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ABSTRACT
This special issue offers a set of methodologies to chart urban elites. Whereas most research has focused on the global super-rich, the authors in this special issue pay specific attention to the multidimensional urban geographies of elite reproduction and transformation, as elites depend on urban contexts for capital accumulation, consumption and leisure, and housing. In this article, we discuss theoretical and methodological antecedents in urban studies that have investigated economic elites. Building on but moving beyond these bodies of literature, we reject a-priori definitions of the size and shape of this social group and propose to pursue relational, place specific conceptualizations of elite composition and behavior. In particular, we argue, urban elite research would benefit from paying more attention to: (i) boundary work between elites and non-elites; (ii) intra-elite competition and distinction; (iii) national state spaces in determining elite composition; and (iv) the urban sense of belonging of economic elites.
Centering cities in elite research
In the recent crisis years, there has been increasing academic awareness of the elitist nature of the networks that govern our societies, polities, and economies (Mair, 2006; Streeck, 2006), and the growing social inequalities that result from that situation (Piketty, 2014). Fundamentally, such awareness has not been translated into social change to dislodge elites from the very power networks that lend them the capabilities to govern. While we can search for political-economic reasons for this “strange” fact (Bassens & van Meeteren, 2015; Crouch, 2011), this special issue aims to center the discussion on the more multidimensional urban geographies of elite reproduction and transformation, as urban elites depend to a significant extent on urban contexts for capital accumulation, consumption and leisure, housing, and other spheres of life. Researchers from various disciplines have started to recognize the relevant analytical and empirical lacunae, even though in geography this problematic of elite behavior and organization tends to be narrowed down to the question of the “super-rich” or “(ultra) high net worth” individuals (e.g., Beaverstock, Hall, & Wainwright, 2013; Beaverstock, Hubbard, & Short, 2004; Hay, 2013).
The limited attention (with some exceptions discussed in the next section) paid to cities and urban areas in elites research is striking, both as sites of research or as explanatory categories. This despite the fact that cities are a logical entry-point to charting elite geographies for reasons that are both agentic and structural in nature. Cities are places where administrative, political, cultural, and economic institutions cluster: institutions that lend elites power and legitimacy and vice versa. Cities are the “basing points” for capital (Friedmann, 1986), that is, the places where accumulated capital is (re)invested (Fernandez, Hofman, & Aalbers, 2016) and wealth reproduction is organized by a range of intermediaries (Beaverstock et al., 2013). Cities are replete with cultural resources that support distinct elite lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1984), and are marked by income and professional polarization, often in conjunction with patterns of socioeconomic segregation (Musterd, Marcińczak, van Ham, & Tammaru, 2017). Cities are the places where and from which elites govern formally and informally, both locally–as codified in growth coalition and urban regime thinking–and also on a global scale (Oosterlynck et al., 2018). Cities are spaces crosscut by globally mobile transitory populations, likely to produce a sociological layer on top of and often detached from local society, as evidenced from studies on expatriates’ enclaves (Beaverstock, 2002). Therefore, why not start with cities when setting out to examine elite geographies? Beyond its rhetorical nature, this question is authentic in the sense that it touches on thorny conceptual and methodological issues when setting out to study urban elite geographies.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of academic and popular literature about elites tends to skate over their urban footprint. Instead, many studies focus on mapping income and wealth across countries. This applies both to the reports published by consultancy firms in finance and real estate on (ultra) high net worth individuals or billionaires (Capgemini, 2018; Knight Frank, 2018; Shorrocks, Davies, & Lluberas, 2017; Wealth-X, 2017, 2018) and to research by historians and economists on top incomes and “the one percent” (Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, & Saez, 2013; Wisman, 2013). Although useful in tracing the increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth, due to statistical data limitations the typical and sole level of analysis is the national level with no attention paid to the geographical distribution of income and wealth within countries. In addition, literature tells us very little about the extent to which this top layer of the population has any degree of power. As we know from elite theory and sociology, the prominence and dominance of wealthy people is not universal or to be taken for granted, as it depends on their particular relations to other types of elites (political, cultural, intellectual, etc.) and the wider population (Hartmann, 2004; Scott, 1996). Instead of adopting such global definitions and measurements of elites, we need to take a more contextual approach that investigates the place-specific evolution of the composition and practices of elites. Further, instead of analyzing economic elites as a social group that is relatively disconnected from other social groups, we need to understand the very power of these elites as the effect of their interactions (direct or indirect through all kinds of intermediaries and organizations) with other “non-elite” social groups. This special issue is concerned with offering a set of methodologies to chart elites in and through urban contexts.
