Vol. 28, No. 2 - Spring 2022

Jeannine Chandler, Ph.D.

Making Partisan Gerrymandering Fair: One Old Methods

and

Two New

"Should we Trust the State?" Narratives on How Evicted Vendors Respond to Reconstruction of Their Wet Market in Post-Reform, Urbanizing Shanghai Jiannan Shi

Concrete Implications? How Confederate Monument Removal Shapes Political Attitudes in the United States Isabel Rudie

of

The Game Theory Analysis of the Section 301 Investigation 2018: The Role of Threat Power

in

Alyssa Heath

Huijie Xu

& international affairs

Development for Whom? Understanding the Global Imprint Contentious Urban Development Under a Neoliberal Order

journal of politics

Steven J. Brams, Ph.D.

Spring 2022

Conflict on the Global Stage: East Asian Relations Through the

1 Pop-Cultural Ascent of BTS

Volume XXVIII, No. 2

Journal of Politics & International Affairs

Spring 2022

Spring 2022 • Volume XXVIII • No. 2 New York University

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Spring 2022 • Volume XXVIII • No. 2 Journal of Politics & International Affairs New York University

spring 2022 • VOLUME XXVIII • No. 2

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SPRING 2022 • VOLUME XXVIII • NO. 2 Notes on the Contributors Conflict on the Global Stage: East Asian Relations Through the Lens of BTS' Pop-Cultural Ascent Jeannine Chandler, Ph.D.

Making Partisan Gerrymandering Fair: One Old and Two Methods Steven J. Brams, Ph.D.

"Should We Trust the State?" Narratives on How Evicted Vendors Respond to Reconstruction of Their Wet Market in Post-Reform, Urbanizing Shanghai Jiannan Shi

Concrete Implications? How Confederate Monument Removal Shapes Political Attitudes in the United States Isabel Rudie

Development for Whom? Understanding the Global Imprint of Contentious Urban Development Under a Neoliberal Order Alyssa Heath

The Game Theory Analysis of the Section 301 Investigation in 2018: The Role of Threat Power Huijie Xu

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This publication is published by New York University students. The university is not responsible for its contents.

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SPRING 2022 • VOLUME XXVIII • NO. 2

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

The Journal of Politics & International Affairs at New York University is a student-run publication that provides a forum for outstanding student work on relevant, thought-provoking topics in the domestic and international landscape, including research in political science, economics, and regional studies.

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

We believe that the student theses published biannually in the Journal – chosen and edited rigorously by our editorial staff – are legitimate and valuable examples of the intellectual growth of politically-minded students and writers at New York University.

NOTES Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted for libraries. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale. Message sponsored by the NYU Center for Student Life and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Articles published in the Journal of Politics & International Affairs do not represent agreement of beliefs or methodology from NYU or the Editorial Board, and readers are not expected to concur with all the opinions and research expressed in these pages. Instead, the diversity of the pieces aim to inform and inspire dialogue in the NYU community by addressing a wide variety of topics and opinions.

Pragya Parthasarathy

Rob Loeser

DIGITAL MANAGING EDITOR Natasha Roy

PRINT ASSOCIATE EDITORS Jacy Chan Laura Phelan Joshua Pazmino

DIGITAL ASSOCIATE EDITORS Ziare Clark Sumaiya Faruque Ryan Carney

EDITORS

Alan Sun Grace Buechler Rishi Dhir Ojas Kharabanda Anaya Galibdin Cooper Lynch Shreya Vasagiri

OUTREACH DIRECTOR Fabiha Khan

Archival volumes of the journal may be found online at

JPIANYU.ORG/JOURNALS Spring 2022

SPECIAL THANKS Annie Cassutt Center for Student Life

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Want to Write for the Journal?

Our editorial staff accepts submissions for consideration throughout the year. To submit your work, or to inquire about being published on our website, email jpia.club@gmail.com.

Pitch to the Journal your original long-form essay or thesis: Works that are published by the print Journal are at least 5,000 words or 20 pages, double spaced, and include an abstract. Submissions are vetted based on their originality, salience, academic strength, and syntax. Works that are chosen are then polished by the Editorial Team. The Journal is published biannually. Submissions from NYU students, as well as non-NYU students, are welcome.

Join JPIA's Digital Team: Our website publishes short blogs that are often around 500 words and feature unique, and creative insights into political issues, current events, and international affairs. We also welcome long-form, reported pieces that are typically 1,000-2,000 words, allowing writers to explore more complex topics with a heavier research component than the blogs. Please reach out to the Editor-in-Chief or the Digital Managing Editors for more information on applying to be a digital staff writer.

Stay upated: To keep up with the Journal or get involved, follow us on our website (jpianyu.org), Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Editor's Note am reflecting on my time at the Journal of Politics & International Affairs as the year ends.

Despite all that has upended our very concept of normalcy in the last four years, the Journal has never withered in its ambition and commitment. With each event that would seemingly beleaguer and debilitate our publication, we have used it as a reason to persist and succeed. To oversee this team and witness their palpable resilience as we adapt to these unprecendented times has given me such pride.

I am even prouder to welcome an ever-growing community of people ready to challenge the status quo, be it in our digital space or print journal. Ending my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, our staff is the largest it has ever been, and our output and traffic have grown multiplicatively year-over-year. We optimized our publishing process, receiving the widest submissions pool in our print journal’s history.

In Spring's print edition, our authors examine phenomena at the forefront of sociopolitics: domestic and international, historical to present. I have the privilege of featuring Professors Jeannine Chandler and Steven J. Brams, who lend their expertise and experience to our academic forum. Professor Chandler uncovers the lasting strains of nationalism in East Asia through the rise of K-pop group BTS, reflecting the contemporary flashpoints between China, Japan, and Korea; Professor Brams introduces a novel way to make partisan gerrymandering fairer through horizontal and vertical district divisions.

I am also proud to feature four brilliant theses. The strengthening governmental capacity of China carries decisive economic implications; questioning the State's integrity, trustworthiness, and influence is Jiannan Shi in his study of the reconstruction of Shanghai's wet market. As American political history faces national outcry, Isabel Rudie writes on the removal of Confederate monuments and the connections between symbolic politics and racial attitudes. Under the Neoliberal Order exists urban crisis: Alyssa Heath explores the intersections of the neoliberal world economic system, urban development, and the perpetuation of social and economic inequity in her multi-continental case study. Our last piece, by Huijie Xu, examines the Section 301 Investigation of the US-China trade war, illuminating her findings on threat powers influencing the movements of the two players, their payoffs, and prospects of the war's progression during the Biden Administration.

These authors impart trenchant and necessary analyses of our state of affairs. This publication is proud to empower them, providing our audience with such compelling pieces. When we contemplate these works as one cohesive whole, at their heart is consciousness. Examining this theme in concert with each issue our author explicates urges us to be aware of the pitfalls ingrained in our institutions, authority figures, and norms. Complacency with their oppression makes us complicit.

Something else we make axiomatic at this publication is the power of language to liberate us.

Churchill said that history is dictated by the victors, but with the written word and open eyes, we reclaim the power of narrative: acknowleging our collective accountability and initiating necessary action.

In this pursuit, we carry great responsibility. To capture all the nuances of our political moment – the terrors and triumphs, the strategic stalemates and ethical dilemmas, the liminalities everywhere in between – is no small feat. I fervently believe if we have expressed even an essence of that complexity in our writing, this publication is achieving its mission. Though the expedition to a more just world is nowhere near over, like I have affirmed in the past, we are dedicated to working towards it.

Spring 2022

9 As the fifteenth Editorial Board adjourns, we enter a new year. When our publication was founded over a decade ago, I wonder if my predecessors at the time entertained how much we would flourish. It is certainly bittersweet this is my last semester at the Journal and New York University, but I am confident and glad to pass this publication onto the most adept of hands, where it will continue to excel to new heights. Our members have the brightest futures as they become scholars, leaders, and activists. It has been my honor to amplify their gifted voices and support their development.

As its evolution continues, I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity for this community to shape and better me along the way. It was this publication that showed me how deeply transformative a supportive team and friendship could be. With the utmost care and gratitude, I will pay it forward.

To my writers and editors, I thank you for your time and hard work. I thank you for your trust in me. And to our readers—thank you for your support. Without you, we wouldn’t be here.

I wish you all my very best. It's been an unforgettable four years.

Pragya Parthasarathy Editor-in-Chief

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS PROFESSORS JEANNINE CHANDLER, Ph.D.

Jeannine Chandler, Ph.D. is a Clinical Associate Professor at the NYU school of Global Liberal Studies.

Prof. Chandler teaches the history of unfamiliar cultures, ethnicities, and geographical areas. Her research specializes in the history of the intersections of religion, politics, and violence in Asia, particularly concerning Tibet and China. Her past publications have focused on the politics of the Tibetan Independence Movement and Western involvement in the Dorje Shugden Controversy.

STEVEN J. BRAMS, Ph.D.

Steven J. Brams, Ph.D. is a Professor at the NYU Department of Politics. Prof. Brams specializes in the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. His preeminent discoveries include the Brams-Taylor procedure, which solved one of the most important open problems in contemporary mathematics. His past publications have focused on cooperative, envy-free outcomes and allocations in two-player games.

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STUDENTS JIANNAN SHI

Jiannan Shi studies Social Science and Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai, from which he will graduate in May 2022. He is interested in the relationship between people's social lives and space, both physical and digital. From 2019 to 2020, Jiannan studied away at NYU's global campuses in Prague and New York, where he concentrated on exploring the role of media and space in society from global perspectives. He is now writing his undergraduate honors thesis on the social media usage for gay men.

ISABEL RUDIE

Isabel Rudie graduated Magna Cum Laude from New York University in December of 2021 with a high honors degree in International Relations and minors in French Studies and Studio Art. Her thesis, published here, won the Albert Borgman / Phi Beta Kappa Thesis Prize for Best Honors Thesis in Social Science as well as the International Relations Department Award for Best Thesis. Since graduating, she has been working as a strategist for a creative agency that focuses on campaign planning and marketing strategy Outside of work, Isabel is a freelance photographer, specializing in film photography and portraiture.

ALYSSA HEATH

Alyssa Heath graduated from New York University with honors in May 2021 from Global Liberal Studies with a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development and a minor in French. In her time as an undergraduate, she was a Millennium Fellow, a Peer Mentor while studying in Paris her junior year, and studied abroad on the International Honors Program — traveling to India, Brazil, and South Africa. In the future, she hopes to pursue her passion for civic governance and geopolitical development by joining the Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State. Originally from Chicago, she currently lives in San Francisco and is working at a startup.

HUIJIE XU

Huijie Xu will graduate from New York University in May of 2022 with an M.A. in Politics. She obtained her B.A. in Political Science and Public Administration from Xiamen University in 2020 as a Distinction Graduate. Her area of research and interest include international relations, comparative politics, human rights, and conflict studies. Her M.A. thesis examined the motivations behind the rhetoric of the U.S. and Russia at the Security Council meetings.

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Conflict on the Global Stage: East Asian Relations Through the Pop-Cultural Ascent of BTS Jeannine Chandler, Ph.D.

Clinical Associate Professor, Liberal Studies New York University The historical and cultural links between the countries of East Asia (in particular, China, Japan, and Korea) have provided a foundation for encouraging cooperation in foreign relations, as well as in economy and trade. However, the persistence of historical memory and the global rise of nationalists highlighted the mutual tensions between the three nations. In analyzing these conflicts in East Asia, the rise of the K-pop group BTS (Bangtan Seonyeondan) provides us with a window or lens through which we may observe the continuing strains in these relationships.

The shared heritage between China, Japan, and Korea dates back to the Han Dynasty. From this period on, the substance of Chinese civilization, including the use of written Chinese, and the adoption of Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism, ultimately influenced Korean culture and development, and from there (albeit through a Korean filter), the culture and development of Japan. Shared heritage did not preclude hostilities and war; China and Japan occupied and dominated the Korean peninsula in the premodern era, while in the modern era, Japan incorporated Korea and parts of China into its World War II empire. Indeed, the threats of Western imperialism and colonialism drove the mid-twentieth-century conflict between the countries of East Asia, as each nation struggled to avoid colonization and come to terms with the forces of modernity.

Japan’s economic and military rise began during the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912); in this new era, Japan’s efforts in modernization and their modeling of Western political and military customs prompted their interest in expanding their influence beyond the borders of the archipelago. This interest ultimately manifested in the gradual encroachment into and subsequent occupation of Korea, the conquest of which was solidified with Japan’s victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). Japan’s expansion continued throughout the early twentieth century with the occupation of Manchuria (and the subsequent establishment of Manchukuo as a puppet state) and gradual forays into different areas of China until war ultimately erupted between the two in 1937. This Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) was particularly brutal; Japanese war crimes, as well as Japan’s perceived reluctance to acknowledge and atone for those crimes, remain in the historical consciousness of Chinese and Korean people today. In the immediate post-WWII era, prompted by the burgeoning Cold War, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into North and South, each backed by the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively. Adding to the Cold War tensions was the success of Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in China in 1949. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea with the aim to unite the peninsula under a single communist

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government. South Korea, aided by the United States, pushed back, driving the North Koreans back to the Yalu River. Chinese troops then joined the North Koreans in driving the American and South Korean troops back across the 38th parallel. The war ended in a stalemate in 1953. Since that time, each of these three countries has been transformed into an economic powerhouse: China (from a struggling nation under Mao), Japan (from a US-occupied former empire), and South Korea (from a fledgling democracy).

Layering upon the surface of these historical tensions, various contemporary issues have contributed to the mutual enmity between the three countries. China, Japan, and South Korea have competing maritime territorial claims in the East and South China Seas. These territorial disagreements are entangled with specific national concerns regarding military build-up and economic expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, and inflected by the heightened tensions between China and the United States.

Relatedly, East Asia is home to the second and third largest economies in the world (China and Japan respectively) and, arguably, the most significant economic boom in the modern era.1 As such, the market stakes are high, and East Asian countries are looking to maintain and increase their shares in the global economy.

Amidst the Korean cultural wave, the success of BTS functions as a lens through which to view the aforementioned international struggles amongst the countries of East Asia. BTS, comprising seven members, debuted on the Korean music scene in 2013. Their popularity and fiercely loyal fandom have grown meteorically, evidenced by their dominance of pop charts and award shows, breaking of records, first in Asia and ultimately around the world. Their music and branding have brought billions into the South Korean economy; they have been named cultural ambassadors by President Moon Jae-in, and have appeared as speakers at the United Nations General Assembly (more than once).2 Even as BTS dominates the global pop culture scene, a closer look at several incidents involving the group over the past five years exposes the deeper rifts between China, Japan, and South Korea.

For example, in 2017, China-South Korea tensions intensified with the installation of the American THAAD missile defense system (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) in South Korea. While the US and South Korea have maintained that this system protects South Korea from a potential North Korean attack, the Chinese government has claimed that THADD system will be used to track Chinese military actions.3 In response, China enacted a ban on South Korean media; K-dramas disappeared from Chinese streaming services, and major K-pop groups were banned from giving performances in China, with Korean idols being denied visas. While this ban has eased somewhat, no major K-pop act, including BTS, has performed in China since 2016. In October of 2020, another incident exacerbated Sino-Korean tensions. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Korean War, the Korea Society granted BTS the James A. Van Fleet Award (an award that celebrates the furthering of US-South Korea relations). In the group’s 1 Cary Huang, “China, Japan and South Korea must choose: history or economics,” South China Morning Post (January 5, 2020), https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3044565/china-japan-and-southkorea-must-choose-history-or-economics 2 Sammy Westfall, “K-pop icons BTS appointed South Korea presidential special envoys ahead of U.N. General Assembly,” The Washington Post (September 14, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/2021/09/14/bts-un-assembly/ 3 Lauren Teixiera, “K-pop’s Big China Problem,” Foreign Policy (July 30, 2019), https://foreignpolicy. com/2019/07/30/k-pops-big-china-problem/

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JEANNINE CHANDLER, Ph.D.

acceptance speech, BTS leader RM (Kim Namjoon) acknowledged the shared losses of South Korean and American soldiers during the war. He stated: “we will always remember the history of pain that our two nations shared and the sacrifices of countless men and women.” The perceived slight of not mentioning China’s war casualties outraged some Chinese netizens on social media. Increasing Chinese nationalist anger resulted in the short-lived Chinese boycotting of BTS products and Korean companies.

