Cities in the International Marketplace: The Political Economy of Urban Development in North America and Western Europe (review)

Case studies of urban development tend to produce generalized theories of political decision making and economic growth and decline. However, in the last thirty years cities have responded to the great challenges of contemporary urban restructuring — the transformation from a manufacturing to a postindustrial economy, the deconcentration of urban downtowns, and the globalization of labor and capital — in surprisingly different ways. In their mammoth volume, Savitch and Kantor account for these differences through a comparative study of ten cities that have taken different paths to success and crisis. Five of these cities are prosperous global centers — New York, Paris, Milan, Toronto, Houston — while the authors politely identify the remainder as "distressed": Detroit, Glasgow, Liverpool, Marseilles, and Naples. In the end, Savitch and Kantor argue for a theory of urban change that recognizes cities as strategic actors with the ability to shape their own destinies.

According to the authors, economic forces combine with political realities to shape the bargaining contexts in which cities operate as they vie for capital investment and other resources. As might be expected, favorable market conditions play a strong role in determining how much leverage a city may be able to wield against powerful interests; for example, Milan's bargaining strength lies in its commercial diversity as a center of professional services and technology as well as high fashion. But in addition, the integration (or diffusion) of the intergovernmental systems surrounding such cities plays a substantial role as well. For this reason, the strong linkages among city, regional, and national authorities in western European nations such as France and Italy tend to be fiscally beneficial to their metropolitan regions. Policies of national intervention not only boost cities in enviable market positions such as Paris but consistently bail out otherwise endangered urban centers such as Naples. Meanwhile, federal aid to U.S. cities has decreased considerably in recent decades, which has led New York to pursue entrepreneurial strategies that generously subsidize private developers and business firms, while leaving Detroit to sink even further into urban despair.

At the same time, cities strategically pattern their decision making according to their more local particularities, including their political cultures and regimes of popular control. For example, Toronto plays host to an active constituency whose goals are informed by postmaterialist values, such as community preservation and sprawl control. Consequently, its civic leaders regularly opt for social-centered development projects that limit neighborhood clearance while promoting land conservation and mixed-use policies. Meanwhile, cities with urban cultures influenced by more materialist concerns, such as jobs, position themselves accordingly by relying on tax deferments, wage credits, environmental deregulation, and other incentives to attract large-scale employers.

To be sure, urban scholars will not necessarily be surprised by most of the findings presented here: indeed, comparisons between Paris and Detroit rarely produce shocking results. Nevertheless, Cities in the International Marketplace makes three important contributions to the field of urban political economy. First, the authors frame development as a strategic choice made by cities operating as social agents rather than as powerless victims in the world system. As opposed to simply following the interests of capital, cities can and do make investment choices in accordance with their own local political landscapes, and often these decisions run counter to a growth-oriented approach.

Second, Savitch and Kantor recognize that even as globalizing trends remake our world capitals into the cookie-cutter shapes and sizes configured by Disney, Starbucks, and Microsoft, the individual trajectories of cities continue to diverge from one another as well. Although it is true that many global cities have achieved a certain aesthetic convergence by adopting similarly postmodern lifestyles accentuated by shopping malls, gentrified tech corridors, and fast-food franchises, great diversity exists with regard to how national policies, governing arrangements, city resources, local popular control, and political cultures affect how cities operate within the international urban...