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

2. Political Paradoxes of Urban Restructuring:Globalization of the Economy and Localization of Politics?

CHAPTER 2 Political Paradoxes of Urban Restructuring: Globalization of the Economy and Localization of Politics? Edmond Preteceille The processes of urban restructuring that are taking place in many countries point to some paradoxical aspects of theoretical paradigms in social science, particularly when we try to examine their economic and political dimensions together. Economic change is characterized by a growing interdependence among local enterprises and increasingly international markets, financial institutions and flows, processes of technological innovation and diffusion. At the same time, most countries experience a revaluation of local politics. Local governments are promoted as major actors of urban, social and economic change, often with responsibilities and resources increased by policies of state decentralization . 27 Copyrighted Material 28 URBAN POLICY Local actors, summoned to promote local economic development , are looking for pragmatic solutions, and will eventually ask researchers to help solve the dilemma of necessary but elusive local economic activity. The first responsibility of researchers is to provide theoretical tools to help in understanding the problem as a whole. And this is where the paradoxical relations between economic and political-institutional changes come in. The most attractive and successful paradigm for the analysis of economic restructuring and its urban and regional implications, developed as part of the economic regulation theory, is the crisis of the Fordist regime of accumulation, leading to the emergence of a new flexible regime of accumulation. It is focused on industrial change and is little interested in the state, whether central or local. In parallel, regarding the renewal or rediscovery of the local dimension of social practices and of local power inside the state, two trends of analysis have developed: one focused on the dynamic of social movements and the restructuring of local communities from the base; the other looking at the politics of institutional reforms from the top. Both have few, if any, links with economic dimensions of analysis; the first eventually considers defensive reactions to the consequences of restructuring as one stimulus for the renewal of local community life, but the second leaves out in most cases the question of the relation between politics and class relations, when that question is not simply dismissed as mechanistic . This chapter discusses how each of these perspectives, whether its main concern is economy or politics, questions the other in its capacity to provide coherent and efficient ways of understanding the various aspects of socioeconomic and urban change. Marx versus Weber, once again? It cannot be summarized that way, since theoretical elaborations derived from both traditions can be found on each side. Marxists or neo-Marxists have been criticized as economistic and mechanistic, often as a way to dismiss their work without considering it seriously.' Although such a critique is often accurate, social science research using Marxist concepts and hypotheses has, since the mid-I970S, paid much more attention to politics and the state and to the elaboration of more complex explanations striving to link the formerly separate spheres. Copyrighted Material Political Paradoxes 29 It is a difficult task. The difficulties are both theoretical and empirical in the construction of explanations recognizing at the same time the specific dynamic of the various social relations-production and political, gender, and ethnic-cultural ones-and their structural interactions.2 Because it has become fashionable, regulation theory tends to spread out in a simplified version that promotes a recurrent form of economism where some seek a simple solution: the magic words "crisis of Fordism" and "flexible specialization" would produce a global explanation of each society deducted mostly from the restructuring of the major industrial production processes. The authors of the regulation theory, for example Boyer (I986al, are themselves much more cautious and aware of the difficulties and complexities of the necessary analyses. Starting from a discussion of the French case, with some elements of comparison with others, I shall try in this chapter to show the necessity of systems of explanation considering the articulations between economic and political processes in their specific historical development in each social formation. Three issues will be discussed: economic restructuring analyzed according to the model of flexible specialization, the increasing economic mobilization of local governments, and decentralization trends and policies. To what extent can they be considered as related processes, contributing to the establishment of a new regime of accumulation with its new regulating mechanisms? To what extent do they reveal different or diverging trends expressing the contradictory character of social relations in our societies...