Similarly, over the past several decades, the strained relationship between Japan and South Korea has revealed the festering wounds of colonization and war from the previous century. In November of 2018, BTS member Park Jimin was criticized by the Japanese media for wearing a t-shirt containing text that celebrated Korean independence alongside the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. This event spurred anti-Korean sentiments in Japan; a scheduled BTS television performance on Japanese television was cancelled, as was an advertising contract awarded to member V (Kim Taehyung).

The ghosts of history thus shadow contemporary East Asian relations, and continue to goad tensions between China, Japan, and Korea. The rise of BTS reflects the contemporary flashpoints between these countries, as shown through a recounting of the Chinese and Japanese responses to the perceived political messaging of its members. While these incidents showcase the political and historical sticking points between China, Japan and Korea, it should be noted that, despite the stances of their respective governments and state media, these incidents have not perceptibly damaged the relationship between BTS and their Chinese and Japanese fans.

Fall 2021

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Making Partisan Gerrymandering Fair: One Old and Two New Methods Steven J. Brams, Ph.D.

Professor of Politics, Department of Politics New York University Objective. To introduce a novel way to make partisan gerrymandering fair.

Methods. In the context of two parties, divide a state into two geographical areas, each of which contain a number of districts that are roughly proportional to the share of the statewide vote received by each party in the last congressional elections. Allow each party to unilaterally design the districts in a designated area of the state, restricted only by traditional districting principles. Adaptations may be made to account for more than two parties.

Results. Each party gerrymanders but is limited to doing so in its designated area of the state, with results that are roughly proportional to the statewide vote. Conclusion. “Fair gerrymandering” is a way to counter unfair partisan gerrymandering and it is likely to reduce the number of uncontested elections and increase voter turnout.

Gerrymandering has a bad name because the party in control of a state typically divides the state into House districts that give it more than its fair share of seats in Congress. The solution I earlier proposed to this problem (Brams, 2018) is to divide the state into two parts—each roughly proportional in population to the number of votes the Democratic and Republican candidates received in the last congressional elections—and allow each party to gerrymander its part unilaterally.

For example, if a state has 10 congressional districts and the Democratic Party candidates won 60 percent of the statewide vote in the previous congressional elections, it would receive a part that comprises 60 percent of the population (and six seats) and the Republican Party a part that contains 40 percent of the population (and four seats). I discuss later two new methods for determining how these parts can be determined: 1. Create a partisan replica of the entire state, insofar as possible, in each of the two parts. In the preceding example, each part would be 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican, duplicating the partisan makeup of the entire state.

2. Give the majority party the right to proportionally divide the state into the two parts. The minority party would then choose whether its part is clockwise or counterclockwise of the radius of a circle that encompasses the state (more details on this method later) and be able to gerrymander this part unilaterally.

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STEVEN J. BRAMS, Ph.D.

Each party would be subject to traditional redistricting principles of compactness, contiguity, respect for preexisting political boundaries; and preservation of communities of interest. In Brams (2018), I called this fair gerrymandering, because each party could gerrymander only the districts in its part.

Background

To compare this method for constraining gerrymandering with how gerrymandering works today, consider the 2014 congressional elections in Pennsylvania, in which Republicans won 55.5 percent of the statewide congressional vote. Because they controlled the state legislature, they were able to gerrymander Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts so that they won 13 districts (72.2 percent) and the Democrats only five in 2016.

With fair gerrymandering, the Republicans, as the majority party, would have been able to divide the state in two, with one part comprising 10 districts and the other eight, which approximates the 55.5–44.5 partisan vote split favoring Republicans in Pennsylvania in 2014. In 2016, the Republican gerrymander of its part probably would have garnered it about seven or eight of the 10 districts in its part, and the Democratic gerrymander probably would have garnered it about six of the eight districts in its part.

Overall, each party probably would have won about its proportion of the statewide vote—a very different result from the 13–5 split favoring Republicans in 2016.

Ideally, of course, it would be preferable to eliminate gerrymandering entirely by having an independent commission draw the district lines of a state. Laws have been enacted in six states to do this, but it is highly unlikely that the other 44 states will move quickly to reform the districting process.

(In Pennsylvania, however, a court challenge by the Democrats led to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court apportioning the state into mostly competitive districts in the 2018 elections, with each party winning nine seats that year.)

In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek that partisan gerrymandering could no longer be litigated in federal courts, although it could be challenged in state courts, as it successfully was in Pennsylvania in 2018. Barring such a challenge, however, partisan gerrymandering will probably remain a fact of political life in most states controlled by one party for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, if agreed to by the Democratic and Republican parties in a state, fair gerrymander, in my view, would not contravene the Supreme Court decision because it would still allow partisan gerrymandering but restrict it to each party’s part of a state.

If fair gerrymandering is not a perfect solution, it is a pragmatic one that constrains the degree to which gerrymandering can be exploited by one party. In Brams (2018), I suggested that the majority party be able to draw a more or less straight line that cuts the state into two parts, each roughly proportional to the votes received by each party in the last congressional elections.

What about minor parties that qualify to receive one or more congressional seats in larger states?

I suggested that after the two major parties receive their parts of a state that reflect their vote shares in the previous congressional elections, minor parties would then be permitted to divide the remainder of the state according to their shares.

This is not entirely fair, because the Green Party, for example, is unlikely to win in any congressional districts. But being able to gerrymander two or more congressional districts may better enable a minority party to help its preferred major party win in these districts—as well, perhaps, as moving this party toward its positions.

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Fair gerrymandering will work better the larger a state is. If a state has only two or three districts, the majority party may be able to divide it so as to win all of them. But with four or more districts, the minority party will have more and more ability to gerrymander its part so that it wins a proportional share of districts in the state.

A more sophisticated version of fair gerrymandering, which would require two cuts, applies the principle of “I cut, you choose.” The majority party would make a cut that gives it the extra districts to which it is entitled (beyond 50 percent). In Pennsylvania in 2016, this would be a part that contains 10 – 8 = 2 districts, which it would presumably be able to gerrymander so that it wins both.

The minority party would then be able to divide the remaining 16 districts into two equal parts, which in Pennsylvania would each contain eight districts. The majority party would then choose the part it prefers, and the minority party would get the other part. This would give each party a good chance of winning most of the districts in its eight-district part. I discuss a version of this approach, using two cuts, in the next section.

The fact that one party will predominate in its part of the state is not entirely fair to voters of the other party who live in that part. But their votes will not be entirely wasted because they will count toward how the state is split into districts two years later.

Two New Methods

Dividing a state into two parts with a straight line, with each part roughly proportional to the votes each party received in the last congressional elections, opens up a plethora of possibilities. To reduce this number drastically, the first new method I propose singles out one division as preferred.

1. Make each of the two parts, insofar as possible, a partisan replica of the entire state, using two lines, rather than one, to divide the state into two parts.

For this purpose, embed a state in a circle whose center is the population center of mass of the state. This is the physical point in a state about which the population is evenly distributed.

Put another way, this center equalizes the “pull” of the population in all directions. It may be in a big city, or it may be between two or more cities in an underpopulated part of the state. It is the point at which the entire population of the state can be concentrated that balances its pull in all directions.

No matter what the shape of a state, the circle in which it is embedded, and the population of the state itself, can be divided into proportional parts by two radii emanating from the population center of mass. (Think of the radii as the two hands of a clock, which effect a proportional division of the state into two parts.) The first new method selects the two radii that render each part, insofar as possible, a partisan replica of the entire state.

Thereby, each party, when it unilaterally gerrymanders its part, would face a similar task because the partisan division of each part would be essentially the same as for the entire state (e.g., 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican). Of course, the distribution of the population of Democrats and Republicans in each part may be quite different, making one part easier to gerrymander than the other.

Nevertheless, the fact that each party faces the task of gerrymandering a replica of the entire state, with the same partisan makeup, is one way of giving the parties similar opportunities to maximize their seat totals in their parts.

2. Determinate the radii by divide-and-choose.

The majority party would select a radius of the circle in which the state is embedded, and the

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STEVEN J. BRAMS, Ph.D.

minority party would choose a second radius, either clockwise or counterclockwise of the first radius, that gives it its proportional share of seats. In effect, the two radii that emanate from the population center of mass would divide the state into proportional parts, but the partisan makeup of each part may be quite different.

This method gives each party a say in determining the location of its part, which it can then gerrymander. This seems preferable to having the majority party draw a single straight line through a state, dividing it proportionally. Typically, this line would not go through the population center of mass, which seems a useful point of departure in dividing a state into two parts, but the partisan makeup of each part may be quite different.

Although the second method gives one party the choice of one radius and the other party the choice of the other radius, neither party has a choice of the radii in the first new method. But the first method gives the parties similar opportunities to gerrymander their parts because they have the same partisan makeup.

It is useful to compare the different outcomes that the two new methods might produce. Assume a state has two representatives, and the partisan division of the state (in percentages) is as shown in the following square, whose four quadrants each contain one-fourth of the state’s population: 55 D, 45 R

55 D, 45 R

45 D, 55 R

45 D, 55 R

If we divide the state vertically, so one part (i.e., district) comprises the two quadrants on the left and the other the two quadrants on the right, then each district will be 50 D, 50 R. The first new method would give this division because it creates replicas of the entire state, which is 50 D, 50 R in each of the two districts.

By comparison, the second new method would give the parties, when choosing the two radii, the choice between a horizontal and a vertical division (the two radii would in fact be a diameter of the circle around the square, going through the center of the square. A horizontal division would give the Democrats the top district (55 D, 45 R) and the Republicans the bottom district (45 D, 55 R), whereas a vertical division would give the same partisan makeup (50 D, 50 R) of the left and right districts.

If the parties are risk averse, it seems likely that they would choose the horizontal division, ensuring each of one district. But if they are risk prone, they would choose the vertical division, giving each a chance of winning both districts, but also a chance of losing both or splitting them. Thus, the two methods may lead to very different outcomes, with the first giving the parties no leeway in choosing a division and the second allowing them some choice.

Neither method is a panacea in making gerrymandering fair by ensuring that each party can obtain a number of districts approximately proportional to its vote share in the last congressional elections.

But each should facilitate the parties’ ability to prevent extreme gerrymanders, whereby the party in control of a state is able to gerrymander the entire state and thereby win a disproportionate number of districts.

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References Brams, Steven J. 2018. “Making Partisan Gerrymandering Fair.” Hill September 7. Available at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/405426-making-partisan-gerrymandering-fair.

Duchin, Moon. 2018. “Geometry Versus Gerrymandering.” Scientific American November 1.

Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geometry-versus-gerrymandering/iH.

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"Should We Trust the State?"

Narratives on How Evicted Vendors Respond to Reconstruction of Their Wet Market in Post-Reform, Urbanizing Shanghai The wet market in China upholds shopping meanwhile social and cultural meanings. The capital-driven urbanization and government-led regeneration projects are transforming the wet markets into vegetable markets in post-reform China, sometimes neglecting the situations the vendors in wet markets would face after that transformation. This paper draws evidence from ethnography and interviews with vendors around a former traditional wet market under reconstruction in Shanghai. It presents the evicted vendors’ responses and narratives to reconstruction: relocations and emotional coping. Economically, vendors re-produced their space after the eviction to cope with the loss of their marketplace ecosystem. The relocations are subject to the vendor’s perception of urban regeneration policy and Hukou-related native places. Emotionally, the vendors’ narratives around urban regeneration show their ambiguous definitions and attitudes towards “guojia” [the state]. The state's role is salient in transforming the wet markets and evident in the micro-level interactions and decision-making among vendors.

Introduction

For local Shanghainese, housewives often greet each other with a question: “Have you been to the vegetable market this morning (今朝侬小菜场跑过)?” (Zhu 2012). In this city, these wet markets have special cultural meanings, besides their foundational function in satisfying people’s need for food in daily life. People’s Daily contributors Wang et al. (2015) once described these markets as critical platforms not only for trading food but also for Chinese urban life in social activities.

Despite their significant cultural meanings, the position of wet markets have been challenged in the surge of modern supermarkets after China’s economic reform, or “Reform and Opening-up [改 革开放]” in the 1980s. In Shanghai, the government and the capital side initiated massive campaigns in reconstructing these traditional wet markets. The Shanghai Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau issued the Municipality’s local standards in the Norms on the Establishment and Management of Vegetable Markets (DB31/T344-2005) in 2005, which regulated the appearance, food quality, and management.

After that 2005 standard, a new report from the Shanghai government encouraged the new wet market standardization, the “2.0 version,” which advocated for a “supermarket-like management mode and malllike shopping experience” to replace its traditional format (Wu and Zhang 2017). Meanwhile, government-

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sponsored media describe the 2.0 wet market as a “scannable” one: the customer can check the price or track the origin and source of food by scanning the QR codes on the products (Anon 2017). From the business side, capitals are transforming the wet markets into corporation-owned, profit-making supermarkets. For example, Fmart (上蔬永辉), a cooperation between the state-owned Shanghai Vegetable Group (上海蔬 菜集团) and the private Yong Hui supermarkets, is constantly expanding their commercial layout, setting a model of “2.0 version” wet market (Chen 2016, Wu and Zhang 2017). Although the government has not announced it, state-owned media have begun advocating the 3.0 version of wet markets. Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening News disclosed that equipping “a new central kitchen that could provide catering services” may distinguish the 3.0 wet market from its 2.0 version (Sun 2019). Shanghai-based media Yicai, or China Business Network, took the “Wanyou Fairs” as an example of a 3.0-version market because these Fairs could provide a “one-stop experience for the residents”: the first floor is the supermarket-like food market, but the second floor works as a shared space with “a central kitchen, a café, an early childhood education center, a barbershop, a gym, a dancing studio, etc” (Luo 2017).

The transformation of wet markets goes hand in hand with urban reconstruction projects in Shanghai. Shanghai Old City Area was once referred to as a “dirty, disorderly, and bad (脏乱差)” place (Anon 2015). The Huangpu district government described this area as “a tough bone to gnaw (难啃的 硬骨头),” as it is an area where “urban problems are concentratedly exposed” (Huangpu Government 2016). According to residents, the vendors used to be scattered around this area, selling food or vegetable before a campaign in 2015 after Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Mr. Zheng Han visited this area. He initiated this campaign of driving the “floating” vegetable vendors on the street into a centralized indoor marketplace, namely Wanyouquan (directly translated as “a comprehensive place with ten-thousands of goods”) Yuyuan Wet Market (万有全豫园菜市场, also referred to as Yuyuan Market), and this market was built under the standard DB31/T344-2005.

