5130 urban political economy
structure and social power in explaining urban
urban political economy
Leonard Nevarez
One of sociology's original and most fundamen
tal questions is: how does the city shape social
life? The answer provided by urban political
economy is: as a mechanism in the accumulation
of wealth, with all the power and inequality that
results. "Political economy" generally refers to
the scholarly paradigm that examines how mate
rial processes of production and exchange shape
and are shaped by decisions made in economic
and political institutions; with "urban," this
concern centers around material production of
and within cities. Since the 1970s, urban political
economy has influenced the field of urban
sociology, bringing insights from other disci
plines - particularly social geography (with its
conceptualization of social space and place) and
political science (the focus on government and
law) - while retaining sociology's social con
structionist framework. Sociology provides an
especially hospitable discipline for urban politi
cal economy's investigation of the ways in which
the city's economic and political relations cohere
and evolve across institutional, legal, and terri
torial domains.
Urban political economy emerged as a cri
tique of the urban ecology paradigm, particu
larly the latter's explanation for the growth and
structure of cities and regions. By emphasizing
the spatial competition for resources by indivi
duals, groups, and institutions, urban ecology
has viewed political hierarchies, economic actors
and laws, and other social institutions as expres
sions of more fundamental and pre conscious
forces. Its corollary that city governments, local
business elites, urban planners, or racist neigh
borhood associations, for example, are not the
"real" agents of urban structure and relations
had long struck a cadre of conflict oriented
urban sociologists as a problematic denial of
social power. By the 19 50s and 1960s, urban
ecology's inability to understand critically the
problems of white flight and urban poverty
in the US as well as urban and political unrest
throughout the world created a breaking point
for many urban sociologists. Consequently,
a first generation of urban political economists
began to emphasize the role of economic
relations.
THE NEO MARXIAN TRADITION
Urban political economy updates the theore
tical legacy of Karl Marx around the urban
condition, a topic he did not address exten
sively in his nineteenth century writings. First,
neo Marxians explained the city's evolution as
structural expressions of historical relations of
production. Beginning in the early twentieth cen
tury, their argument goes, industrial capitalists
promoted the flight of manufacturing to the
urban periphery and the growth of residential
suburbs to advance their class interests in,
respectively, avoiding the costs of aging and
inflexible urban infrastructure and dispersing
urban hotbeds of labor unrest. Industrialists
promoted these interests in the political and
cultural realms via federal policies and cultural
sentiments promoting homeownership, subur
ban development, and the encouragement of
growth in America's "Sunbelt" region (where
the union tradition is much weaker than in the
older "Rustbelt"). In urban sociology, these
early neo Marxian claims appeared in the
1970s and 1980s alongside other intellectual
agendas that, although not necessarily sharing
the same conflict orientation, put urban class
relations at the forefront of the field. Research
on dual labor markets, immigrant entrepre
neurs, ethnic niches, and related issues have all
benefited from the neo Marxian insight that
economic forces do not merely express social
relations but in fact drive them as well. How
ever, by emphasizing capitalism's causal role,
this early urban political economy research in
turn raised a question that casts doubt on urban
sociology's disciplinary relevance: is the city
merely a container for larger social forces?
A powerful rejection of that question began
with a largely European cadre of neo Marxian
scholars whose work integrated "urban" with
"political economy" in new and compelling
ways. First, British geographers starting with
David Harvey explained how investment in land
provided important functions for capitalism.
Borrowing the idea of space as a "secondary
circuit of capital" from French sociologist
philosopher Henri Lefebvre (whose urban

writings at that time were mostly untranslated in
English), Harvey contended that land and the
built environment offer capital an important
alternate site for investment when industrial
investments soured. With this claim, Harvey
reframed urban sociology's traditional interest
for urban and regional development into a struc
tural Marxist theory of capital accumulation. By
assigning landed capitalists a distinct role vis a
vis industrialists and financiers in the structural
dynamics of capitalism, Harvey also established
a new interest for the social role of landlords,
developers, and other capitalists who profit from
the built environment. Next, the Spanish born,
French trained sociologist Manuel Castells the
orized that the "urban" corresponds specifically
to relations of collective consumption, those city
based services, housing, and infrastructure
provided by the state with which people repro
duce their labor power. His claim particularly
resonated in Western Europe and Latin
America and launched a neo Marxian research
agenda that examines urban politics, grassroots
protest, and urban movements as expressions
of class relations distinct from the capitalist-
worker conflict usually emphasized by neo
Marxians.
THE NEO WEBERIAN TRADITION
If Marx gives urban political economy its con
cern for the structural dynamics of capitalism,
Max Weber's legacy provides the conceptual
vocabulary with which to understand social
power and human agency. This is underscored
by the curious fact that for Marx, the notion of a
"ruling class" is somewhat a contradiction in
terms. Governance involves political processes
that, to have theoretical integrity, must not be
entirely determined by other social realms; yet
Marx famously gave little credence to politics'
autonomy from material relations of production.
