Urban Problems (Routledge Revivals)

An Applied Urban Analysis

Michael Pacione

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134599363
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Urban problems and their resolution represent one of the major challenges for planners and decision makers in the modern world. This book, first published in 1990, makes a major contribution to the field, presenting an international and interdisciplinary approach to the challenges presented by the urban environment. The coverage is comprehensive, ranging from the economic and political dimensions of the capitalist system, to the issues of poverty and deprivation and questions about housing equity. This is an essential reference guide to social, economic and environmental problems in urban areas, which is of great value to students of planning, urban studies, geography and sociology.

Chapter one

Land-use issues

Towns and cities are primarily economic phenomena. Although most have occupied the same location for centuries the buildings and other physical infrastructure which comprise the built environment are not fixed but are continuously affected by the dynamic forces of change initiated by public and private development interests. This modification or ‘development’ of the urban environment occurs at a variety of scales ranging from the residential relocation decisions of myriad individual households, and the restructuring of operational techniques and workforce requirements by firms and industries, to large-scale projects, including public road building programmes and private housebuilding schemes. In addition, to different degrees in different countries, the operation of these market forces is influenced (enhanced or constrained) by state and local planning mechanisms. The net effect of these socio-spatial processes impacts upon the lifestyle of citizens (influencing, for example, journeys to work, access to facilities, and the housing environment), and is most tangibly revealed in patterns of land use and land-use change.

Growth and change in the capitalist city

The limited ability of traditional ecological and neo-classical economic theories to explain the forces underlying the urban development process led researchers to consider the place of the city in the capitalist mode of production. Although many of the earlier interpretations of urban growth and change based on Althusserian structuralism have been superseded, study of the political-economy of urbanization has made a significant contribution to understanding the processes underlying contemporary urban development. In Marxist theory the city is regarded as a particular built form commensurate with the fundamental capitalist goal of accumulation, according to the dictum ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake’. Thus, as well as concentrating the means of production, cities also develop the urban infrastructure which facilitates the geographical transfer of surplus value (profits) – i.e. the circulation of capital. The central role of capital in urban development forms the basis of Harvey’s (1985) analysis of the urban process under capitalism. Harvey envisaged three circuits of capital. The primary circuit may be regarded as the structure of relations in the production process. Surplus value (money capital) created in the production process is either reinvested in the primary circuit or is channelled via the capital market into the secondary circuit. In the process of constructing the built environment the mobile ‘money capital’ is fixed in place and extra value created. The tertiary circuit of capital comprises the investment in science and technology that ultimately leads to increases in productive capacity, together with the social expenditure undertaken by the state as part-contribution to the reproduction of the labour force (including, for example, investment in education and health services, and in mechanisms of law and order). There is a limit to the process of capital transfer from primary to secondary circuits. When this point is reached investments become unproductive and the exchange value of capital put into the built environment is reduced, or in some instances lost completely (which could lead to bankruptcy for some fractions of capital). However, the devaluation of exchange value does not necessarily destroy the use value (the physical resource). This can be used as ‘devalued capital’ and as such can help to promote renewed accumulation (i.e. the ‘use value’ of a building can be the basis for further development).

Devaluations of fixed capital provide one of the main ways in which capitalism can check the fall in the rate of profit and speed accumulation of capital value through formation of new capital. There is, therefore, a major contradiction in the capitalist city between the capitalist dynamic of accumulation (provoking urban growth and change) and the inertia of the built environment (which resists urban growth and change). As Harvey (1981: 113) explains ‘under capitalism there is a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time’. The different forms of crisis which assail capitalist economies have been outlined by Edel (1981). One of these — underconsumption (e.g. due to a fall in market demand) — along with its counterpart, overaccumulation, has been hypothesized as the main cause of post-war suburbanization in North America (Baran and Sweezy 1966). According to this thesis, because of an inability of the domestic market to absorb the industrial surpluses which built up as the war machine returned to peacetime production, other labour and capital absorbing activities were promoted by successive governments in the 1950s and 1960s, including suburban capital formation. By engineering a shift of investment into the secondary circuit the state and specialist financial institutions avoided a crisis of overaccumulation in the primary circuit and simultaneously stimulated new demand for industrial goods in the housing and transportation sectors. While the under-consumptionist thesis provides a convincing foundation for the suburbanization process in USA it has less relevance for the situation in Britain where successive post-war governments have sought to control capitalist tendencies for urban growth through the operation of a planning system which seeks to circumscribe urban development and direct it towards socially desirable goals. The regional specificity of the under-consumptionist thesis serves to underline two important points. The first is that the concrete patterns of development in which the capitalist mode of production is manifested vary considerably between different societies. Consequently a proper understanding of the internal structuring of any city requires an appreciation of the wider framework of national social and economic development. The second point is that while urban areas and their residents are caught up by structural forces outside their control this does not imply an insignificant role for local conditions or human agency in determining the form of the built environment. It is necessary, therefore, to complement a macro-level structural analysis with consideration of the major actors in the production of the built environment.