Later on in 2016, the “Remodeling Shanghai Old City Area (重塑老城厢)” started here until today, and it has attracted the media’s attention because of the complex and disordered history within this area. The red-shaded area in Figure 1 indicates the coverage of the Old City Area. In this campaign, Yuyuan Market becomes a targeted place pending reconstruction because of its prime location. “Wanyou Fair,” a 3.0-version wet market advocator, set its target in transforming this already-standardized market into a profit-making and fashion one. In March 2019, reconstruction begun. With only one month's notice beforehand, all of the vendors were evicted abruptly and without compensation which uprooted them from their livelihoods.

In the narratives on the remolding of wet markets, both the government and the mass media give a positive interpretation by comparing how the reconstruction will benefit the local landscape and the residents’ lives. Meanwhile, in most of the state media presentations and articles published on government websites about the urban reconstruction going on regarding wet markets, the voices of the people who will be running a business inside these markets have been absent.

Where would the vendors go? How would they cope with the losses resulting from reconstruction?

This research paper will seek to address how these vendors coped with their losses both economically and emotionally. How did they perceive the reconstruction? By answering these questions, I will construct narratives from the individual level on how the state-sponsored corporation-led urban reconstruction and development could have an impact in post-socialist China and how the affected understand such impact.3 Through observations around the market area and interviews with vendors, this paper examines

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the narratives of the vendors in the market in terms of economic coping and emotional responses and how they perceive the reconstruction.

After the eviction, vendors coped with the economic loss by spatial relocations: they re-produced spaces of business. Vendors’ narratives have been around an ambiguously defined concept “guojia” [the state]. The different levels of confidence in guojia result in different emotions on eviction as well as urban regeneration in Shanghai. The state is not only shaping the macrostructure of the urban landscape; its role is also embodied in the micro-level interactions among vendors. In this embodiment, the state becomes a question in the mind of the evicted vendors: should I trust the state?

Literature Review

Sociologists understand space as a constructed product beyond physical existence (Durkheim 2001, Lefebvre 1991). French philosopher Lefebvre (1991: 410-11) contends that space projects social relations. He put forward that space is composed of conceived space, perceived space, and lived space as a triad (Lefebvre 1991). People may conceive, perceive, and subjectively use spaces in different ways and subsequently produce space through them. In the development of wet markets in Shanghai, the state, market, customers, and retailers are entangled in shaping and reshaping the market landscape through history and interpersonal interactions, socially producing spaces.

In socialist China, the exercise of power in food markets came from the state and the socialist system. In examining the urban vegetable supply in China, Skinner (1978: 733) notes that “the logistics of feeding the urban population is critical in any complex society, indicative inter alia of priorities and procedural preferences in the social system.” It was the comprehensive caishichang – or directly translated as vegetable markets – run by the state that supplied vegetables, and the grain was sold separately in the specialized shop or general food market run by the state with strict regulation of supplying (Skinner 1978).

Such a model of the food supply is referred to as an “urban public good regime” (Solinger 1995). An urban Hukou status was the basis to enjoy the planned services and food supplies.

As China transitions from socialism, the power exercising in the space for food retailing is changing. With the population growth and the transition from the planned economy to the market economy, Solinger (1995) notes that the “urban public good regime” has broken down in the surge of massive peasants moving into the cities. The research from Zhang and Pan (2013) shows that vegetable retail is no longer part of the state-provided public service but, instead, a profit-seeking business run by capitalists.

Since the emergence of modern supermarkets in China, the existence of wet markets has been challenged. To elaborate, Hu et al. (2004) examine that due to the government policies in China, the growth rate of the supermarket revolution is higher than in any other country in the world, which they predicted could trigger society’s preferences for supermarkets rather than traditional wet markets.

In a similar vein, Reardon et al. (2012) observed that the “supermarket revolution” was happening in developing Asian countries, including China. In the revolution, the modern food retail approaches link farmers to the modern supermarkets directly, supplying food without retailers in traditional wet markets.

Besides modern supermarkets, the existence of wet markets is also threatened by the political economy of urban growth. Logan and Molotch (1987) treat the city as a growth machine in which the pursuit of economic competitiveness is the focus of urban growth. In the political economy of urban upgrades, the wet market can be replaced because it lacks the potential to favor the national investment nor to favor the

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business elites.

Overall, these studies examining the changing landscape of food retail are either attributed to the institutional structure or from a large-scale investigation of customers. However, on the individual level, few scholars have examined how the procedure of changing the market could impact vendors. In examining migrants’ response to eviction, Zhang (2001) presents a thorough case study that the Wenzhou migrants in Beijing took collective actions after the demolishment of Zhejiangcun to appeal for a return.

However, in the wet markets, the composition of vendors is more diverse than in Zhejiangcun, where people had native-place recognition from Wenzhou and the mutual trust built among them. In wet markets, both the local residents and migrants from all over the country have a share in the business. Therefore, how the vendors cope with their loss due to market reconstruction remains to be explored.

Research Design

This paper draws evidence from three field visits to the post-eviction Yuyuan Market area and interviews with residents, vendors, and customers there from April to May 2019, when I am a second-year undergraduate student. I identified evicted vendors through informal interviews with people in the field and approached them for semi-structured interviews. In this paper, I will present stories mainly from three individuals while using affirming accounts from other interlocutors to enhance the comprehensiveness of my analysis.

In this research, I do not aim to conclude how vendors respond to reconstructions but to give voices to diverse individuals and understand their narratives through their personal, historical, and social experiences.

The Field: Yuyuan Area

Yuyuan area (the shaded area in Fig. 1) is under a remodeling project. On April 7, 2019, I went there for the first fieldwork. Posters are put up all over the neighborhood, indicating that the massive demolition is happening here (see Fig.2 Fig.3). The gate of the market was entirely shut down, and many construction workers were preparing for the construction (see Fig. 4). Grandma Fish and a tea stall painted their new address onto the gate (see Fig. 4). The messages left on the gate imply not only the efforts from the moved-out vendors in trying to keep their previous customers but also the close vendor-customer relationships that they founded when the market was open.

Walking around, I found several vegetables, meat, and fish stores that were operating under some other brand that does not indicate the actual business inside on the storefront signboard. In a shop branded “Home appliance repairment station,” fish vendors were peddling their little yellow croakers.

In the front of a ceramic shop, a vegetable vendor is selling bok choy. Residents nearby said that all of those people selling different things used to own stalls in the Yuyuan Market before its reconstruction. Cooperating shops are vendors’ self-initiated actions in response to their being evicted. Through informal interviews, I identified six stores that are run by the former vendors in the markets with whom I conducted semi-structured interviews, as marked in figure 5. Figures 6 – 8 show the scenes of how the storefront signboard contrasts the actual products that the vendors are selling.

During my visit to the Yuyuan Market on April 28, two elevators were installed for this four-story building which used to be a traditional wet market (see Fig. 8).4 The elevators imply that the new Yuyuan Market would be multi-storied, and the operational cost would be higher than in the previous market.

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Interviews

Semi-structured interviewing is based on my use of an interview guide in which I will ask questions on how the reconstruction process influences the vendors and the livelihood of the customers but meanwhile allows the interviewers to have the discretion in answering questions from their perspectives (Bernard 2006:210). Compared to the structured interview in which the interviewees would feel pressured about my questions and the unstructured interview in which the interviewees might question my insufficient preparation, the semi-structured interview is optimal in the setting of my research. The former vendors I interviewed still have their business in other stores after their being evicted from the wet market, and their discretion on how and what to answer my questions minimalizes the potential disturbances to their business. The semi-structured interviews created a relaxed atmosphere for both the customers and the vendors. A semi-structured interview allowed me to control what information I wanted to extract and follow new clues from the interviewees while simultaneously leaving space for the interviewees to tell their stories.

Vendors

The scattered vendors were my main pool of interview participants. During my interview with one ceramics shop, I discovered that the shop owner and I came from the same province, and speaking in the same dialect helped establish a rapport with him and other vendors. To the courtesy of the ceramics shop owner, I was able to connect with three other informants and the interviewees in a snowball sampling fashion.1 Considering their time and privacy concerns in speaking aloud on the street and considering my intention of disturbing their business to a minimal level, I offered all of them my phone number and WeChat account. Some of the quotes were from WeChat calls. I have also offered to compensate each interviewer with a tube of toothpaste (around 20 RMB per each), which is a common practice in social research in China.2 From the vendor interviews, I aim to 1) probe what policy of reconstruction they have heard from their previous market; 2) understand their interpretation of urban reconstruction; 3) attitudes and opinions on the policy and the reconstruction; 3) understand what aspects the eviction has impacted on them (what the previous experience in the Yuyuan Market was like in terms of income, working conditions, and how the reconstruction changed it); 4) know their response to the reconstruction: how they are planning to cope with the (potential) loss of financial source and interpersonal relationship.

For ethical concerns, I named all the interviewees according to their current workplace.

Stories From the Vendors Yuyuan Market as an Ecosystem

“Did it taste good last time you ate it?” I tried my best to understand Grandma Fish’s heavily accented Shanghainese. This was our first conversation when I met her: she misrecognized me as one of her aquatinted customers. After moving from the stall to her current address, her fish stall was no longer popular as before.

Starting her business in 1984, Grandma Fish was one of the first self-employed entrepreneurs after the market reform in China. She opened her very first stall, which sold smoked fish, a typical

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Shanghainese dish made from fresh fish, in the Yuyuan market in its first version, and this stall has been passed on by three generations until today. This long-time business has gathered a group of fish fans, some of whom would drive far away across the city in order to buy fish from her, and this is part of the reason why she would paint her address directly on the closed gate of the previous Yuyuan market. The son of the Grandma Fish proudly described the popularity of their stall in the previous market: “On average, if you want to buy our fish, you have to wait at least for two hours.”

Grandma Fish cannot succeed in business without support from other vendors in the market.

Shanghai’s local television station once featured their smoked fish. The presenter introduced that using fresh fish all the time had been one of the secrets for Grandma Fish to keep her stall vibrant. For Grandma, her secret was in the sociality that their family had established with neighbors. The son of Grandma Fish and the son of a fresh fish vendor was growing up together inside the market, and these two families have built an intimate relationship with each other. The fish vendor in the market would always reserve decent raw fish for Grandma Fish to buy.

Similar to Grandma Fish, the tofu stall bought its kitchenware, and the steamed bread shop got their ingredient inside the market. Interpersonal relationships were formed within the marketplace, and many of these businesses formed a mutually beneficial relationship with one another. Altogether, this built a strong sense of community. Many residents around this market recall memories of kids from different vendors playing with each other after school inside the market. A neighboring vendor would also take care of a stall when its owner was absent for a while. The vendors themselves have constructed an ecosystem inside the market, and the mutually dependent relationships have sustained their business inside the market.

Breaking of the Ecosystem: Economic Coping

Ms. Fruit is also a butcher who used to be resident in the market for more than ten years.

Qingqing Fruit, the place where she is currently at, stopped its business because of the lack of customers resulting from the large-scale house demolition project around that shop. Similarly, Ms. Fruit misses the old days in the market, but from an economic perspective. According to her, Wanyouquan, the previous company that runs the market, charges the vendors with a reasonable plan: 1000 yuan for a month, plus one-month rent as a pre-charged deposit. But now, she could only afford her rent in this current store using all the money she earned. “Sometimes it’s a breakeven, but most of the time since I moved here, I lose money. I am barely sustaining the running of this store.”

Mr. Crab has similar concerns but worries more about his customers. A butcher who worked in the market for more than ten years, he now must move outside. A crab store owner generously allowed him to use the crab store during the fishing moratorium. On the one hand, Mr. Crab acknowledges that he has been running his business in a breakeven situation due to the rise in rent since he came here. On the other, fewer customers come to buy meat. The red-colored slogans of urban reconstruction and house demolition are everywhere in the neighborhood where the Yuyuan market is located in. He said: “All the people are moving out with the money they get from the government; who would still live here to buy stuff?”

Regarding future choices, Ms. Fruit and Mr. Crab say in the same tone that they want to go back to the market even if it is upgraded. According to their information, if the previous vendors want to go back to the updated market, they need to pay almost 3,000 yuan per month with 17-month rent as a

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pre-charged deposit, which is almost 20 times the former price. Returning would probably place immense stress on their financial situations.

Different from Ms. Fruit and Mr. Crab, Grandma Fish is Shanghainese who lives right in the Yuyuan neighborhood, and she currently sells fish in her own home. She, as well as her son, express that they do not care that much about the upgrading of their previous market because they “would be back to the market in any case.” Grandma Fish presents a different story here. She and her son describe that the state government is lifting the quality (dangci 档次) of the market, and they are excited about staying in the market although they have left the market. Despite the positive tone from Grandma Fish, I did not see anyone come buy her fish in my three visits to her house. Contrasting the past images of a busy business and lines to buy her fish, the store is now in a financial decline and has received fewer customers every day. They have so much free time that in the three visits I paid to their store, and not once did I see any customers. From my observations, their business is declining even though their new address is painted on the closed gate of the market.

Breaking of the Ecosystem: Emotional Response

Clearly, Grandma Fish is excited about their new stall to return after the market is upgraded.

The son says every time when a campaign happens around the retailing industry, “there is always someone who gets weeded out, and those who stay would be the winner.” Grandma Fish is happy that her success in running this fish stall was a result of the state’s marketization of the economy. Her happiness comes from her previous experience in the market, which grants her confidence to continue her business in the upgraded market. Because of the media coverage and their good reputation, it seems that Grandma Fish and her offspring do not worry about their customers because they have a group of returning customers who would always find them no matter where they move.

However, Ms. Fruit and Mr. Crab do not think so and have low expectations about their situations. Ms. Fruit says that she is disadvantaged because she has a low education level, and she does not have Shanghai Hukou. Her only job has ever been to be the butcher. With more than 20-year experience dealing with meat, she has honed excellent skills in picking and cutting meat according to the needs of the customer. She says, “I have already been in such an old age, and I am not able to learn anything new.” Ms. Fruit appeals to a stable life. She wants to stay in Shanghai selling meat, but the realities that she is facing, soaring rent and the lack of customers, seem to be blocking her away from continuing to live in the city. Mr. Crab wants clear and enough space for him to run his business, which all could be achieved in the market instead of the individual shops.

Emotions towards "Guojia" [The State]

Grandma Fish is confident about every action that the state makes. She and her son describe the market reconstruction with positive words like “upgrade,” “progress,” and “elevate.” They consider their action in selling fish at home as a “temporary moving out,” which does not influence their long-term profit-making. During their moving out, they do not need to afford the extra rent that has troubled those who are not local. The neutral response to their income and the positive impression of the government’s action grants them a splendid image of the state.

However, Mr. Crab does not think so. He has witnessed how the Yuyuan neighborhood is disappearing since the remodeling campaign, and he clearly sees the role of government is affecting his

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business. He describes his opinion on the role of the state: If I could go back, I probably would only work there for one year or so, and then I’ll go back to my hometown. The local government doesn’t want us to be here. They force the market boss to raise our rent, and they drive our customers away. What the government has done is such a mess to us!

The ceramic shop owner presents a different view, and he considers that the reconstruction is the result of the nature of private capital instead of the government after the marketization of the vegetable retail industry. “No state, no ‘sense of discipline!’ [没有国家在，就没有纪律性]” The ceramics shop owner holds a strong trust in the government and blames the force from the market for the eviction of the vendors. “If we have the channel to voice up, we definitely will do. But the fact is that we don’t have any channel to voice; we are tired and such a small group of people. Also, we don’t know who the general boss of the new market is.” In his mind, the state is the role to which the people, whenever they meet trouble, could turn to. However, the current status of the scattered vendors cast doubts on the role of the state in his mind.

