Beyond the City Limits: Urban Policy and Economics Restructuring in Comparative Perspective

10. Theoretical Methods in Comparative Urban Politics

CHAPTER 10 Theoretical Methods in Comparative Urban Politics fohn Walton This volume provides both a signal and exemplar of changes currently taking place in urban social science. As the editors argue in their introduction, urban studies have reached an impasse-a theoretical deadlock between approaches that explain urban development, distributional patterns, and ecological form as the result of either market mechanisms or structures embedded in the political economy. The tendency in each case is to deduce an explanation of urban events from the respective models of market competition or structural constraint and contradiction . As several authors in this collection note, the analytical style of both market competition and political economy is to "read off" interpretations of empirical events from a theoretical logic; to sustain the case by illustrating (not testing) the plausible fit between theoretical assumptions, selected empirical events, and proffered normative judgments. Ironically, both theories are economically determined-mirror images that stress, respec243 Copyrighted Material 244 REFLECTIONS tively, the inexorable force of market competition with its generally agreeable results or the irresistible contradictions of capitalism , which generate mostly losing struggles over inequality. The authors represented in this collection propose to find a way out of the impasse. Their aim is to rekindle urban studies by shifting simultaneously its analytical style from deducing theoretical uniformity to explaining empirical variation and its interpretive emphasis from economics to politics. In this conclusion, I shall attempt to frame the diverse contributions : to identify their common purpose, evaluate its successful realization, and indicate the directions in which it may fruitfully lead. The editors have stated the aims of this enterprise in what I judge to be three well-taken points. I. Neo-conservative market-oriented analyses (for example those by Peterson, Kasarda) and, with greater emphasis here, neo-Milrxist political economy (for example Bluestone and Harrison, Castells, Harvey) have produced erroneous theoretical accounts of urban change. Their common errors include: the reification of markets or structures, a failure to recognize or explain variation in the patterns of urban policy and performance, and a neglect of agency. 2. By focusing on the political process it is possible, on one hand, to incorporate the urban effects of markets and economic structures and, on the other hand, to demonstrate how these forces are politically mediated to produce a variety of policy and practical outcomes . 3. Theoretical generalization will proceed from an accumulation of comparative studies that allows for the identification of essential causes of urban change across cases and behind the welter of casespecific factors. These are, as I say, sensible points and together they provide the foundation for a fresh start. The Premises Elaborated In the first place, the problems of urban theory deserve a little more elaboration. I am dubious about the symmetries drawn between the theories of the market and political economy, Copyrighted Material Theoretical Methods 245 although I would not dispute the explanatory limitations of each. The editors give more space to criticizing the second approach, which is fine if that is meant to suggest that political economy is the more challenging of current explanatory models. It must be stressed, however, that these two approaches have never been direct competitors in any temporal or theoretical sense, despite some recent reinterpretations that would make them so (Gans 1985). Within urban sociology, for example, the market model of ecological dominance and succession was moribund and generally supplanted by studies of community power and social organization (Gans 1962; Suttles 1968) long before political economy enjoyed its meteoric rise in the 1970S in response to other developments including the "urban crisis" and a short-term radicalization of the discipline. Indeed, political economy theorists like Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977) argued with relish that their approaches faithfully incorporated the reliable empirical detail of work on land use and urban ecology, but went on to supersede it in general interpretations. Market theories, moreover, talked past the issue of political determination without really engaging the process, while structuralist approaches at least attempted to link economic exigencies with political action through the vaunted subject of social movements -which, to be sure, typically owed their existence to contradictions between the decisive economic demands of capitalist accumulation and secondary political responses. That said, however , political economy has continued to strive for a more integral or relatively autonomous treatment of class struggles and political movements, notably, for example, in the recent work of David Harvey (1985), which moves some distance from the...