Major actors in the production of the built environment

The land development industry comprises a variety of builders, subcontractors, architects, marketing agents, developers, and speculators together with their legal and financial consultants. During the conversion of rural land into occupied housing a plot might pass through the ownership of at least five different actors — a rural producer, a speculator, a developer, a builder, and finally a household. Assisting with land transfers at each stage are a set of facilitators including real estate agents and financiers. Finally at local and central government level planners and officials oversee the development process to varying degrees according to the prevailing social formation. The motives and methods of these participants vary considerably. Bearing in mind the inter-related nature of the land development process we can, in the interests of clarity, examine the operation of several of these individual actors in detail.

The speculators

Property speculators, either individual entrepreneurs, or corporations, purchase land with the hope of profiting from subsequent increases in property values. Speculative activity is a characteristic of capitalist urban development which occurs throughout the urban arena. Speculation in the central city can contribute to the creation of slums, prior to revitalisation of a neighbourhood, either through private sector upgrading or gentrification or publicly-financed rehabilitation. The effects of speculative activity on the residents of the existing built up area can be pronounced, often leading to displacement and the destruction of communities. The impact of speculative development on land use is seen most starkly around the periphery of cities in USA, where the area currently under urban use is over ten million acres but ‘twice as much land is withdrawn from other uses because of the leapfrogging which characterizes much suburban growth’ (Feagin 1982: 51). Leapfrog development usually occurs as builder-developers try to avoid land which is tied up in complex legal arrangements or is being held by speculators in anticipation of very high profits. Some indication of the level of profits possible is provided by the fact that in Los Angeles, the price of residential land increased at a rate of 40 per cent per year in the late 1970s, in part due to speculative activity. Such inflationary costs are, of course, built into the final purchase price for suburban housing.

On the urban fringe, the effects of land speculation constitute one of the most important impacts on land use. For agriculture speculative land holding can have both positive and negative effects. Beneficial interaction can occur through the rental back to farmers of farmland which has been purchased by non-farm interests. Provided that lease conditions are not onerous, from a purely economic perspective it may be attractive for a farmer to rent land rather than to purchase and encumber the business with a heavy mortgage, thus releasing more of the farmer’s capital for improvements. On the other hand, rising land prices and land speculation make farm enlargement costly, and where tax is levied on land values, as in USA, sales of surrounding land can push up property taxes. Tax pressures coupled with other urban shadow effects such as pollution, trespass, theft and vandalism may eventually force the suburban agriculturalist to sell out to speculators. The impact of potential urban development also affects land husbandry practices in the fringe. Where urban pressures are strong farmers may become active speculators, disinvesting in their farms while anticipating a large capital gain from the sale of their land in the near future. Some farmers may ‘farm to quit’ or attempt to ‘mine’ the soil fertility while others may ‘idle’ their farmland. In the absence of effective land market regulation idle land may be a perfectly rational land use response to the economic incentives created by the urban fringe property market. Berry and Plaut (1978), for example, estimated that for every acre converted to urban uses in the north-eastern USA another was idled due to urban pressures. Farmers living under less intense urban pressures may be involved in a more passive form of land speculation, watching the appreciation of land values with a view to selling for a large profit on retirement.

The real estate agents

Although the principal role of real estate agents is as middlemen between buyers and sellers of property some adopt a broader remit and may operate in the assembly of small land parcels for development or as speculators in the urban land market. Direct involvement in the land market can be particularly profitable during periods of inflation and can lead to manipulation of the land market. Gutstein (1975) found that in a resurgent inner-city neighbourhood in Vancouver in the early 1970s some properties were ‘sold’ several t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 Land-use issues
• 2 Power and politics in the city
• 3 Poverty and deprivation
• 4 Territorial justice
• 5 Environmental hazards
• 6 Urban liveability
• 7 Neighbourhood change
• 8 Housing issues
• 9 Urban retailing
• 10 Urban transportation
• Conclusion
• References
• Index