Ms. Fruit, as a 20-year experienced butcher in the market witnessing the changes of ownership repeatedly, regards the reconstruction as an action from the state and says that she would not trust the state in any cases now. She feels the government’s action in allowing the market to be upgraded without considering the interest of the vendors in the market is unjust. “The government bullies us, outsiders.” The calling for individual business opened her a door to survive and to live, but now the calling for upgrading the individual business is shutting the door to her survival.

Three different individuals present complex and different emotions towards the role of the state in their narratives. In their voices, the role of the state is never a fixed entity that shapes the wet market and the entire retailing landscape. The state is not only shaping the macrostructure; its role is also embodied in the micro-level interactions among vendors. In this embodiment, the state becomes a question in the mind of the evicted vendors: should I trust the state?

Conclusion

The reconstruction of the Yuyuan market is under the large-scale urban reconstruction and gentrification trend in Shanghai, a similar trend that has been taking place in many cities around the globe.

The capital-driven urbanization and government-led urban regeneration projects are transforming the wet markets into vegetable markets in post-reform China while sometimes neglecting the situations that the vendors in wet markets would face after that transformation.

Prior to reconstruction, vendors and customers co-produced the wet market as a lived space through interpersonal interactions. Their previous interactions had supported shopping, social, and even cultural activities as an ecosystem, but the reconstruction has broken these relationships. Instead of presenting a story of being permanently evicted from the city, vendors have re-produced their new spaces for business to cope with economic losses and also sustaining their interpersonal relationships.

For the vendors, narratives to respond to reconstructions of their wet market reflected the power dynamics among their perceptions of urban regeneration policy, hukou status, and different levels of confidence in an ambiguously defined concept “guojia [the state].” For the local resident, Grandma Fish, the reconstruction is a happy thing she could expect because her previous benefit from the market reform, housing, reputation, and many returned customers can give her and her fish stall confidence. She believes that moving out is temporary. But for the non-native migrant workers who came to Shanghai as vendors

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– Mr. Crab, Ms. Fruit, and the ceramics shop owner – the story is different. They are being evicted from the marketplace and moving out might not be as simple as a temporary solution. The high rent and few customers are blocking them from re-entering the market, and it is not possible for them to gain some new skills and change their job as vendors.

These factors made up the perplexity of how the vendors re-produce their space after their eviction from the original market: relocations to different places to cope with economic losses. The reconstruction of the Yuyuan Market results from the conjunct force of the state indication as well as the capital in the market, and the current livelihood of the vendors challenge their presumed image of a state that serves all people. While it is shaping the urban landscape from a macro view, the role of the state is embodied in the daily interactions, decision-making, and emotional narratives among vendors. In the minds of evicted vendors, the answers to the question “should I trust guojia [the state]” can never be the same. Each one of the individuals has different responses after the eviction, and even though the losses were real they can never go back to their original marketplace now.

Declaration

This research has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of New York University Shanghai (2019-038 “Previous vendors and customers’ response to the demolition of their wet market”; PI: Professor Yifei Li; Investigator-in-Training: Jiannan Shi). This research received no financial support.

The first version of this paper was submitted to fulfill the course requirement as a final research project for SOCS-SHU 360 Urban Sociology.

Note 1.

2.

3.

4.

Interviewees are the vendors are still selling vegetables near the reconstructing market from a snowball sampling. Thus, I can be challenged for not having had representative data in the research, and the research result may be biased if I treat all the vendors into a labeled group. However, it is not feasible for this research to gather all the contact of the evicted vendors to make a representative sampling because of their mobility. Also, for the interviews with previous customers in the market, it is hard to measure what the Yuyuan Market means to them because of their different habits of shopping, age, gender, and other characteristics.

I used toothpaste as compensation because it is introduced as a common research practice in China.

However, one unexpected pitfall of using toothpaste is the assumption that everyone should have teeth. In the neighborhood around the Yuyuan market, there were seldom young vendors who were selling food, and the vendors I encountered were suffering from tooth loss because of age and poor dental health conditions. I still gave them toothpaste with the explanation that toothpaste can also be used as a powerful detergent.

It can also be problematic to treat the vendors as a labeled group to probe what their coherent narrative is. In this research, I do not aim to analyze comprehensively on the aftermath of the temporary closing of a wet market from the perspectives of vendors. Rather, I aim to construct diverse narratives from individual responses to the reconstruction process, which is different from the institutional or media narratives on how the reconstruction benefits the overall urban development.

Considering the time limit of this research, I am not able to keep track of the vendors and customers for their future emotional change, the path of survival efforts, or shopping habits. These limitations

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Appendix

Fig 1. Areas of the remodeling Old City Area and the location of Yuyuan Market

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Fig. 2 Slogans on the wall: insist on the sunshine goal of house expropriation; construct a harmonious society; collectively construct a beautiful home; share the achievement from the urban reconstruction

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Fig. 3 A slogan is put up on the wall with characters meaning “Remodeling Shanghai Old City Area”

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Fig. 4 The gate of Yuyuan Market.

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Fig. 5 A map that indicates the location of the current footholds of the former vendors of Yuyuan Market.

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Fig 6. Vegetable and fish vendors are running their business with a home appliance repair service provider.

(Star 1 in Fig. 5)

Fig 7. A vegetable vendor is running their business with a ceramic shop (Star 3 in Fig 5), and a butcher (Ms. Fruit) is running her business under the signboard “Qingqing Fruit” (Star 4 in Fig 5).

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Fig. 8. A butcher is selling meat under the signboard “Crab Store” (Star 4 in Fig. 5).

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Fig. 9. Two elevators are installed in the building where Yuyuan Market was located.

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Sun, Yun 孙云. 2019. “ ‘Shanghai diyi dazhen’ jiang chuxian 3.0 ban caishichang Zidai zhongyang chufang kaizhan zhulao song can ‘上海第一大镇’将出现3.0版菜市场 自带中央厨房开展 助老送餐 [3.0-Version Wet Market Would Appear in the ‘Biggest Town of Shanghai’ with a Central Kitchen Providing Services to Help the Elderly].” Xinmin Evening News 新民晚报.

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Wu, Haifeng, Weiqun Zhang. 吴为群, 张海峰. 2017. “Shanghai biaozhunhua caichang jinru 2.0 shidai. 上海标准化菜场进入2.0时代 [Standardized Vegetable Farms in Shanghai Have Entered the 2.0 Era].” Shanghai Observer 上观新闻. Retrieved April 12, 2019. (https://web.shobserver. com/news/detail?id=48169.)

Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population. Stanford University Press.

Zhang, Qian Forrest and Zi Pan. 2013. “The Transformation of Urban Vegetable Retail in China: Wet Markets, Supermarkets and Informal Markets in Shanghai.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 43(3):497–518.

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Concrete Implications? How Confederate Monument Removal Shapes Political Attitudes in the United States Isabel Rudie

There is minimal existing research within the United States today that informs us on the significance of symbolic politics, and just how impactful physical symbols can be in terms of the shaping of history, interpretation of events, representation of government, and framing of a country's ideals. This paper hones in on Confederate monument removal to explore the effect such has on subsequent changes in Republican vote share and political attitudes of United States citizens. Using a two-way fixed effects model with electoral and monument data, as well as an ordinary least squares regression model with unique data collection via an online survey experiment, I find that the removal of Confederate monuments, on average, significantly decreases subsequent Republican vote share at the Presidential level and caused United States citizens to be significantly more likely to support and believe in the validity of the Black Lives Matter movement. The effects are even more extreme when considering gender and support for Donald. J. Trump. These findings add to a hyper-relevant and quickly growing field of research and literature pertaining to symbolic politics and its connection to political and racial attitudes in the United States today.

Introduction

It may be surprising to some just how often political conflicts are derived from contestation over physical spaces in a manner that has no concern for issues of territory and ownership. Rather, the issue at hand relates to the topic of symbolic politics, which can be most succinctly described as the “political exploitation of symbols such as names of public spaces, monuments, and other types of historical, religious, or ideological iconography” [Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020]. In recent years, conflicts of symbolic politics have exploded across the globe and within the United States, most often relating to issues of historical and racial representation, and power struggles dating back to the beginning stages of colonialism and wider-scale imperialist movements. Honing in on the case within the United States in the last decade, the issue of symbolic politics at hand has largely been related to systemic racism, police brutality, and Black Lives Matter protests that resulted in a concurrent surge of Confederate symbol removals, whether that be statues of Confederate generals from the Civil War, Confederate Flags on the steps of Southern courthouses, or renaming highways and schools that once memorialized historical Confederate figures.

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The intention of this paper is to analyze the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent differences in Republican vote share and the political attitudes of U.S. citizens. Despite the pertinence of symbolic politics to racial relations, political sentiments of individuals as well as larger groups, and increasingly frequent media coverage within the United States, empirical research on the topic as it relates to political consequences and effects is rather limited: “At the most basic level, we still do not know whether political manipulation of symbols has any systematic, measurable political repercussions.” [Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020]. Whilst Rozenas’ and Vlasenko’s empirical research contributed to the topic in the context of symbolic politics’ impacts on electoral outcomes in the case of Ukraine, this paper aims to progress this area of research further by investigating the same question in the case of the United States to shed light on how symbolic politics can impact individual-level political attitudes.

Recent developments within the United States such as the mass protests and disapproval of Confederate monuments following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in Summer 2020, the November 2020 Presidential Election results, and the accelerating pace of Confederate monument removals on a state-by-state basis to this day present a unique and timely opportunity for a systematic empirical analysis of this ongoing spectacle. However, the debate over Confederate monument removal is by no means unique to the last decade; contestation over Confederate symbols at the state and local level dates back at least thirty years [Rahnama 2020, Leib and Webster, 2007].

Although, the debate over what exactly Confederate symbols stand to commemorate (the main arguments being Southern cultural heritage versus racial prejudice and slavery) as well as nationwide efforts for their removal most definitely accelerated at a never before seen pace in the last five to six years [Rahnama 2020]. This acceleration of the dispute over, and disapproval of, Confederate symbols is most widely connected to aftermath of the 2015 Emanuel AME Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, in which white supremacist Dylann Roof, intending to start a “race war,” murdered nine Black people at a bible study meeting [Alderman and Dwyer, 2004, Domby, 2020]. Several photos became publicly accessible that depicted Roof holding a gun as well as the Confederate flag. South Carolina officials responded by passing legislation to have the Confederate flag removed from State house grounds.

The debate reignited oncemore in 2017 when the Unite the Right rally, which stood against the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in a “self-described Neo-Nazi” driving his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one individual. The leaders of several nearby towns responded by calling for local Confederate monument removal.

Following these events, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) assembled and continues to update a database mapping over 2,000 unique Confederate symbols in the U.S., with 702 monuments in total and 90 having been removed [Gunter et al., 2016].1 I combine this dataset with United States Presidential Electoral outcome data sourced from Decision Desk HQ as well as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab that includes election years 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. Combining these sources of data, I define treatment as Confederate monument removal that occurred between the 2000 and 2020 Presidential Elections. The outcome variable is the numerical change in Republican vote share between Presidential election years. The unit of analysis for this portion of my research falls at the county level, as this is the smallest-scope level of information gathered for the merged electoral and monument dataset. I 1 These figures correspond to the last verified version of the database from December 2020. I do not incorporate any updates to the database or additional removals after December 2020 in the analysis.

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employ a two-way fixed effects model for the analysis of this data, as this model accounts for the treatment of Confederate monument removal (or lack thereof, the control counties), county fixed effects, year fixed effects, and relevant controls. Variation in Confederate monument removal is both spatial and temporal [Rahnama 2020].

I augment my analysis with original data collection concerning political attitudes at an individual level via an online survey experiment. I define treatment as assignment to an article depicting Confederate monument2 removal that resulted following a Black Lives Matter protest in Birmingham, Alabama.

The outcome variable at hand is Political Attitude, measured in terms of opinion on the significance of monuments, support for BLM protests, belief in racial inequality throughout the U.S., and more indicators at an individual level relevant to the makeup of one’s general political attitudes. Naturally, the unit of analysis for this portion of my research falls at the individual level. I employ a randomized experimental design and analyze the results using an ordinary least squares cross-section regression model. This model is most fitting for my survey experiment because the treatment and outcome variables at hand at the level of the individual are associated with a single point in time. Further, the model can account for a vector of all relevant controls on individual characteristics for person i, and the randomized assignment to treatment balances the demographic characteristics I aim to control for.

The primary identification strategies utilized throughout this paper do not come without challenges. In the observational component of this study, potential selection bias stems from a counties’ ability to be treated given the differences in the status and number of monuments. To address the potential issue of the number of total Confederate monuments within a county affecting treatment and biasing results, I generate both “ratio removed” and “total monuments” variables so that the regression accounts for these differences between counties and in a sense, levels the comparison. In terms of my survey experiment, the identification strategy relied primarily on sampling schemes and the implementation of control-based questions within the survey. I will speak more to my methods of doing so below as well as in the Data/Empirical Design section.

Using a two-way fixed effects design for the observational analysis, I find that the removal of Confederate monuments, on average, decreases Republican vote share at the county-level. Because I am comparing the temporal changes in election outcomes relative to the changes in the presence of Confederate monuments within the same electoral county, these results cannot be driven by unobserved time-invariant characteristics of the locations where the Confederate monuments were removed. Robustness and placebo tests show that these results are unlikely to be affected by time-varying characteristics of the counties.

Using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression for my online survey experiment conducted at the individual level, I find that exposure to the treatment article concerning recent Confederate monument removal, on average, caused respondents to be significantly more likely to support and believe in the validity of the Black Lives Matter movement. Further, all political attitude outcome indicators exhibited positive coefficients, implying that the treatment article had an overall liberalizing effect on respondents. A series of questions related to demographics and knowledge of the topic at hand were included within the survey to act as controls so as to not bias the results and cause any problems in the effort to truly identify the causal effect of Confederate monument removal on key political attitude indicators like respondents’ 2 The SPLC dataset includes Confederate iconography beyond monuments, but I hone my analysis to focus only on physical monument iconography.

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views on racial inequality, the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations, the capitol insurrection, freedom of speech, and more. Further details on actions taken to preserve the robustness of the experiment’s results can be found in the Data/Empirical Design section.

This paper contributes to the existing research within American politics on Confederate symbols as well as the more global-scale topic of symbolic politics. The existing research concerning Confederate symbols has primarily focused only on removals concerning the Confederate battle flag [Rahnama 2020, Cooper and Knotts, 2006, Grose and Peterson, 2020, Hutchings et al., 2010, Orey, 2004, Strother et al., 2017]. Of the few papers that have considered the broader subset of Confederate symbols—physical monuments, plaques, names of schools, military bases, and courthouse grounds, etc.— none have studied the post-effects of actual monument removal as it relates to vote share and political attitude changes, to the best of my knowledge [Gunter et al., 2016]. Other than the aforementioned research by Rozenas and Vlasenko, the closest study to mine is by Johnson, Tipler and Camarillo (2019). Their research consisted of an online survey experiment measuring how deliberation and direct democracy affects support for the removal of the Confederate memorials in the U.S. My study takes on a different angle in this topic in that I am interested in the effects of the actual removal of Confederate monuments (as opposed to informational priming on deliberation) on both the individual level and on broader electoral outcomes.

Literature Review

It may be surprising to some that the majority of Confederate symbols and memorials built across the United States were not constructed in the direct aftermath of the American Civil War, which ended in 1865. Rather, there were two distinct periods many years later that mark concentrated increases in the erection of Confederate symbols across the country; most notably, the 1890s–early 1900s that accompanied an extensive increase in Jim Crow laws, as well as the 1950s and 60s during the raciallycharged civil rights movement [Rahnama 2020, Gunter et al., 2016].