Consequently, structural Marxists like Harvey
had no vocabulary with which to understand
urban power and political contingency apart
from the structural determination and historical
conjunctures of the economy.
Reasserting its intellectual relevance, the
American school of urban sociology reintro
duced the neo Weberian question, "Who gov
ems the city?" posed previously within political
urban political economy 5131
science during the 1950s and 1960s. In this
earlier community power debate, Floyd Hunter
and other proponents of the elitist perspective
argued that a core group of private urban elites
regularly and successfully promote their inter
ests through city hall. Rejecting this claim,
Robert Dahl and other advocates of a pluralist
perspective countered that private interest
groups may prevail on certain issues, but not
consistently enough to dominate urban politics.
Eventually, the community power debates
reached an impasse over inconclusive findings
as well as theoretical and methodological differ
ences. By the 1970s, as urban political econo
mists studied the ways in which cities generate
wealth for capitalists, it became clear with hind
sight that neither side in the community power
debate had theorized the material interests of the
city's power holders in a substantial way.
Consequently, urban political economists
adapted neo Weberian premises to the neo
Marxian problematic and identified the social
production of urban space - that is, city building
- as the institution that organizes the material
interests and galvanizes the political dominance
of urban elites. This means that urban govern
ance is not confined within urban governments;
just as important are the private decisions made
by place based entrepreneurs and businesses to
make money. Harvey Molotch crystallized this
idea with his theory of the growth machine, a
territorially defined coalition of urban elites
from across public, private, and civic sectors
that promotes growth in order to advance its
common interests in intensifying land based
exchange values (higher rents for developers
and landlords, increasing tax revenues for local
governments, new readers for local newspapers,
more ratepayers for utilities, more jobs for local
trade unions, and so on). With his colleague
John Logan, Molotch identified the class rela
tions and political stakes underlying the growth
machine, asserting that the exchange value
interests of growth machines invariably portend
environmental impacts, infrastructure strain,
fiscal constraints on public services, and other
material conflicts with the use value interests of
residents. For urban sociologists, the growth
machine theory transcended the earlier com
munity power debate by identifying urban
growth as the consensus agenda (which elitists
emphasized) underlying the overt conflicts and
5132 urban political economy
political factions of city hall (which pluralists
emphasized).
Contemporary research on urban power
has further developed the insights of growth
machine theory, which did not theorize in detail
on how urban elites engage the political realm,
under what conditions they cooperate with one
another (in fact, urban elites may be divided by
vested interests in different parts of the city or
different kinds of growth), or how effective they
are in attracting urban growth and achieving
political hegemony. These issues have been
taken up by urban regime theory, a school of
urban political science that has influenced urban
political economy since the late 1980s. An urban
regime is the set of formal and informal arrange
ments that makes urban governance by a public-
private coalition possible. As Clarence Stone has
explained, urban regimes vary by the agendas
that their participants pursue; some are radi
cally progressive, while others simply maintain
the political status quo. However, the most
frequently observed type is the development
regime enacted by pro growth elites, although
for reasons that go beyond the shared interests
of the growth machine. Just as importantly,
actors in the development regime most effec
tively marshal and share the political benefits,
business opportunities, and other "selective
incentives" that enforce cooperation and prevent
dissent within their public-private coalition.
NEW PATTERNS OF URBAN
RESTRUCTURING
Since the 1980s, urban political economy has
developed in large part as a response to the dra
matic shifts in economies, politics, population,
and settlement associated with urban restructur
ing. This concept has pushed urban political
economists to identify what is qualitatively new
and significant about capitalism's transforma
tions of the city. For example, the globalization
of traditional American industry, on the one
hand, merely demonstrates at a larger scale
structural dynamics that spurred the growth
of the American Sunbelt decades earlier: indus
trial capital's vulnerability to site specific labor
costs and labor control, and its benefits from
geographically uneven development. On the
other hand, the technological and organizational
innovations that made globalization possible
have generated unanticipated economic, spatial,
and social outcomes.
In her global city thesis, Saskia Sassen
explained how the financial capitals of New
York, London, and Tokyo have assumed new
centrality in the coordination of transnational
corporate (TNC) activity. This is not because
these global cities attract TNC headquarters,
many of which have in fact left major cities,
but instead because they concentrate the social
networks of smaller financial and advanced busi
ness service firms that oversee, respectively, the
capital investments and legal organizational
management needed by TNCs. Sassen's insight
that geography, markets, and networks assume a
coordinating role formerly contained within cor
porate bureaucracy parallels a larger theory
about the geography of "flexible accumulation."
