By adopting the market economic approach to local economic development, urban administrators are given the impression that they can do little more than "hunker down" and engage in increasingly more intense levels of competition within the "urban hierarchy" for private investments and higher-income residents. Competition is, therefore, not just the most basic prescription that emerges from the market perspective, it is the "only" prescription all else either derives from this prescription, or is irrelevant.
As far as prescriptions go, however, competition is one which, politically and administratively, has been inadequate and positively harmful. In large part, this has been because the ecological or market perspective fragments attention by focusing on individual transactions as opposed the broader concerns of politics, administration, or their complementary roles in the democratic governance process. As such, it acts to hide the “ideological biases and... inevitable tensions and disagreements that arise in a multiethnic society of tenacious inequalities, precarious democratic practices, and deeply ingrained capitalist values” (Beauregard, 1993: 267).
And, while the market perspective may be capable of tolerating minor descriptions and analyses of politics, the opportunities and consequences associated with these questions are, in no way, comparable to those associated with democratic urban governance. The term "democratic urban governance" is defined here as a democratically organized system of guidance or steering whereby local institutions (Selznick, 1957, 1984) exercise public authority, leadership and representation of the interests of all, rather than some, citizens. Local institutions are involved in the governance process to the extent they are accountable to, and draw their legitimacy from, citizens subject to their authority. Where these conditions are met, these institutions collectively act to enhance the long-term welfare of citizens, to meet their common needs, and further distributive justice (Warren, Rosentraub & Weschler, 1992; Wamsley et al., 1990).
At issue is the capacity for dealing with problems like concentrated poverty, long-term debt, urban crime, environmental protection and urban economic development. These require long-term comprehensive treatment. They require the type of broad-based, bi-sectoral cooperation that money cannot buy, and that a strict market-economics approach cannot support.
More broadly, these requirements have been equally elusive within the urban development politics literature mainly because it has ignored its indebtedness to the field of normative political philosophy. Over the past several decades, this literature has stripped itself of all reference to its classical ancestry, and has replaced (i.e., downgraded) this with a more empirical/ expository approach to urban politics. Having done so, market-economists have been able to use something of a "camels nose" approach to invade this field.
To further illustrate this point, the field of urban development politics has been aware of the private domination of local government since the early works of Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd (1929, 1937). Yet, because of its infatuation with empirical methods, few of its scholars have relied on the more critical methods as a basis for questioning whether private interests should dominate urban government, or what happens to the distribution of values when they do so, or what qualities are essential for those who dominate the most financially consequential area of urban policymaking. They have been unable to address these types of concerns because empirical methods are only capable of supporting causal explanations. These concerns do not lend themselves to causal explanation rather, they require, and lend themselves to, moral justifications.
Taken together, the rigidities of the market perspective signal a crucial limitation for the theory of urban economic development. As such, the theoretical home of this perspective (i.e., the urban development politics literature) may have little utility for those who attempt to understand the role of politics and public administration in urban development policymaking much less for those who attempt, more practically, to analyze the system from a democratic urban governance perspective, or to re-design those systems that fail the underlying criteria of this perspective.
Therefore, while acknowledging the value of the market-economics perspective, I have chosen to follow, at least initially, in the footsteps of those who have examined urban development policymaking from the more comprehensive, urban political-economy perspective (Logan & Swanstrom, 1992: 7; Elkin, 1987; Stone, 1989; Swanstrom, 1988).
Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.
About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. Hes now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see
http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.