The appalling events of Charleston, Charlottesville, Minneapolis, and countless others with less notable media coverage in the last decade have encouraged American researchers and historians to revisit the indisputable connection between lasting Confederate memorials and their effect on U.S. citizens’ impression and memory of the civil war. Competing narratives regarding what exactly Confederate symbols serve to represent is arguably the largest and longest ongoing reason behind their controversy.

The two main frames of thought considered in empirical research on the topic are firstly, the idea that Confederate symbols represent the valiant “Lost Cause” of Southern states fighting for their rights, which was spread and propelled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) [Rahnama 2020, Cox, 2003, Domby, 2020]. And secondly, the arguments advanced, in part, by Black civil rights leaders that view Confederate symbols as ongoing physical manifestations of racial prejudice and white supremacy [Rahnama 2020, Alderman and Dwyer, 2004, Moeschberger, 2014].

Following the aforementioned Charleston shooting in 2015, CNN conducted a national poll that found an insignificant change in citizens’ take on the meaning of the Confederate flag in comparison to results of the same poll given in the year 2000; 57% viewed the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage, and 43% viewed it as a symbol of racism [Roper Center, 2020]. This naturally raises the following question: is the difference in perceived meaning of Confederate symbols the only reason for the controversy surrounding their removals? A survey experiment conducted in 2019 tested whether the mode of decision making affects public attitudes, testing the effects of a decision made by a public referendum versus by a

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city council [Johnson et al., 2019]. In particular,, the authors found that, “respondents view decisions made by referendum to be fairer and more legitimate and allow multiple perspectives to be heard. These results hold even for respondents who oppose the referendum’s outcome” [Johnson et al., 2019]. These findings contribute to the literature on symbolic politics by advancing the conclusion that “direct participation in decision making can enhance satisfaction with a decision,” offering a modal approach for cities across the country that are actively dealing with the controversy around Confederate symbols within their area of jurisdiction [Johnson et al., 2019]. This paper aims to contribute a different, additional modal approach for municipality leaders, by offering evidence that demonstrates the political implications of how they choose to deal with existing Confederate symbols.

In a more similar line of approach to this paper, a recent study by Benjamin et al. (2020) incorporated the strengths of both (1) case studies of Southern municipalities that currently have or once had Confederate symbols, and (2) polling reports of people’s attitudes about these symbols in order to gain insights as to “why some monuments have been dismantled and others remain in place” [Benjamin et al., 2020]. Using a logistics regression design, the paper found that, “the size of the black population, the presence of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, and the percentage of Democrats in a county in which a monument exists—as well as whether the monument exists in a state that constrains removal by legislative decree—best predict whether a Confederate monument will be taken down” [Benjamin et al., 2020]. My hope is that in a similar fashion, this paper too “elucidates the interplay of race, partisanship, and local and statewide politics as it relates to the dismantling of Confederate monuments” [Benjamin et al., 2020]. The key component that differentiates this paper’s contribution from that of Benjamin e al.’s is the scope of study as it relates to monument status; this paper focuses directly on the post-removal effects as they relate to voting and political attitude changes and/or patterns at both the county and individual level.

Similarly to the aforementioned literature, Christian R. Grose and Jordan Carr Peterson set out to study the effects of economic concerns on Southerners’ likelihood to support Confederate monument removal and hence, “liberalize their racial attitudes” [Grose and Peterson, 2020]. Using three separate groups of Southern political elites and voters, the study conducted three separate survey experiments and used a simple OLS regression to analyze their findings. They found that overall, “Southerners were far more likely to support removing the flag from public property when told it would hurt the local economy.”

On a more specific level of their respondents, elected officials and voters went from “somewhat likely” to favor removal, to “very likely”, and county elected officials moved from “neither likely nor unlikely” to support removal toward “somewhat likely” when told it would hurt the local economy [Grose and Peterson, 2020]. Their findings pose a unique contribution to the field of research relating to Confederate symbols by introducing novel data collection that can point future officials dealing with Confederate monument concerns in their areas of jurisdiction to concrete evidence that economic threats “change the minds of both Southern elected officials and voters” [Grose and Peterson, 2020].

Once again, this paper fits in and contributes to the active research on Confederate symbols in a unique fashion different from that of Grose and Peterson and the previously discussed literature in that it focuses on the less often studied post-removal indicators and effects on political attitudes and voting. In a time of increasingly rapid Confederate symbol removals, with over 50 removed in 2020 alone (compared to just 5 in 2019), it is of the utmost importance that empirical research begins to consider the subsequent effects of said Confederate symbol removal; not just the widely discussed pre-removal effects

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and mechanisms relating solely to the Confederate flag, racial attitudes, and modes of decision-making [Gunter et al., 2016].

Further, the inclusion of both unique data collection at the individual level as it relates to post-removal effects on political and racial attitudes and larger-scale observational data that considers electoral shifts (the first to do so concerning Confederate monuments in the United States, to the best of my knowledge) is a weighty and significant research package worthy of note. I next outline the theoretical basis for why Confederate monument removal may shift Republican vote share up or down, as well as spur changes in individual political and racial attitudes in different directions.

Theoretical Expectations

The primary goal of this paper is to test how the removal of Confederate monuments after the 2000 U.S. Presidential election affected subsequent Republican vote share in the following Presidential Elections through year 2020, as well as how removals affect a range of political attitude outcomes, including measures on racial inequality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more. Relevant literature demonstrates the important role that physical symbols play in the political sphere; one paper argues that far more political scientists should treat “rhetoric and symbols as central rather than epiphenomenal to politics” [Wedeen, 1999]. Whilst theory has been published on symbols’ linkage to mass mobilization, group identity, and social conflict, as well as their use as modes of belief formation and decision-making, there is little that points to a direct hypothesis concerning voters’ reactions to manipulation of public symbols, and more specifically, their removal [Rahnama 2020, Brown and Ellithorp, 1970, Cobb and Elder, 1973].

It is important to clearly note that the supporters of Confederate symbols in current times are predominantly associated with the Republican party. With that assumption, there are various theoretical grounds that support the hypothesis that removal of Confederate monuments hurt the associated party, the Republican party, at the polls. According to Rozenas and Vlasenko, “symbols are short-cuts to complex ideologies and political platforms” [Gill, 2008]. In turn, Confederate monuments serve as supporting, propagative resources for sects of the Republican party, especially in deep-Southern states that were prior members of the Confederacy. In the context of communism in East Central Europe, political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse found that, “legacy parties often benefit from the infrastructural and organizational capital they inherit from the past” [Grzymala-Busse, 2006, Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020]. In a sense, Confederate monuments can be viewed as a “capital stock” for the far right, hence the removal of said capital may negatively affect the electoral prospects of their associated party, the Republican party, more difficult at the polls [Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020].

However, there are also legitimate reasons to hypothesize that the removal of Confederate monuments helped the Republican party at the ballot boxes. Rozenas and Vlasenko used the theoretical argument that, “voters may punish the incumbent if they believe that he uses symbolic politics to divert attention from the lack of progress on real issues like income, jobs, crime, or national security” to support the hypothesis that removal of Soviet monuments helped the election results for Soviet legacy parties, and the same can be said of Confederate monument removal and the Republican Party’s recent election results [Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020, Solt, 2011]. Further, Republicans and supporters of Donald J. Trump may have been mobilized by the rapid increase in Confederate monument removals in recent years, helping the Republican party at the subsequent 2020 Presidential election. The backlash effect leading to mobilization

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of perturbed voters has been seen in other studies of symbolic politics, like the repercussions that ensued following the movement of the grave of Francisco Franco, the former Caudillo of Spain [Rozenas and Vlasenko, 2020, Rubin, 2018]. According to Rozenas and Vlasenko, “the logic of the backlash effect is similar to the status threat mechanism: when a group perceives a threat to its social, economic, or political status, it can provoke a defensive reaction that shows up in voting behavior” [Petersen, 2002, Bustikova, 2014].

The available data for the observational, vote share angle of my research is not susceptible to complete disentanglement of competing characteristics that have potentially significant interaction effects with Confederate monument removal. However I am able to provide suggestive evidence for the nature of operation of these interactions via my survey experiment’s individual-level data. I am also able to hypothesize the modes in which certain interactions will be more likely to have an effect.

Using the two primary frames of meaning for Confederate monuments mentioned in the introduction, my first interaction-related hypothesis is that Southern respondents and voters are more likely to experience feelings of loss and aversion when witnessing removal. This subgroup is most likely concentrated in the 11 former Confederate states [Rahnama 2020, Alderman and Dwyer, 2004, Domby, 2020]. I hypothesize that this sub-population, Southern white respondents, are more likely to take part in the backlash effects of Confederate monument removal, resulting in sparked antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equality-related topics. I expect these outcomes to be further affected by gender. The predominant role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in upholding and spreading the physical symbols and memories of the Confederacy is suggestive of expecting a larger effect among Southern white women than that of Southern white men [Rahnama 2020, Domby, 2020, Gulley, 1993].

Further, a 2019 study revealed that, “relative to white men, who do not show strong inclination to adopt a racial identity, 57% of white women scored high in racial identity scores” [Rahnama 2020, Jardina, 2019].

With this in mind, I expect to find, on average, a larger spark in antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equality-related topics for white women compared to white men.

When considering respondents and voters that think Confederate monuments are racist and glorify slavery, most likely liberals, northerners, and Blacks, the hypothesis that removal of Confederate monuments will lower antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equalityrelated topics is possible. This sub-population is more likely to view removals as, “a claim to space and gain in symbolic capital within the broader movements for reparative justice and racial reconciliation” [Rahnama 2020, Balfour, 2003, Harvey, 2010]. It is likely that those that fall into this frame of perspective on Confederate monuments might view their removal as physical manifestations of a shift in societal norms towards confrontation and further disapproval of legacies upholding slavery and racism, causing some witnesses of removal to lower their racially-charged antagonism [Rahnama 2020, Bursztyn et al., 2019, Getachew, 2020].

If Confederate monument removal decreased subsequent Republican vote share, it would indicate support for the hypothesis that Confederate monuments can be viewed as a “capital stock” for the far right of the Republican party. If removal increased Republican vote share, it would indicate support for the idea that the backlash effect led to mobilization of perturbed Republicans. When considering individual United States’ citizens, I expect Southern white respondents to be more likely to experience sparked antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equality-related topics when prompted with Confederate monument removal, and an even greater level of this amongst white women

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relative to white men. Finally, for those that view Confederate monuments as symbols of white supremacy, racial prejudice, and slavery-glorifying, I expect removal to cause a decrease in antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equality-related topics.

Data and Empirical Design: Observational Survey

The relevant unit of analysis for the electoral, observational component of my research is the county-year. A county level analysis is most fitting given that the treatment at hand, Confederate monument removal, is best categorized and observed at the county level3. Further, the United States Presidential electoral data on vote share is available at a county level. Variation at the county level will come from several factors: time trends and changes, confounding variables like local politics, leaders, demographics, and external events like protests and recent police brutality. I am most interested in the variation in Republican vote share across time on the county level.

My treatment variable is the ratio of Confederate monuments removed to those still standing within each county, via data gathered by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is important that the ratio removed be my primary treatment rather than a simple integer-based ‘removed’ variable so that differences in treatment given the number of total monuments within each county is accounted for. The ratio removed treatment variable is easy and feasible to track, record, and calculate. I do not believe there is any nonclassical measurement error to be concerned with for the ratio removed functioning as the independent variable, as the data source captures all monuments that experience removal.

My outcome variable is Republican vote share. This is measured empirically on the county level from Presidential election years 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The election data is derived from Decision Desk HQ as well as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Republican vote share is the ratio of Republican Presidential candidate votes to total votes within each United States county.

I am interested in the difference in Republican vote share over time within counties that were treated (experienced Confederate monument removal). The benefit of this measure is that it is easy and feasible to track, record, and calculate. I do not believe there is any non-classical measurement error to be concerned with for Republican vote share functioning as the dependent variable, as the data sources are well respected outlets for United States election data at several contextual levels.

Further, I have included a variable that identifies the total number of Confederate monuments within each county. This variable had the potential to act as a control if the simple integer-based ‘removed’ variable functioned as the treatment rather than the ratio removed. However, through generating and using the ratio removed variable as the treatment, the same function and purpose is served as would ‘total monuments’ as a control.

Using Census Data gathered from 2016 and 2019, I was able to generate and merge in demographic make-up related variables that aided the study of potential interaction effects as well as functioned as a potential control. In terms of racial makeup, share White and share Hispanic variables made it possible to study the interaction effects between the racial makeup of a county’s population and Confederate monument removal, as seen in Table 2. The inclusion of a population size variable functions as a potential control variable. Please find the correlating descriptive statistics table for the observational study in the appendix below.

3 Confederate symbol data provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center is given at both the city and county level.

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The main identification problem my research suffers from is isolating the true, lone effect of Confederate monument removal on changes in Republican vote share. There are several potential confounders and sources of bias that may prevent me from estimating the true causal effect of Confederate monument removal on Republican vote share. For example, external events like police brutality, Black Lives’ Matter protests, and counter protests that occur in counties where Confederate monument removal also occurred may be affecting and/or skewing the changes in Republican vote share at the county level.

Furthermore, the demographic makeup of counties may also affect the changes in Republican vote share over time. This is a difficult topic to study mostly because these potential, and likely, confounders are not easy to eliminate in the form of quantitative controls. Yes, I can compare the changes in Republican vote share across counties that experienced Confederate monument removal and those that did not, but there is not a confident quantitative measure I can take to isolate the effect of Confederate monument removal from that of BLM protests or police brutality, as the three are so intricately interwoven, especially in our current political climate.

The empirical strategy I employed to demonstrate the effect of Confederate monument removal on Republican vote share is a two-way Fixed Effects Model. This model limits the identification problems mentioned above via the inclusion of county fixed effects so as to make isolating the effect of monument removal on republican vote share clearer. This model also allows for the inclusion of time-varying controls, which I investigated via the census-given population variable4. The corresponding regression model is as follows: Yit = Ɣc + Ɣt + β(Cit) + Xitɸ + εit where Yit is the Republican vote share outcome in county i at year t, Ɣc represents the county fixed effects, Ɣt represents year fixed effects; “The inclusion of unit and time fixed effects accounts for both unit-specific (but time-invariant) and time-specific (but unit-invariant) unobserved confounders in a flexible manner” [Imai et. al, 2020]. Cit is an indicator of the presence, or absence of treatment of Confederate monument removal in county i in year t. More specifically, Cit is the ratio of monuments removed in relation to the total number of Confederate monuments in a county. The value of Cit for each Presidential election year corresponds to the share of monuments removed in the last four-year administration period. For example, the value of Cit for year 2020 corresponds to the share of monuments removed between 2016 and 2020.

Xit represents a vector of county-level controls, and εit represents the standard errors, which are clustered around the unit of analysis, the county i.

Results: Observational Component

I estimate the average effect of Confederate monument removal on Republican vote share using the merged SPLC and Electoral data and a two-way fixed effects empirical design. The results are shown on the county level across time, specifically presidential election years spanning from 2000 - 2020. In terms of breaking down treatment and control, if at least one Confederate monument within a county is removed, the county is considered as treated. If there are no removals of Confederate monuments within a county, it functions as a control. However, the use of the ratio removed as the treatment variable makes it so that treatment within the regression functions in a manner that accounts for the number of total 4 See results section below for further detail regarding the inclusion of this control.

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Confederate monuments within a given county, so that a county with 2 total monuments and 1 removed is not assumed to have been treated in the same manner as a that of a county with 16 total monuments and 1 removed, for example. Standard errors are clustered at the level of treatment, the county. These results are shown in Table 1 below.

