The Urban Land Nexus and the State

A. J. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135687038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book was first published in 1980. In this book, the author has tried to establish the main guidelines of a determinate analysis of the phenomena of urbanization and planning, in two principal stages. Firstly, the attempt to identify something of the broad social structure and logic within which these phenomena are embedded, and from which they ultimately draw their character. Second, to attempt to discover in detail the ways in which these phenomena appear within society, assume a specific internal order, and change through time.

1
The urban question in context

1.1 Introduction

Some elements of the question

Early in 1978 in response to the growing crisis of central city areas in the United States, the Carter administration put forward a new national urban policy as outlined by the President's Urban and Regional Policy Group (1978). The main provisions of this policy represent a remarkable change of emphasis in comparison with the main urban policy guidelines that had gradually evolved in the United States in the period following the Second World War. The proposed new urban policy is designed to attack on a broad front the chronic problem of the physical, economic, and social deterioration of central city areas. It seeks to make central cities attractive places to live, to reverse the persistent erosion of their basic economic arrangements, and to help alleviate the crisis of municipal finance that in the mid-1970s brought the city of New York, for example, to the verge of bankruptcy. As a corollary, the policy also seeks to bolster central city redevelopment by attempting to stem in a variety of ways the tide of rapid outward urban expansion that in the last four or five decades has absolutely dominated the process of urbanization in North America. Of course, intimations of this emerging new trend in federal US urban policy have been discernible in prior urban legislation and programmes of aid to central cities. They are discernible, for example, in the urban renewal policies of the 1950s and 1960s, in the model cities programme, in the 1968 Housing Act, and so on. The new policy, however (and whether or not it is ultimately successful in the specific version outlined in the report of the President's Urban and Regional Policy Group), seems to mark a quite definite break with previous federal programmes, which, on balance, tended strongly to favour suburban expansion at the final expense of the central cities. Certainly, it is directed at what has probably become the most critical urban problem in the United States at the present time, and not simply in the United States, for in various ways it is also apparent in Canada and in parts of Western Europe, most notably perhaps in the large British conurbations.

But what, we may ask, brought so many contemporary cities to this particular conjuncture of events? Why in fact have inner cities over the decades steadily lost jobs and population to the urban periphery? Why was this process of decentralization formerly actually encouraged by official policy? Why does that policy now haltingly but unmistakably begin to reverse itself? Why could these problems of inner city areas not have been foreseen and provided for in earlier policies? What new and as yet unforeseen problems will emerge as the new policy begins to run its course? Could these not be anticipated and the new policy modified accordingly? What, in general, is the relationship between spontaneous urban change on the one hand, and public policy and planning on the other hand? Do planners control the urban system? Or does the developmental structure of the urban system preempt the decisions and actions of planners? Are there discoverable 'laws of motion' linking spontaneous urban change and public policy and planning together?

The structure of a general response

It is the aim of this book to establish a general urban problematic within which the elements of a response to all such questions can in principle be discovered. The book represents an attempt to set up a broad theoretical framework that identifies the location of the urbanization process within society as a whole, and that reveals the origins, dynamics, and internal order of urban spaces and systems. In brief, it seeks to illuminate and to render coherent all those apparently disparate and disjointed social events that can be categorized as being in one way or another urban phenomena. The book seeks to achieve this end by addressing four major interrelated levels of analysis, all of which cluster around the central theme of land contingency, which, as will be shown below, is taken here to identify a unified basic concept of the urbanization process. More particularly, the theme of land contingency represents a means of rendering intelligible the properties and mutual interactions of all social incidents as they emerge out of a global system of human relationships and are mediated through urban space. Let us briefly consider the main content and orientation of each of these levels of analysis in turn.