Assembling theoretical and methodological antecedents in urban studies
In light of the state of affairs sketched out above, we are convinced that an interdisciplinary urban studies approach can offer viable methodological inroads toward dealing with the question of urban elite reproduction and transformation. This special issue builds on, but also moves beyond, at least three bodies of literature that have investigated economic elites in urban settings: (i) urban studies research into growth machines and urban regimes that focuses on the interactions between local political and business elites, (ii) research in economic geography on the “super-rich” and their housing and service needs, and (iii) ethnographic research that studies the social routines and internal workings of elite cultures.
While there are differences between the literature about growth machines (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Molotch, 1976; Rodgers, 2009) and about urban regimes (Imbroscio, 2003; Lauria, 1997), our main interest lies in their shared concern with “collaborative arrangements through which local governments and private actors assemble the capacity to govern” (Mossberger & Stoker, 2001, p. 812). This concern leads to a partial return to the so-called community power debate of the 1950s and 1960s in U.S. urban political sociology, and to a central problematic in elite theory. Whereas the “elitist school” in this debate argues that a core group of political and business elites determines the direction of city government (Hunter, 1953), the “pluralist school” rejects this view of a coherent urban elite and argues that we can only observe functional elites that exercise power over specific policy arenas and urban institutions (Dahl, 1961). One of the limitations of the literature on growth machines and urban regimes is that it assumes very strong social relationships between business and political elites, whereas many current city governments seem quite disconnected from business elites, with companies moving from one location to the next in search of better opportunities (see also Nevarez, 2002). This directs attention to the ways in which local political elites act in accordance with certain economic imaginaries (Jessop, 2004; Van Heur, 2010), even in the absence of strong social relationships between economic and political elites. This implies the need for a methodological openness to the position of different types of economic elites within specific cities, and their differential power relations to political or other elites (ranging from a strong coupling in line with urban regime and growth machine theory, to a complete decoupling). It also points to the need for a multiscalar understanding of urban elite power, since the “capacity to govern” cities is evidently shaped by discourses and networks that connect the urban to the national and supranational scales.
A second body of literature comprises more recent work on the super-rich in the field of economic geography (Beaverstock et al., 2004; Hay, 2013). This strand of literature by and large adopts the consultancy report definition of high net worth individuals to narrow down the empirical research on economic elites to those with at least a million U.S. dollars in financial assets. It can thus be subjected to the same criticism as discussed above, in that it uses generic, global definitions to describe socio-spatially variable processes. At the same time, this field has produced valuable empirical studies on super-rich mobilities (Birtchnell & Caletrío, 2013), housing (Butler & Lees, 2006), education (Waters, 2007), philanthropy (Hay & Muller, 2014), and services such as private wealth management (Beaverstock et al., 2013). Nevertheless, this body of work is limited in two ways. It is theoretically underdeveloped, as the analysis of the super-rich is largely concerned with elite social networks and elite spaces, and only to a very limited extent with the relationship between elite and non-elite groups, either directly or as mediated through all kinds of intermediaries. As a result, this strand of literature does not theoretically connect or contribute to the wider debate on social structure and inequality, and largely ignores the much more established tradition of elite sociology and theory in which these issues are repeatedly addressed. This neglect seems to be the result of the recurring argument that these elites are primarily global elites, only marginally connected to concrete urban spaces and societies. Literature about the super-rich is also underdeveloped due to its empirical selectivity. There is a tendency to focus on what we would describe as “glamorous cases” of elite distinction and behavior, such as neighborhoods of super-gentrification (Butler & Lees, 2006), elite enclave urbanism (Pow, 2011), private aviation (Budd & Hubbard, 2010), or luxury yachts (Spence, 2014). This ignores the wider range of elite practices that are perhaps less glamorous but most likely more common. Being attentive to the more mundane aspects of elite life in encounter with non-elites has also inspired the focus of the current special issue.
The third research strand relevant to this special issue is anthropological work on elites as well as, more broadly, research into elites that adopts substantive ethnographic approaches. Some of the work in the other two bodies of literature discussed above includes such approaches as part of a wider social scientific methodological repertoire, but it usually remains a minor part that is instrumentally mobilized in the service of a primarily political economic explanation of elite rule. By contrast, ethnographies of elites contribute more detailed and contextualized descriptions to the analysis, which pay particular attention “to the internal workings of elite cultures, to the way they construct, employ, and perpetuate their power and influence, and to the social perception and cultural valuation of elites among the larger pu...