Column one regards the ratio of Confederate monuments removed as the treatment variable, whilst Column two regards the sum of removed Confederate monuments in a given county to be the treatment variable. Column three uses a removed binary variable, taking values of either 1 or 0, as the treatment variable. My primary analysis concerns the regression and results of column one, as I consider the ratio removed to be the principal treatment, and the two-way fixed effects model diminishes the need for a population size control.

Table 1: Effect of Confederate Monument Removals on Republican Vote Share Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share (1) Intensive Full Ratio Removed

(2) Total Count Removed

(3) Extensive Full

-0.061*** (0.008)

Removed (sum)

-0.031*** (0.005)

Removed Binary

-0.058*** (0.007)

Total Monuments

0.035

0.013

0.012

(0.022)

(0.018)

(0.018)

Observations

3510

3533

3533

R-squared

0.901

0.900

0.900

Controls

NO

NO

NO

Fixed Effects

YES

YES

YES

This table shows Two-Way Fixed Effects estimates for the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent Republican vote share using Presidential electoral data from Decision Desk HQ and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, as well as monument data provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Results are presented at the county contextual level, whereby a county that experienced Confederate monument removal is considered treated, and counties with Confederate monuments that did not experience removal function are the control group. Clustered standard errors at the county level are reported with the following significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

In Table 1, the direction of the effect on Republican vote share is negative for all three columns

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with differing specifications of the treatment variable. The primary regression results, that of column one in Table 1, indicate that as the ratio of Confederate monument removal within a county goes from zero to one, we see a subsequent 6.1% decrease in Republican vote share. This effect is statistically significant and of a rather large magnitude, as the coefficient is approximately a tenth of the mean. This result is significant to the 1% level. Column two’s results indicate that for every additional increase in Confederate monument removal within a county, we see a subsequent 3.1% decrease in Republican vote share. This effect is statistically significant to the 1% level and of a rather large magnitude. Column 3’s results indicate that for counties where any Confederate monuments were removed, we see a subsequent 5.8 percent decrease in Republican vote share. This effect is also statistically significant to the 1% level and of a rather large magnitude.

I chose to exclude my total monuments control from this main regression when using the ratio removed as the treatment variable because the two inherently affect the regression in the same way by accounting for both the number of monuments removed, and still standing, within each county. These results support the hypothesis discussed in the prior theory section that the removal of Confederate monuments hurt the Republican party in subsequent elections.

A noteworthy concern with the previous analysis may be the criteria for inclusion (the purposeful focus on Confederate monuments, rather than all Confederate symbols). For that reason, a secondary test was run that included all Confederate symbol types the Southern Poverty Law Center had within their dataset, instead of just physical monuments. The intention of running this secondary test focusing on the symbol type, with all other factors held constant in the regression, is to prove the robustness of the main regression results using only Confederate monuments, and further signify the impact these physical symbols have on politics and voting behavior. The results of the secondary test (see Table 11 in the Appendix) are as follows; there is a significant effect of all three variations of the removed monument treatment variable (ratio removed, total count removed, and binary removed) on subsequent Republican vote share—this speaks to the legitimate effect of all Confederate symbols. However, all three coefficients exhibit a decrease in comparison to that of the primary analysis concerning just Confederate monuments. This speaks to the hypothesis that symbolic politics regarding large physical symbols that transform spaces have a pronounced effect on the political views of those in the local area.

As mentioned above, census data made it possible to explore the interaction effects between race and Confederate monument removal. As seen in table 2 below, there are no significant effects of comparing the share of a population that is White with the number of Confederate monuments removed.

However, interestingly enough, when there is a larger share of Hispanics in a given county that experienced Confederate monument removal, a marginal increase in Confederate monument removal results in a subsequent 7.7 percent decrease in Republican vote share. This interaction result demonstrates that the racial makeup of a county holds leverage upon the effect Confederate monument removal will have on subsequent Republican vote share.

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Table 2: Race and Monument Removal Interaction Effects Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share

Ratio Removed

(1) White Intensive Full

(2) Hispanic Intensive Full

-0.003

0.020

(0.045)

(0.012)

Removed (sum)

Share White

1.651*** (0.554)

Ratio Removed x Share White

0.001 (0.057)

Share Hispanic

-0.488 (0.334)

Ratio Removed x Share Hispanic

-0.097*** (0.032)

Constant

-0.520

0.645***

(0.389)

(0.004)

Observations

1165

1165

R-squared

0.993

0.992

Controls

NO

NO

County & Year Fixed Effects

YES

YES

-0.0017

-0.0770

0.9133

0.0014

Tot. Int. p-value (Tot. Int.)

This table shows Two-Way Fixed Effects estimates for the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent Republican vote share using interaction effects with Census-sourced racial-makeup data. Results are presented at the county contextual level. Clustered standard errors at the county level are reported with the following significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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In summation, as the ratio of Confederate monument removal within a county goes from zero to one, we see a subsequent 6.1 percent decrease in Republican vote share. This effect is statistically significant and of a large magnitude. Furthermore, we also see significant results when removal is interacted with the share Hispanic of a given county’s population; a marginal increase in Confederate monument removal results in a subsequent 7.7 percent decrease in Republican vote share, demonstrating the legitimate and noteworthy effect that Confederate monument removal and a county’s racial makeup has on subsequent voting in Presidential elections.

Data and Empirical Design: Survey Experiment

The relevant unit of analysis for the survey experiment component of my research is the individual. The goal of this survey is to analyze the political attitude outcomes of individual United States citizens, hence the fitting individual-level unit of study. Variation naturally arises from differences in the individual respondents that participated in the survey. All respondents are located in one of four former Confederate states: Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. The map below depicts the locations of respondents when taking the survey.

Table 1: Effect of Confederate Monument Removals on Republican Vote Share

*Respondents located outside of the four southern states mentioned above were used only within the pilot test and not counted within the final analysis.

Respondents were chosen from zip codes that currently had standing Confederate monuments, and none removed, to the best of my knowledge given data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. This sampling method limits the potential of outside treatment5 via witnessing nearby Confederate monument removal.

5 By the term ‘outside treatment,’ I mean survey participants receiving something close to the survey experiment’s treatment via witnessing nearby Confederate monument removal. My hope is that by limiting respondents to zipcodes where removal had not yet occurred, this ‘outside treatment’ did not occur, and I received a more accurate separation between the treatment and control groups.

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Variation amongst the individual participants may arise from differences in ideology, income, race, education, gender, and other factors that can largely affect political opinions. Naturally, the controls utilized in my analysis included ideology, income, race, education, and gender, balanced via quotas Qualtrics utilized for the survey.

My treatment variable is assignment to one of two articles. Half of respondents were randomly assigned to the treatment article, which was a CNN article titled, “Protesters tried to remove a Confederate monument in Birmingham. The mayor told them he would finish the job,” while the other half of respondents were randomly assigned to the control article, which was a CNN article titled, “Hollywood changed this year. Some things will never go back to the way they were.” Both articles were followed by three corresponding reading comprehension questions. In order to be included in the final count of the 207 respondents analyzed, the respondent must have correctly answered all three questions, ensuring proper treatment via a complete understanding of the article assigned to them.

The dependent outcome variables examined were the following: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Racial Inequality, measured based on response to the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Racial Inequality is an ongoing issue within the United States that must be addressed.”

Reparations, measured based on response to the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Reparations are necessary in order to account for disadvantages that AfricanAmericans face due to the United States' past of slavery.”

BLM Validity, measured based on response to the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The Black Lives Matter movement is a valid-response by the African-American community to ongoing racism in the United States.” , measured based on response to the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? BLM Protests that call for local politicians to enact Confederate Monument Removal are more effective than those that attempt physical monument removal.”

Support BLM, measured based on response to the following question: “Rate your level of support for Black Lives Matter Protesters.”

Participate BLM, measured based on response to the following question: “How likely are you to participate in a Black Lives Matter protest?”

Capitol Effect BLM, measured based on response to the following question: “How do the recent events in the Capitol affect your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

Capitol Effect Rights, measured based on response to the following question: “How do the recent events in the Capitol affect your opinion on freedom of speech and assembly?"

I do not believe there is any non-classical measurement error to be concerned with for these dependent variables, as the responses analyzed are gathered from secure, unique data collection via Qualtrics.

Other important variables to consider are those which served as modes of interaction studies with the assignment to treatment (or control). The following variables were used within interaction regressions: 1.

Freedom of Speech, measured based on response to the following question: “How much value do you

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2.

3.

4.

5.

ISABEL RUDIE place on your right to freedom of speech?”

Ideology, measured based on response to the following question: “Where would you place yourself on this scale? Extremely Conservative, Conservative, Slightly Conservative, Slightly Liberal, Liberal, Extremely Liberal.”

Trump Dummy, measured based on response to the following question: “Who did you vote for in the 2020 Presidential Election?”

Gender, measured by respondents’ self-classification as either male or female.

Race, measured by respondents’ self-classification as Black, White, or other.

The results of the interaction regression analysis can be seen in Tables 5-9, and will be further discussed in the survey experiment’s results section below.

Below is a diagram of the order of the survey experiment, as given to the respondent.

A link to the survey in full can be found below in the appendix.

The main identification problem my research suffers from is isolating the lone effect of the treatment article. This is concerning a BLM protest that resulted in an attempted Confederate monument removal on respondents’ political attitude outcomes on racial inequality, reparations, and the Black Lives Matter movement. There are several potential confounders and sources of bias that may prevent me from estimating the true causal effect6. Demographic and ideological differences between respondents are intended to be controlled via the aforementioned control variables, but it is impossible to account for all 6 More detail about identification problems are further discussed in Section 4, the Data/Empirical Design of my observational research.

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other factors related to what shapes one’s political attitude. This is a difficult topic to study mostly because these potential, and likely, confounders are not easy to eliminate in the form of quantitative controls. I can compare the political attitude outcomes of those that received the treatment article and those that did not, but there is not a confident quantitative measure I can take to confirm that control respondents were not affected by nearby or televised news of Confederate monument removal. Further, as mentioned in section 4, it is difficult to isolate the effect of such from that of BLM protests or police brutality, as the three are so intricately interwoven, especially in our current political climate. However, random assignment to treatment is precisely how I address the aforementioned identification problem.

Given these concerns, in order to isolate true causal effects, it was necessary to establish a balance between the observable covariates between the treatment and control groups, which was expected given the random assignment of treatment. I demonstrate the balance in controlled characteristics of the respondents in the balance table below.

Table 3: Survey Experiment Balance Table Factor

Level

Control Assignment

Treatment Assignment

107

100

73 (68.2%)

74 (74.0%)

White

79 (73.8%)

77 (77.0%)

Black

23 (21.5%)

16 (16.0%)

Other

5 (4.7%)

7 (7.0%)

3.22 (1.39)

3.39 (1.35)

Less than HS

1 (0.9%)

2 (2.0%)

High School

47 (43.9%)

51 (51.0%)

Associate Degree

20 (18.7%)

16 (16.0%)

Bachelor's Degree

25 (23.4%)

24 (24.0%)

Post-Graduate Degree

14 (13.1%)

7 (7.0%)

$0-$50,000

66 (61.7%)

45 (45.0%)

$50,000-$100,000

30 (28.0%)

42 (42.0%)

$100,000-$150,000

9 (8.4%)

9 (9.0%)

$150,000 or more

2 (1.9%)

4 (4.0%)

N Female Race

Ideology, mean (SD) Education

Income

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The empirical strategy I employed to demonstrate the effect of the treatment article concerning Confederate monument removal and a BLM protest on several indicators of a respondent’s political attitude is a simple Ordinary Least Squares Regression model. This model and the randomized assignment to treatment and control groups in my online survey experiment via Qualtrics limits the identification problems and potential biases of the respondents that could skew the results. The corresponding regression model is as follows: Political Attitudei = αi + β(Treatment Articlei) + XiƔ + εi where Political Attitudei is the outcome variable related to one’s political attitude—their take on BLM Validity, Racial Inequality, Reparations, Support for BLM, Participation in BLM, or the Capitol Insurrection’s effect on their view of BLM—in individual respondent i. Alpha represents the political attitude of respondent i when they did not receive treatment, hence this is represented by members of the control group in the survey. Treatment Articlei represents the respondent i’s assignment to treatment, whether that be the treatment article concerning BLM and Confederate monument removal, or the control article concerning movie success during the pandemic. Xi represents a vector containing all the controls on individual characteristics for person i, which are balanced via random assignment to treatment, and εi represents the standard errors, which are clustered at the unit of analysis, the individual respondent i.

Results: Survey Experiment

I estimate the average effect of the treatment article concerning a Black Lives Matter protest that resulted in Confederate monument removal on several political attitude indicators concerning views on racial inequality in the United States, reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement, monument removal strategies, and the Capitol insurrection that occurred on January 6, 2021. The results are shown on the individual level. The 207 respondents that participated in the online survey experiment were equally and randomly assigned to either the treatment or control articles. Respondents’ demographic and personal characteristics relating to age, gender, race, income, location, etc. were balanced (see Table 3) across the treatment and control groups to eliminate the need for control variables in my regression analysis. Standard errors are clustered at the level of treatment, the individual. These results are shown in Table 4.

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Table 4: Effect of Treatment Article on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.047

0.056

0.111*

0.014

0.396*

0.126

0.095

0.049

(0.051)

(0.068)

(0.066)

(0.067)

(0.204)

(0.174)

(0.088)

(0.082)

0.813***

0.364***

0.589***

0.626***

2.664***

2.084***

2.075***

1.981***

(0.038)

(0.047)

(0.048)

(0.047)

(0.145)

(0.117)

(0.065)

(0.058)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

0.004

0.003

0.013

0.000

0.018

0.003

0.006

0.002

Constant

Observations R-squared

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level, whereby an individual that received the treatment article and correctly answered all corresponding reading comprehension questions is considered to be treated, and individuals that received the control article and answered all corresponding reading comprehension questions correctly function as the control group. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

In Table 4 above, the coefficients on all eight political attitude outcomes are positive, indicating that the treatment article had a relatively consistent effect on respondents. The first significant finding can be seen in column three, and concerns the outcome variable of BLM Validity, in which respondents were asked “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The Black Lives Matter movement is a valid response by the African-American community to ongoing racism in the United States.” The coefficient for BLM Validity indicates that treated respondents that read about a BLM protest and subsequent Confederate monument removal were 11.1 percent more likely to view the BLM movement as valid. This effect is statistically significant to the 10% level and of a rather large magnitude as the coefficient is nearly a fifth of the mean response. The second significant finding concerns support for BLM as seen in column five; respondents were asked to, “rate your level of support for Black Lives Matter Protesters.” The coefficient for BLM Support indicates that treated respondents were 39.6 percent more likely to exhibit a high level of support for Black Lives Matter protesters. This effect is statistically significant to the 10% level and a rather larger magnitude as the coefficient is over a tenth of the mean reply.

The robustness of this analysis can be largely attributed to the variation in outcomes considered within the overarching concept of one’s political attitude. The inclusion of questions relating to racial relations, reparations, the Black Lives matters movement not only in terms of support but also regardings its validity and likelihood to participate, as well as examinations of respondent’s takeaways from the Capitol insurrection and their views on monument removal strategy all support a multifaceted, complex, and comprehensive exploration of what views and relevant events affect and shape a respondent’s political attitude.