The first major level of analysis to which this book is addressed concerns the overall problem of situating the urban system within some wider social context. Here, especial attention is paid to the genesis of the urbanization process within one particular historical totality: the capitalist mode of production. It is shown how this totality is constituted out of a set of primary social entities and relationships comprising, for example, commodity production, the social surplus, social classes, the State, and so on, and how contemporary urbanization, as a secondary social event, is of necessity a derivation out of these phenomena. It is demonstrated, in particular, how the specifically urban (land-contingent) functions and rationality of firms and households on the one hand, and planners on the other hand, emerge through a succession of mediations out of the broad structure of capitalist society. In line with this initial orientation, a general attempt is made in chapter 2 to scrutinize the logic and dynamics of capitalism as a whole.

The second major level of analysis is then concerned with a detailed examination of the aggregate behaviour of firms and households as they make their appearance in urban space. This phase of the argument represents an attempt to discover the mainsprings of urban form and development in the logic of private decisionmaking within capitalist civil society, and it is shown, further, how this logic is structurally enveloped within a network of social and property relationships that is built up around the institution and functional imperatives of commodity production. As it manifests itself in urban space, this logic leads endemically to the eruption of obstinate urban problems and predicaments that in turn call urgently for planning intervention.

The third major level of analysis is focussed around a description of the origins and character of urban planning as a (land-contingent) process of public (or collective) intervention in capitalist cities. This third phase of the argument consists in an effort to describe urban planning as a specialized administrative formation within the total apparatus of the State, while, at the same time, demonstrating also that the existence of urban planning is immediately predicated upon the very problems and predicaments brought into existence as a result of the wayward locational logic of private firms and households in urban space. Hence, as will be shown, the nature of urban planning in capitalist society is stamped both by the general properties of the State at large, and by the specific character of the urban problems and predicaments with which the State must actively deal.

The fourth major level of analysis to which the book is addressed represents a tentative theoretical description of the process whereby urban civil society on the one hand and the urban planning system on the other hand combine to form an organically integrated entity designated here the urban land nexus. It is then demonstrated how this entity evolves through time in a series of land-use interactions which, through varying surface outcomes, reflects an unvarying structural dynamic that generates one urban problem after another while shackling the ability of planners either to deal effectively with specific symptoms or to readjust in meaningful ways the fundamental social mechanisms that generate those symptoms.

In addition to these four main analytical modules there is a persistent attempt throughout the book to evaluate and to criticize alternative discourses about the city and about the role and significance of collective urban intervention in capitalist society.

1.2 The question of the urban land nexus

From the above brief outline of the main argument that is to follow, it will be already apparent to the reader that the notion of the urban land nexus is highly derivative: it represents a sort of by-product of a prior theoretical analysis of the structure and meaning of capitalist society generally. However, it must be added at once that while the urban land nexus cannot be understood outside of the context of capitalist social and property relations, neither can it simply be conjured away as a purely a posteriori category. On the contrary, it possesses, as a concept, a high degree of internal peculiarity which is, in turn, an intellectual echo of its very specific material manifestations. Hence, in its immediate phenomenal appearance, the urban land nexus takes on the form of a land-use system consisting of interpenetrating private and public spaces. These spaces are outcomes of the (historically determinate) locational logics of various actors in urban space. As a corollary, the urban land nexus may be seen in somewhat more analytical terms as a structured assemblage of dense polarized differential locational advantages through which the broad social and property relations of capitalism are intermediated. It represents, in a word, a socially embedded collection of land uses or locations, all of which depend functionally upon one another across a focussed geographical space. It is precisely this characteristic locational integration within the urban land nexus as a geographical unit which raises it to the status of a definite puzzle within social theory as a whole. As will be shown continually throughout the remainder of this book, the urban land nexus posits itself (via the general analytical idea of land contingency) as the specific object of enquiry to which any really coherent urban question must be addressed; and this assertion is based in turn upon the observation that the specifically urban (as opposed to economic, psychological, cultural, etc) logic and effects of any social event are in the end decipherable only via an analysis of the intraurban system of differential locational advantages.