Rejecting the popular wisdom that place no
longer matters in globalization, this theory
documents the central function offlexible indus
trial districts in industries where skilled labor,
entrepreneurial companies, and specialized sup
port systems cluster, such as Silicon Valley
(technology), Hollywood (film), Paris (high
fashion), and the "Third Italy" (textiles).
Amidst the global context of capital mobility
and job flight, these and other economically
vibrant cities and regions in fact witness eco
nomic polarization and social inequality, due to
economic growth as well as stagnation. For
instance, well paid workers in booming techni
cal, cultural, and creative industries create new
demand for consumer services that employ low
skill labor. Also, some creative industries remain
competitive by relying on local sweatshops
(endemic in fashion centers like New York
or Los Angeles) or other informal enterprises.
Manuel Castells and John Mollenkopf have
described the subsequent urban structure with
their idea of the dual city. In its more glamorous
half, new professionals revitalize once staid
urban economies, gentrify abandoned neighbor
hoods, and stimulate the growth of coffeeshops,
bistros, bars, and other high end consumer ser
vices. In its less affiuent half, working classes
become less secure with the exodus of manufac
turing and other activities that once created
decent paying union jobs, while new immi
grants leap over older ethnic and racial groups
to manage and fill the low paying service and

sweatshop jobs, or to sell goods on the street in
informal economies.
Theoretically, globalization underscores how
the dynamics of growth and decline extend
beyond the scale of any one city, region, or even
nation. Not surprisingly, urban restructuring
has thus challenged urban political economy's
models of human agency. On the one hand, the
structural context in which growth coalitions
operate has always been "global" to some
extent, as companies choose a location from a
variety of places, and places' competitive advan
tages are influenced by non local factors like
state budgets, national federal mandates, and
interest rates. On the other hand, capital invest
ment and urban growth increasingly materialize
in a decentralized, market form. At least in the
new economy's industrial clusters, the decisions
that bring growth are made by a number of
actors too large for any growth coalition to sway
effectively with conventional lobbying. As urban
political economy keeps abreast of the structural
changes associated with urban restructuring,
the paradigm's practitioners continue to reeval
uate what constitutes the "political." Does the
neo Weberian focus on political institutions'
legitimacy, interest groups' pressure politics,
and coalitional power plays still have explana
tory value in this era of urban restructuring? If
so, just how much, and at what scale does it
explain?
SEE ALSO: Capital, Secondary Circuit of;
City; Global/World Cities; Globalization;
Growth Machine; Inequality and the City;
Social Movements; Uneven Development;
Urban Ecology; Urban Policy; Urban Renewal
and Redevelopment
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED
READINGS
Castells, M. (1983) The City and the Grassroots. Uni-
versity of California Press, Berkeley.
Dahl, R. (1961) Who Governs? Yale University Press,
New Haven.
Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital. University
of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hunter, F. (1953) Community Power Structure. Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Logan, J. & Molotch, H. (1987) Urban Fortunes.
University of California Press, Berkeley.
urban poverty 5133
Mollenkopf, J. & Castells, M. (Eds.) (1991) Dual
City. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
Nevarez, L. (2003) New Money, Nice Town. Routle-
dge, New York.
Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City. Princeton Uni-
versity Press, Princeton.
Stone, C. (1989) Regime Politics. University of
Kansas Press, Lawrence.
Tabb, W. & Sawers, L. (Eds.) (1978) Marxism and
the Metropolis. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
urban poverty
David J. Harding
While a technical definition of the urban poor
includes those individuals in families with
incomes below the federal poverty line who live
in metropolitan areas, most research on urban
poverty focuses on racial and ethnic minorities
living in segregated, high poverty neighbor
hoods in central cities. The study of urban pov
erty lies at the intersection of several sociological
fields, including race and ethnicity, immigra
tion, stratification, and urban sociology. As a
predominantly problem oriented field, urban
poverty research attempts to understand the
roots of urban dilemmas such as crime and
delinquency, single motherhood, unemploy
ment, and low levels of education, often drawing
theoretical concepts from other areas of sociol
ogy such as social capital, networks, and cul
ture. The causes and consequences of spatially
concentrated poverty and the intergenerational
transmission of poverty are also frequent sub
jects of inquiry. A recurring debate in this field
is whether income inadequacy causes problem
behavior or whether problem behavior causes
income inadequacy.
The study of urban poverty dates back to the
founding of sociology as a discipline in the US
with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro,
first published in 1899. Du Bois developed the
oretical ideas that remain important to this day,
including the connection between spatial isola
tion and social exclusion. Sociologists of the
Chicago School largely viewed urban poverty
as a temporary stage in the incorporation of
immigrant groups from abroad and of migrants
from rural areas. High population turnover, lack