As mentioned above, other important variables played a crucial role in exploring what other

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views and qualities affect one’s political attitude. The following variables were used within interaction regressions:7 Freedom of Speech, Ideology, Trump Dummy, Gender, and Race8. There are little to no significant effects of interacting the value a respondent places on freedom of speech with the treatment article (see Table 8) . This indicates that a respondent’s value placed on freedom of speech and their assignment to either the treatment or control article did not affect their political attitude outcomes. There are also no significant effects of interacting a respondent’s ideology (spanning from extremely conservative to extremely liberal) with the treatment article (see Table 5). This indicates that a respondent’s ideology and their assignment to either the treatment or control article did not affect their political attitude outcomes.

When interacting the 2020 Presidential voting decision (simplified to either Donald J. Trump (1) or Joseph Biden(0)) of a respondent with the treatment, we see significant effects on the following variables (see Table 6 below): respondents that voted for Trump in 2020 and received the treatment were 16.7% more likely to support reparations; this effect is significant to the 10% level. Treated Trump supporters were also 55.9% more likely to support BLM and after witnessing the events of the capitol insurrection, 30.9% more likely to support BLM; these effects are significant to the 5% level. Furthermore, treated Trump supporters were 43.1% more likely to participate in a BLM protest, these effects are significant to the 1% level. This interaction result demonstrates that the treatment article holds leverage upon the political attitude outcomes of past supporters of Donald J. Trump.

Table 6: Interaction of Trump Dummy and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.022

0.002

0.091

0.033

0.036

-0.126

-0.048

0.088

(0.041)

(0.110)

(0.063)

(0.102)

(0.252)

(0.273)

(0.130)

(0.128)

-0.395***

-0.476***

-0.655***

-0.057

-2.303***

-1.789***

-0.982***

0.421***

(0.092)

(0.087)

(0.088)

(0.111)

(0.222)

(0.185)

(0.125)

(0.137)

0.096

0.165

0.058

-0.134

0.523

0.557*

0.358*

-0.130

(0.128)

(0.140)

(0.129)

(0.161)

(0.359)

(0.314)

(0.182)

(0.191)

0.953***

0.535***

0.860***

0.674***

3.744***

2.907***

2.512***

1.814***

(0.033)

(0.077)

(0.054)

(0.072)

(0.177)

(0.176)

(0.091)

(0.090)

149

149

149

149

149

149

149

149

Trump Dummy

Treatment x Trump Dummy

Constant

Observations

7 More details on the questions relating to these variables can be found in the prior empirical design section for the survey experiment.

8 Interaction results concerning key factors such as value placed on freedom of speech and race are in the Appendix.

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R-squared

0.207

0.181

0.432

0.021

0.479

0.371

0.361

0.091

Tot. Int.

0.1186

0.1670

0.1490

-0.1015

0.5588

0.4307

0.3093

-0.0417

p-value (Tot. Int.)

0.3295

0.0553

0.1854

0.4149

0.0302

0.0063

0.0166

0.7695

57

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s 2020 voting decision on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

The interaction results concerning the race of respondents and treatment come as no surprise; non-white respondents were more like to believe in racial inequality, support reparations, and uphold the validity of BLM. This supports my original hypothesis that white respondents were more likely to experience sparked antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equality-related topics when treated (see Table 9 in the Appendix). However, the results of the interaction between treatment and gender provided far more surprising results (see Table 7 below). Disproving my hypothesis that white women would experience a larger spark in antagonistic attitudes towards Black Lives Matter protests and racial equalityrelated topics, the gender-treatment interaction regressions showed that treated female respondents were actually more likely to support and believe in the validity of BLM than men. As noted by the total interaction effects, treated females were 14% more likely to think the BLM movement is valid (significant to the 10% level), and 40.8% more likely to support the BLM movement (significant to the 10% level).

This interaction result demonstrates that gender possesses significant leverage upon the effect the treatment article will have on a respondent’s all-encompassing political attitude.

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Table 7: Interaction of Gender and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

-0.043

0.023

0.009

0.095

0.253

-0.210

0.095

-0.011

(0.119)

(0.124)

(0.131)

(0.128)

(0.389)

(0.311)

(0.177)

(0.171)

0.114

0.060

0.087

0.099

0.498

0.210

0.023

-0.157

(0.087)

(0.099)

(0.104)

(0.103)

(0.306)

(0.247)

(0.142)

(0.126)

0.113

0.040

0.131

-0.117

0.154

0.438

-0.002

0.093

(0.130)

(0.149)

(0.152)

(0.150)

(0.456)

(0.373)

(0.204)

(0.194)

0.735***

0.324***

0.529***

0.559***

2.324***

1.941***

2.059***

2.088***

(0.076)

(0.081)

(0.086)

(0.086)

(0.251)

(0.201)

(0.118)

(0.106)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

R-squared

0.049

0.009

0.036

0.005

0.049

0.031

0.006

0.011

Tot. Int.

0.0696

0.0624

0.1403

-0.0224

0.4078

0.2277

0.0935

0.0820

p-value(Tot.Int.)

0.1910

0.4471

0.0678

0.7787

0.0882

0.2722

0.3657

0.3783

Female

Treatment x Female

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s gender on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

In summation, treated respondents that read about a BLM protest and subsequent Confederate monument removal were 11.1 percent more likely to view the BLM movement as valid, and 39.6 percent more likely to exhibit a high level of support for Black Lives Matter protesters. These effects are statistically significant and of a large magnitude. Furthermore, all coefficients on the eight political attitude outcomes considered are positive, indicating that the treatment article had a relatively consistent effect on respondents.

When considering the interaction explorations, we saw further significant effects when considering the gender and the 2020 voting decision of treated respondents.

Conclusion

American author Susan Jacoby wrote, “the forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.” I would add that the forgetting and the warping of history to benefit a certain groups’ remembrance, culture, and ongoing political power is an issue that is certainly present within the topic of symbolic politics in the United States, more specifically that of standing Confederate monuments and symbols. It is of the utmost importance that we understand how

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standing Confederate monuments in the 21st century affect United States citizens’ views and interpretation of the American Civil War, slavery, and race relations. This naturally raises the question, what exactly do monuments and physical symbols serve to do and represent for society, especially when they stand to represent a party and group that upheld ideas like racial prejudice, slavery, and white supremacy? Despite the rapid increase in protests, discussions, and media coverage relating to symbolic politics in recent years in the U.S. and across the globe, empirical research on the topic as it relates to political consequences and effects remains sparse. This paper set out to explore the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent differences in Republican vote share and the political attitudes of United States citizens.

Using a two-way fixed effects model to analyze data concerning Confederate monuments that are both standing and removed, as well as Presidential election results spanning from 2000 – 2020, I found that the removal of Confederate monuments, on average, significantly decreases subsequent Republican vote share on the county-level. I supplement my analysis with unique data collection on the individual level, conducted through an online survey experiment via Qualtrics. Using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression, I find that exposure to the treatment article concerning recent Confederate monument removal, on average, caused respondents to be significantly more likely to support and believe in the validity of the Black Lives Matter movement. Further, all political attitude outcome indicators exhibited positive coefficients, implying that the treatment article had an overall liberalizing effect on respondents.

Respondents felt liberalized and mobilized by the treatment article concerning a BLM protest and calls for Confederate monument removal, which may explain why we see decreases in Republican vote share following Confederate monument removal in the observational study of my research; United States citizens are encouraged and mobilized to express their liberal views at the polls after witnessing the movement of Confederate monument removal.

Further, I find that in response to the treatment, female respondents are significantly more likely to think the BLM movement is valid, and support the movement as a whole in comparison to male respondents. Additionally, treated respondents that identified as Trump supporters were significantly more likely to support and/or participate in a BLM protest than untreated respondents that identified as having voted for Trump in 2020.

While this paper contributes unique ideas to the existing research within American politics on Confederate symbols as well as the more global-scale topic of symbolic politics, there is far more to be explored concerning the connection between symbolic politics and voting patterns. Once additional Confederate monuments have been removed, increased variation in the removals across time will allow for further analysis concerning differences in vote share between specific election years and presidential administrations. Whilst the survey component of my research revealed liberalizing effects of the treatment that were further increased by gender, race, and support or lack thereof for Trump, the sample size of 207 is rather small in scale, and the field of study would most definitely benefit from a larger-scale exploration of United States citizens’ political attitudes after witnessing further development of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased Confederate monument removal. Other natural supplementations to this project may include studies related to changes in hate crimes, state-to-state migration, and political donations patterns after removal of Confederate monuments and other symbols.

Notwithstanding the limited nature of this project, the joint findings of this observational and experimental study call attention to the intensifying relevance of symbolic politics in the United States and the necessity of further empirical research on the topic. As we continue to witness the ever-increasing scale

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of Confederate monument removal and enter the new presidential administration of Joseph R. Biden, there will undoubtedly be compelling discussions and questions lying ahead concerning how physical monuments are interpreted and what exactly they serve to represent.

Appendix

Observational Study Descriptive Statistics at the County-Year Level Variable

Observations

Mean

Standard Deviation

Min

Max

Vote Share Republican

3,533

0.5787

0.1425

0.0409

0.9136

Ratio Removed

3,510

0.0173

0.1242

0

1

Removed Binary

3,533

0.0221

0.1469

0

1

Removed

3,533

0.0303

0.2595

0

9

Total Monuments

3,533

1.3784

1.3346

0

21

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Table 1: Effect of Confederate Monument Removals on Republican Vote Share Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share (1) Intensive Full Ratio Removed

(2) Total Count Removed

(3) Extensive Full

-0.061*** (0.008)

Removed (sum)

-0.031*** (0.005)

Removed Binary

-0.058*** (0.007)

Total Monuments

0.035

0.013

0.012

(0.022)

(0.018)

(0.018)

Observations

3510

3533

3533

R-squared

0.901

0.900

0.900

Controls

NO

NO

NO

Fixed Effects

YES

YES

YES

This table shows Two-Way Fixed Effects estimates for the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent Republican vote share using Presidential electoral data from Decision Desk HQ and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, as well as monument data provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Results are presented at the county contextual level, whereby a county that experienced Confederate monument removal is considered treated, and counties with Confederate monuments that did not experience removal function are the control group. Clustered standard errors at the county level are reported with the following significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Effect of Confederate Monument Removals on Republican Vote Share with Logged Population as a Control Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share Regressions:

Ratio Removed

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

-0.061***

0.002

(0.008)

(0.010)

-0.031***

-0.018

(0.005)

(0.019)

-0.058***

-0.002

(0.007)

(0.013)

(sum) Removed

Removed Binary

Total Monuments

0.035

0.000

0.013

0.000

0.012

0.000

(0.022)

(.)

(0.018)

(.)

(0.018)

(.)

Observations

3510

1165

3533

1165

3533

1165

R-squared

0.901

0.992

0.900

0.993

0.900

0.992

Controls

NO

YES

NO

YES

NO

YES

County & Year Fixed Effects

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

R-squared

0.004

0.003

0.013

0.000

0.018

0.003

*Columns 1 and 2 regard the ratio of Confederate monuments removed as the treatment variable, whilst Columns 3 and 4 regard the sum of removed Confederate monuments in a given county to be the treatment variable. Columns 5 and 6 use a removed binary variable, taking values of either 1 or 0, as the treatment variable. Columns 2, 4, and 6 utilize population size as a control variable. All 6 regressions present clustered standard errors at the county level. My primary analysis concerns the regression and results of column 1, as I consider the ratio removed to be the principal treatment, and the two-way fixed effects model diminishes the need for a population size control.

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Table 2: Race and Monument Removal Interaction Effects Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share

Ratio Removed

(1) White Intensive Full

(2) Hispanic Intensive Full

-0.003

0.020

(0.045)

(0.012)

Removed (sum)

Share White

1.651*** (0.554)

Ratio Removed x Share White

0.001 (0.057)

Share Hispanic

-0.488 (0.334)

Ratio Removed x Share Hispanic

-0.097*** (0.032)

Constant

-0.520

0.645***

(0.389)

(0.004)

Observations

1165

1165

R-squared

0.993

0.992

Controls

NO

NO

County & Year Fixed Effects

YES

YES

-0.0017

-0.0770

0.9133

0.0014

Tot. Int. p-value (Tot. Int.)

This table shows Two-Way Fixed Effects estimates for the effect of Confederate monument removal on subsequent Republican vote share using interaction effects with Census-sourced racial-makeup data. Results are presented at the county contextual level. Clustered standard errors at the county level are reported with the following significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Coefficient Plot, Primary Independent Variables

* Ratio Removed is the primary independent variable used for analysis. Total monuments function as a control. The locations of their plots indicate significance or lack thereof, as seen by the inclusion (or lack of) of zero.

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Table 11: Placebo Test—Effect of Confederate Symbol Removal on Republican Vote Share Dependent Variable: Republican Vote Share (1) Intensive Full (Clustered) Ratio Removed

(2) Total Count Removed (Clustered)

(3) Extensive Full (Clustered)

-0.050** (0.025)

Removed (sum)

-0.042* (0.023)

Removed Binary

-0.045** (0.022)

Total Monuments

0.019***

0.021***

0.020***

(0.003)

(0.004)

(0.003)

Observations

2275

2281

2281

R-squared

0.905

0.906

0.905

Controls

NO

NO

NO

County & Year Fixed Effects

YES

YES

YES

This table shows Two-Way Fixed Effects estimates for the effect of all Confederate symbol removals (excluding monuments) on subsequent Republican vote share using Presidential electoral data from Decision Desk HQ and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab as well as monument data provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Results are presented at the county contextual level, whereby a county that experienced Confederate monument removal is considered to be treated, and counties with Confederate monuments that did not experience removal function as the control group. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 3: Survey Experiment Balance Table Factor

Level

Control Assignment

Treatment Assignment

107

100

73 (68.2%)

74 (74.0%)

White

79 (73.8%)

77 (77.0%)

Black

23 (21.5%)

16 (16.0%)

Other

5 (4.7%)

7 (7.0%)

3.22 (1.39)

3.39 (1.35)

Less than HS

1 (0.9%)

2 (2.0%)

High School

47 (43.9%)

51 (51.0%)

Associate Degree

20 (18.7%)

16 (16.0%)

Bachelor's Degree

25 (23.4%)

24 (24.0%)

Post-Graduate Degree

14 (13.1%)

7 (7.0%)

$0-$50,000

66 (61.7%)

45 (45.0%)

$50,000-$100,000

30 (28.0%)

42 (42.0%)

$100,000-$150,000

9 (8.4%)

9 (9.0%)

$150,000 or more

2 (1.9%)

4 (4.0%)

N Female Race

Ideology, mean (SD) Education

Income

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Table 4: Effect of Treatment Article on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.047

0.056

0.111*

0.014

0.396*

0.126

0.095

0.049

(0.051)

(0.068)

(0.066)

(0.067)

(0.204)

(0.174)

(0.088)

(0.082)

0.813***

0.364***

0.589***

0.626***

2.664***

2.084***

2.075***

1.981***

(0.038)

(0.047)

(0.048)

(0.047)

(0.145)

(0.117)

(0.065)

(0.058)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

0.004

0.003

0.013

0.000

0.018

0.003

0.006

0.002

Constant

Observations R-squared

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level, whereby an individual that received the treatment article and correctly answered all corresponding reading comprehension questions is considered to be treated, and individuals that received the control article and answered all corresponding reading comprehension questions correctly function as the control group. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 5: Interaction of Ideology and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

0.028

0.007

-0.008

-0.134

0.045

0.146

0.059

0.149

(0.153)

(0.153)

(0.160)

(0.182)

(0.461)

(0.384)

(0.214)

(0.233)

0.085***

0.137***

0.154***

-0.015

0.480***

0.421***

0.204***

-0.051

(0.025)

(0.030)

(0.028)

(0.036)

(0.092)

(0.073)

(0.041)

(0.038)

0.001

0.007

0.027

0.044

0.079

-0.028

0.000

-0.027

(0.036)

(0.042)

(0.038)

(0.051)

(0.127)

(0.120)

(0.059)

(0.058)

0.540***

-0.076

0.091

0.673***

1.117***

0.727***

1.416***

2.146***

(0.105)

(0.107)

(0.109)

(0.124)

(0.307)

(0.227)

(0.147)

(0.155)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

R-squared

0.103

0.158

0.243

0.004

0.249

0.205

0.199

0.025

Tot. Int.