Something like this identification of the phenomenon of land contingency with the urban question is already implicitly affirmed in all those existing approaches to a general theory of the city that are founded on such thematic issues as urban spatial organization, urban space and structure, the geography of urban patterns, and all the rest. In the present discussion, the urban question is similarly pinned down to these sorts of thematic issues, and to a problematization of the complex relationships that they contain. Here, however, the generic notional expression of those issues, that is, the urban land nexus, is never reified (as it is in much mainstream work) into a self-sufficient and analytically autonomous discourse. On the one hand, the idea of the urban land nexus is indeed taken here to identify, to problematize, and to make coherent all that is innately urban about urban events and phenomena, in the sense that urbanization as such can never be represented by the incommensurable and heterogeneous things that are to be found in urban areas, but only by the web of connections that combines those things into a coherent whole, that is, their mutual interdependence via the system of intraurban differential locational advantages. Yet, on the other hand, the conceptual status of the urban land nexus is quite definitely dependent on and derived out of certain more basic mental constructs. In this book, all discourse about the city (the urban land nexus) is taken to be ultimately referrable back to the historical materialist conception of a mode of production in general, and the capitalist mode of production in particular. Within this wider universe of discourse, however, it will be made increasingly evident that the urban question is the question of the mutual interrelations of all land-contingent phenomena (both private and public) in urban space—in a word, the urban land nexus as the finally unifying idea of the city.

It is clear from all of this that the general method of attack adopted in this book explicitly rejects [along with Castells (1968)] any attempt to take urban phenomena as 'independent variables'. In view of the pervasive attempt in the ensuing argument always to encapsulate the idea of the urban land nexus within some wider conception of society, and given, by contrast, that the mainstream literature on urban theory and planning falls so frequently into precisely the sophism criticized by Castells, a brief further methodological comment on these matters seems to be in order at this stage, and we may open the argument with the apparently uncontroversial (though often tacitly controverted) assertion that urban occurrences of whatever kind are primarily concrete social phenomena. It is important to stress this point for it is commonly denied by implication in much of the literature where the locational patterns of firms and households in urban space are so frequently reduced to the status of simple geometric abstractions, and urban planning is persistently confounded with the purest forms of voluntaristic intervention. On the contrary, both the private and the public dimensions of the urban land nexus are definite social occurrences, connected in complex ways with one another, and with other more general social phenomena. This remark implies at once that urban civil society and urban planning form an intertwined totality constituting the universe of urban reality. And this proposition implies another, running parallel to it, and indeed encompassing it, namely, that there exist connections between this aggregate urban entity and the rest of society such that this totalization constitutes the universe of social reality. Two major points need to be developed directly.

First, out of this initial conception, there immediately emerges the question of the manner in which the urban land nexus in general takes its origin in the rest of society. Concomitantly, there emerges the subsidiary question as to the manner in which urban planning (a constituent component of the urban land nexus) takes its origin in both the internal dynamics of the urban land nexus, and the rationality of the capitalist State at large. For we cannot simply make the a priori assumption that either an urban land nexus in general, or urban planning in particular, represents an autonomous sphere of activity and development. That is to say, we cannot assume that either the urban land nexus or urban planning emerges, evolves, and acquires its observable qualities in conformity with forces that reside solely within itself. Such an assumption leads inevitably to a metaphysical conception of urban relata as systems of self-engendering essences. Above all, it leads immediately to those familiar illusions wherein the urban land nexus is reified into an abstract idealist conception of intraurban space, and urban planning is turned into a transhistorical mechanism of administrative rationality, both of them divorced from any more fundamental roots, and in fact effectively structurally divorced from one another. Nonetheless, acknowledgement of the necessary existence of a complex hierarchy of interconnections running between the various phenomena of society as a whole (civil society and the State), the urban land nexus, and the institution of urban planning, in no way, in and of itself suggests any particular clues as to the nature and substantive content of these interconnections. Only some prior theoretical position can provide such clues. What this acknowledgement does, however, is to affirm by implication that, whatever general theoretical framework we may ultimately adopt, it must be unambiguously capable of illuminating these interconnections.

