Kevin Cox was because it offered a critique of empirical generalization as a mode of explanation. Another factor was the assumption of a similarity between the realist method and Marxist ontology, an assumption which Kevin now believes to be erroneous.

Realism’s approach to causal analysis could be distinguished from that of positivism on the basis of the former’s emphasis on social relations, internal mechanisms and their conditions of activation. Abstract research seeks to identify the relations that structure social processes and provide social objects with different powers and liabilities. Concrete research is about the ways in which these powers and liabilities are expressed contingently to produce actual processes and outcomes. This means that the causes of spatial patterns and events cannot be inferred directly from their observed patterns of occurrence. Therefore any attempt empirically to model spatial patterns and derive general laws of spatial behavior is likely to obscure rather than reveal causal mechanisms and processes. In these respects, realism seemed to offer a viable alternative to the methods of positivist spatial science.

However, realism raised troubling questions about the ontological status of space. From a realist perspective, space can be approached in terms of its necessary social properties, which in turn must be identified and isolated through the method of rational abstraction. Space, in turn, takes on many different concrete forms; and these forms can make a difference to the ways in which causal mechanisms are activated. Therefore knowledge of spatial form must be incorporated into concrete research; but space itself can be ignored at the level of abstract research. As Sayer (1985, 54) argued:

Abstract social theory need only consider space insofar as necessary properties of objects are involved, and this does not amount to very much. It must acknowledge that all matter must have spatial extension and hence that processes do not take place on the head of a pin and that no two objects can occupy the same (relative) place at the same time…Hence, while it is important for abstract theory to be aware of the existence of space, the claims that can be made about it are inevitably rather indifferent ones …

Whilst broadly sympathetic to the realist method of rational abstraction, Kevin was nonetheless eager to work through its strengths and weaknesses, a task which he initially undertook in the 1980s and continues with the discussion in Chapter 4. His particular concern is with the ontological status of space. Is space merely a container or contingent effect of general social processes which can be identified without reference to the spatial context? Or can space be said to have properties which influence and shape how causal mechanisms work in practice? In other words, does capitalism generate particular spatial forms and do these forms have emergent social properties and causal powers?

Working with his graduate students, Kevin Cox initially sought answers to these questions through the lens of research on the local state and urban politics. The debate about locality studies in the 1980s became an important outlet for the development of many of these ideas. The locality debate emerged from criticisms of an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council)-funded interdisciplinary research program in the United Kingdom known as the Changing Urban and Regional System (CURS). The CURS project was designed to interrogate wider propositions about the restructuring of the UK space economy at a time of rapid economic, social and political change (Cooke 1987). It generated quite a fractious debate in scholarly journals. Neil Smith (1987), for one, accused researchers working under the CURS banner as engaging in empiricism: each team of locality researchers seemed to be preoccupied with the detailed characteristics of the specific places they were examining (six British case studies were chosen) rather than with interrogating wider theoretical propositions about the capitalist space economy and the changing nature of state spatial policy. At issue was the status of ‘theory’ vis-à-vis ‘empirics’, with the charge that in the case of locality research theorization was often playing second fiddle to empirical analysis. In short, locality researchers were seen to be guilty of empirical generalization.

Although there were various nuances to the locality debate, Kevin Cox made several interventions which in many respects define his approach to territory, the state and urban politics. In one paper published with Andrew Mair in Antipode, Cox and Mair (1989a) argued the case for approaching locality studies from the vantage of different levels of abstraction. In a related paper, Cox (1991a) deployed levels of abstraction to criticize the claim that urban political regimes are structurally predisposed towards promoting capital accumulation at the expense of social reproduction, suggesting that this relationship is socially necessary yet contingent in form. The notion of levels of abstraction disrupts the idea that the ‘empirical’ and the ‘theoretical’ are opposite sides of the ontological coin; indeed, as realism suggests all observations about social forms are dependent on the conceptual tools which are brought to bear upon them. Instead of reducing space to the level of the concrete, the method of abstraction allows for different layers of historical and geographical specificity to be introduced into concrete analysis of a given spatial problem. At a more abstract level, it is possible to identify the necessary conditions for capital accumulation but this tells us very little about the precise spatial form of these conditions. At a lower level of abstraction, it becomes possible to specify the particular spatial assemblages required for accumulation in a given place. For example, it seems that capital requires fixed spatial investments, which in turn constrain the activities of individual capitalists and impose conditions on how accumulation plays out in given spatial contexts.

In order to suggest how space can make a difference to processes of capital accumulation, Cox and Mair (1988; 1989b) offered the intermediate level abstraction of ‘local dependence’. The co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Territory, the State and Urban Politics in Critical Perspective
• PART I: CONCEPTUALIZING SPACE AND TERRITORY: FROM QUANTITATIVE GEOGRAPHY TO HISTORICAL-GEOGRAPHICAL MATERIALISM
• PART II: URBAN POLITICS AND LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN TERRITORIAL CONTEXT
• PART III: STATE, TERRITORY AND DIFFERENCE
• REJOINDER
• Index