Second, the urban land nexus in general, and urban planning in particular, are manifestly changeable phenomena, marked as they are by frequent short-run episodes and variations of trend. The opening paragraphs of this chapter are sufficient testimony to this state of affairs. From this it follows that any theory of urban occurrences generally that does not seek to root such changeable and ephemeral phenomena in an understanding of those more enduring social structures to which they are demonstrably related can only produce trivial and/or erroneous statements and predictions. A really viable analytical attack on these phenomena must be capable of anchoring them in more deeply rooted and more stable social processes and dynamics. In short, a viable theory of the urban land nexus in general and of urban planning in particular must grow out of a conceptual structure that explicitly reveals the intrinsic social embeddedness of these phenomena.

The significance of these two general points becomes all the more understandable and emphatic when it is recalled that much of the existing literature on urban matters, ignoring precisely these cautionary observations, tends to generate in large quantities various disparate and incommensurable 'points of view', and these points of view fall constantly and predictably into disrepute as mere fashions and whims as the urban system moves rapidly from one conjuncture to the next, and as one specific urban problem succeeds another. If urban theory is to move beyond this sort of eclecticism and incoherence, then it must certainly be underpinned by a conceptual scaffolding that at least meets the two requirements discussed above. In the present study, a concerted effort is made to achieve this goal by adducing a chain of conceptual relations such that, first, the logic of the urban land nexus is derived out of the interdependent logics of private and public decisionmaking in urban space, second, the logics of private and public decisionmaking in urban space are derived out of the logics of civil society and the State, respectively, and, third, the logics of civil society and the State are derived out of the logic of the capitalist mode of production at large (an ultimately durable and indeed, in conceptual turns, irreducible phenomenon). At the same time, it must be pointed out that the complex intermediations that occur as a mode of production finally manifests itself in the urban land nexus are never simply and uniquely unidirectional. Rather, as less durable events and structures arise out of more durable events and structures so there is a process of backward transformation such that the more durable is definitely modified and in part restructured by the less durable. In this way, the urban land nexus never simply dissolves away, via analysis, into its conceptual contexts, but rather retains a definite status as an object of theoretical enquiry, that is, as a question that provokes coherent and socially meaningful responses.

It goes without saying that the practicability of the entire intellectual project proposed here is to a very large degree dependent upon a clear demonstration that its major focus of attention—the urban land nexus—does indeed constitute a legitimate and conceptually fertile object of theoretical enquiry. Any final verdict on this matter must obviously be postponed until the major arguments of this book have been fully deployed. However, it is apparent, even at this stage in the proceedings, that the idea of the urban land nexus (in its combined private and public dimensions) does in fact raise a scientifically and practically significant question. It is a question that is addressed to the uniquely problematical manner in which land-contingent phenomena behave within the city, interact with one another, arrange themselves across urban space, evolve as an integrated geographical entity through time, create problems and conflicts, call for policy responses, and concomitantly induce idiosyncratic forms of political action and intervention. It is a question, as already indicated above, that resides within the wider problem of the meaning and structure of human society as a whole, and yet it cannot be assimilated without a correspondingly vast loss of information and insights into that wider problem, just as it cannot be simply broken down into a succession of more detailed problems. The pessimistic view of Castells (1977, page 62), who asserts that "urbanization is neither a specific real object nor a scientific object", is simply an evasion of the problem once it is seen that the phenomenon o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 The urban question in context
• 2 Mode of production, capitalism and the State: a general framework of analysis
• 3 Commodity production and the structuring of geographical space
• 4 Urbanization and planning: a brief record of some recent problems and policies
• 5 Mainstream approaches to urban theory
• 6 Urban patterns 1: production space
• 7 Urban patterns 2: reproduction and circulation space
• 8 The urban land nexus and the State
• 9 The origins and character of urban planning
• 10 Urban development and planning intervention: five illustrative sketches
• 11 Planning ideologies
• 12 Urban problems and urban planning today
• References
• Appendix
• Index