0.0294

0.0142

0.0191

-0.0900

0.1232

0.1181

0.0590

0.1224

P-value (Tot.Int.)

0.8045

0.9031

0.8782

0.5109

0.7233

0.6706

0.7148

0.4948

Dependent Variables

Treatment Assignment

Ideology

Treatment x Ideology

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with ideology on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 6: Interaction of Trump Dummy and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.022

0.002

0.091

0.033

0.036

-0.126

-0.048

0.088

(0.041)

(0.110)

(0.063)

(0.102)

(0.252)

(0.273)

(0.130)

(0.128)

-0.395***

-0.476***

-0.655***

-0.057

-2.303***

-1.789***

-0.982***

0.421***

(0.092)

(0.087)

(0.088)

(0.111)

(0.222)

(0.185)

(0.125)

(0.137)

0.096

0.165

0.058

-0.134

0.523

0.557*

0.358*

-0.130

(0.128)

(0.140)

(0.129)

(0.161)

(0.359)

(0.314)

(0.182)

(0.191)

0.953***

0.535***

0.860***

0.674***

3.744***

2.907***

2.512***

1.814***

(0.033)

(0.077)

(0.054)

(0.072)

(0.177)

(0.176)

(0.091)

(0.090)

149

149

149

149

149

149

149

149

R-squared

0.207

0.181

0.432

0.021

0.479

0.371

0.361

0.091

Tot. Int.

0.1186

0.1670

0.1490

-0.1015

0.5588

0.4307

0.3093

-0.0417

p-value (Tot. Int.)

0.3295

0.0553

0.1854

0.4149

0.0302

0.0063

0.0166

0.7695

Trump Dummy

Treatment x Trump Dummy

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s 2020 voting decision on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 7: Interaction of Gender and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

-0.043

0.023

0.009

0.095

0.253

-0.210

0.095

-0.011

(0.119)

(0.124)

(0.131)

(0.128)

(0.389)

(0.311)

(0.177)

(0.171)

0.114

0.060

0.087

0.099

0.498

0.210

0.023

-0.157

(0.087)

(0.099)

(0.104)

(0.103)

(0.306)

(0.247)

(0.142)

(0.126)

0.113

0.040

0.131

-0.117

0.154

0.438

-0.002

0.093

(0.130)

(0.149)

(0.152)

(0.150)

(0.456)

(0.373)

(0.204)

(0.194)

0.735***

0.324***

0.529***

0.559***

2.324***

1.941***

2.059***

2.088***

(0.076)

(0.081)

(0.086)

(0.086)

(0.251)

(0.201)

(0.118)

(0.106)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

R-squared

0.049

0.009

0.036

0.005

0.049

0.031

0.006

0.011

Tot. Int.

0.0696

0.0624

0.1403

-0.0224

0.4078

0.2277

0.0935

0.0820

p-value(Tot.Int.)

0.1910

0.4471

0.0678

0.7787

0.0882

0.2722

0.3657

0.3783

Female

Treatment x Female

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s gender on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 8: Interaction of Freedom of Speech and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.016

0.062

0.079

-0.092

0.096

-0.179

0.003

0.123

(0.078)

(0.128)

(0.117)

(0.128)

(0.351)

(0.278)

(0.165)

(0.123)

-0.108

-0.038

-0.122

0.026

-0.407

-0.128

-0.141

0.265**

(0.075)

(0.108)

(0.105)

(0.108)

(0.314)

(0.248)

(0.138)

(0.117)

0.035

-0.013

0.036

0.161

0.406

0.441

0.123

-0.084

(0.102)

(0.152)

(0.142)

(0.150)

(0.432)

(0.354)

(0.195)

(0.160)

0.893***

0.393***

0.679***

0.607***

2.964***

2.179***

2.179***

1.786***

(0.059)

(0.093)

(0.089)

(0.093)

(0.262)

(0.204)

(0.115)

(0.093)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

R-squared

0.017

0.005

0.023

0.016

0.026

0.010

0.011

0.032

Tot. Int.

0.0510

0.0486

0.1147

0.0686

0.5027

0.2628

0.1262

0.0389

p-value(Tot.Int.)

0.4358

0.5512

0.1578

0.3843

0.0469

0.2325

0.2269

0.7065

Race

Treatment x Race

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s value placed on freedom of speech on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 9: Interaction of Race and Treatment on Political Attitude Outcomes Regressions:

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Dependent Variables

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

Support BLM

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

Treatment Assignment

0.211*

0.372**

0.273*

-0.271

0.870

0.678

0.455**

0.101

(0.123)

(0.177)

(0.161)

(0.169)

(0.530)

(0.420)

(0.212)

(0.194)

0.188***

0.395***

0.322***

-0.081

0.765**

0.555***

0.443***

-0.042

(0.040)

(0.094)

(0.078)

(0.086)

(0.308)

(0.209)

(0.116)

(0.080)

-0.125*

-0.241*

-0.122

0.218*

-0.359

-0.421

-0.274*

-0.041

(0.069)

(0.133)

(0.101)

(0.116)

(0.387)

(0.307)

(0.148)

(0.132)

0.567***

-0.153

0.167

0.732***

1.663***

1.358***

1.495***

2.036***

(0.086)

(0.123)

(0.121)

(0.121)

(0.400)

(0.286)

(0.164)

(0.131)

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

207

R-squared

0.050

0.124

0.114

0.018

0.073

0.036

0.094

0.006

Tot. Int.

0.0860

0.1311

0.1505

-0.0523

0.5106

0.2568

0.1812

0.0606

p-value(Tot.Int.)

0.1782

0.0673

0.0539

0.4997

0.0239

0.1719

0.0627

0.5157

Race

Treatment x Race

Constant

Observations

This table shows ordinary least squares estimates for the effect of the treatment article interacted with a respondent’s race on several political attitude outcome variables using unique data collected from an online survey experiment conducted via Qualtrics. Results are presented at the individual contextual level. Significance levels: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

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Table 10: Survey Experiment Summary Statistics Group

Assignment

Female

Ideology

Racial Inequality

Reparations

BLM Validity

Removal Strategy

BLM Support

Participate BLM

Capitol Effect BLM

Capitol Effect Rights

All

Control

Treatment

Mean(SD)

Mean (SD)

Mean (SD)

0.48

0.00

1.00

(0.50)

(0.00)

(0.00)

0.71

0.68

0.74

(0.45)

(0.47)

(0.44)

3.31

3.22

3.40

(1.38)

(1.40)

(1.36)

0.84

0.81

0.86

(0.37)

(0.39)

(0.35)

0.39

0.36

0.42

(0.49)

(0.48)

(0.50)

0.64

0.59

0.70

(0.48)

(0.49)

(0.46)

0.63

0.63

0.64

(0.48)

(0.49)

(0.48)

2.86

2.66

3.06

(1.48)

(1.50)

(1.44)

2.14

2.08

2.21

(1.25)

(1.21)

(1.29)

2.12

2.07

2.17

(0.64)

(0.67)

(0.60)

2.00

1.98

2.03

(0.59)

(0.60)

(0.58)

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Survey Experiment Marginsplots: Political Attitude Indicators by Ideology

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Arturas Rozenas and Anastasiia Vlasenko. The Real Consequences of Symbolic Politics: Breaking the Soviet Past in Ukraine. Available at SSRN, 2020.

Roper Center. Public Opinion on the Confederate Flag and the Civil War. 2020.

Logan Strother, Spencer Piston, and Thomas Ogorzalek. Pride or prejudice?: Racial prejudice, Southern heritage, and white support for the Confederate battle flag. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 14(1):295–323, 2017.

Jonah S Rubin. “How Francisco Franco governs from beyond the grave: An infrastructural approach to memory politics in contemporary Spain.” American Ethnologist 45(2):214–227, 2018.

Frederick Solt. “Diversionary Nationalism: Economic inequality and the formation of national pride.” The Journal of Politics 73(3):821–830, 2011 L Wedeen. Ambiguities of domination: politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary Syria.

University of Chicago press, 1999.

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Development for Whom?

Understanding the Global Imprint of Contentious Urban Development Under a Neoliberal Order Alyssa Alexandra Heath

Globally, cities are experiencing a rapid change to their urban spaces as a result of the neoliberal world economic system, which has produced a new urban crisis. This change is characterized by both explicit, intentional redevelopment projects ignited by municipalities, commonly seen in cities across the Global South, and urban gentrification processes initiated by speculative developers and enabled by city planners, commonly seen in cities across the Global North. This reality has led to the unjust displacement of vulnerable stakeholders, either through intentional force to make way for new developments or gradual pricing-out of neighborhoods. The relationship between housing location and success is made increasingly clear as the evidence of place-based opportunity is presented. The current development model that exists under the Neoliberal Order will be challenged, and an alternative model will be offered: participatory civic planning.

This thesis investigates the relationship between explicit and market-based urban renewal in cities around the globe, offering case study anecdotes with primary research completed over the past three years. The case studies discussed are from five continents: Ahmedabad, India; São Paulo, Brazil; Paris, France; New York City, USA; and Cape Town, South Africa. I use a comparative analysis model in which cases were analyzed on a thematic basis, providing global trends from local experiences in urban development.

The results of the qualitative research presented conclude that as global economic systems continue to be questioned in perpetuating social and economic inequalities, the planning and development of cities must transform into being inclusive. If municipalities wish to beautify their cities, then residents in the neighborhood of interest need to have a true seat at the table in decisionmaking, amplifying and valuing their voices and concerns. In addition to this, cities must be conceived and developed in ways that serve and benefit their local residents and match their own cultural norms over striving for Western urban ideals.

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Introduction

Twenty-one years into the 21st century there are evident and pervasive issues that have cut across countries, cultures, and people throughout the world. Heightened socioeconomic stratification and systemic poverty are challenging societies globally, most viscerally seen in urban centers across the Global North and Global South. Much of this class division can be diluted to vast, institutional issues related to labor rights, housing access, and educational opportunities. Regressive policies that cater towards capitalism — seen both nationally and internationally — have had a major impact on these various aspects of society. Class disparities can be seen tangibly in the built environment of cities around the world, specifically looking at the way in which urban spaces are intentionally developed or altered through market-related gentrification.

Beginning with economic and political decisions made in the 1980s which advanced international capitalism through the vessel of neoliberalism, transnational development norms were directly influenced in the approach to urban change. Neoliberalism can be understood as an economic system that: “redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning,” (Monbiot). Instead of being human-based, participatory, and stakeholder-oriented, the act of urban renewal has transformed into a capitalistic machine that prioritizes profit, international attraction, and visuals above the actual lived experience of urban citizens. With the help of deregulation, free trade, and labor outsourcing through neoliberal conventions, such as the Washington Consensus and other pandering in the Global South, imperialistic nations (e.g., the United States and Britain) have not only preyed upon natural resources and cheap labor but have manipulated peripheral countries into believing that global capitalism is a “celebrated miracle” that will rise tides for all. This belief has had a staggering influence on the nature of urban development around the world: most consequentially occurring in cities throughout developing nations. Ultimately, the overpowering economic forces of neoliberalism have resulted in municipal governments putting growth and development ahead of the needs and rights of their own people. In all cases — regardless of nation — immigrant, minority, and low-income populations are targeted and displaced.

The Neoliberal Order, or commonly known as Neoliberalism, can be defined as a formalized policy model that governs global political and economic marketization and trade. It was popularized in the 1980s as a way to eliminate pricing controls, promote the global deregulation movement of capital markets and limit trade barriers. Overall, diminishing state influence in the economy by purview of privatization and public-private partnerships (Marangos, Panagiotis, 1). The idea of contentious urban development can be understood in two ways. The first being urban development that is initiated and designed by local municipalities in an effort to revitalize physical blight and low-income areas as a way to beautify the city, oftentimes displacing entire communities and large groups of already disenfranchised populations. The second being urban development that is propagated by predatory developers who buy into a speculative real estate market which is then enabled by local city governments who are eager for investment and urban renewal, and are lobbied into modifying zoning laws to allow for such development. The urban development crisis can be understood as the current crisis facing the urban fabric of cities today. The urban fabric of cities are overwhelmingly falling victim to both

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? predatory neoliberal economic development and problematic public development projects all in order to construct the illusion of a beautiful or luxurious city. This crisis plays a role in the larger social and economic stratification that is on display throughout developed countries around the world: resulting in more homelessness, joblessness, and economic depression for those who occupy the working class. It is critical to question how urban development plays a direct role in the physical and social environment of cities globally and evaluate exactly how detrimental neoliberal policies of deregulation, open trade, and free transnational markets have been to the social fabric of cities — diminishing equality and promoting a “development at-all-costs” mentality that is unchecked and rampant, especially seen amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout this thesis, geopolitical trends of neoliberalism and their implications on the urban environment, specifically how it relates to gentrification and redevelopment projects, will be examined and challenged through the presentation of primary research conducted by myself across five continents and five cities, over the span of three years. The purpose of conducting a synthesis of such an assortment of material is to tie international trends to local experiences — better understanding the repercussions of a development model within a consequential global economic framework. Much of the primary research presented was completed in spring 2018 while I was studying abroad on an International Honors Program that took place in three different countries: India, Brazil, and South Africa. The program had a thematic focus on the development of cities in the 21st century world and allowed for incredible primary research opportunities through site visits, access to local activists, and hands-on support from in-country staff.

My experience in each country ensured the quality of primary research and provided an opportunity to understand each case fully within its own context. Other primary research was completed during the 2019-2020 academic year while I was studying abroad at the New York University campus in Paris, where I had the opportunity to do both observational and interactive primary research, specifically on a four week internship at a Parisian non-profit. Primary research completed in New York was done remotely during the fall 2020 semester with the support and guidance of the United Nations Millennium Fellowship, of which I was a part of the 2020 cohort. The collection of cases presented are analyzed through the lens of a comparative analysis, characteristically comparing case study pairs with overlapping themes. These comparative examinations offer answers to the questions posed throughout the thesis and provide results of my work within these various locations.

A Brief History: Contextualizing Neoliberalism and Urban Development

The most predominant economic system, capitalism, is the function that most directly impacts the transnational economic system in place today and informs the principles of neoliberal economics. The German philosopher, Karl Marx, had valid concerns about the inclusivity and sustainability of capitalism.

In his critique of capitalism, Marx explored the idea that structural changes to capitalism can be made only through meaningful civic engagement, revolutionary movements, and gradual political reforms. Socialism can be defined as a variety of economic and political ideologies that support “… social equality, collective decision-making, distribution of income based on contribution and public ownership of productive capital and natural resources,” (“Economic Systems”). Marx’s theorizing on the effects of capitalism are important because they address the serious social implications of long-term capitalism and the costs of a system that is based on exponential, unending growth through the amassing of wealth.

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The idea of “trickle-down” economics, enabled through laissez-faire regulations and marketbased trends is fundamentally flawed and plays a crucial role in the topic of contentious urban development and rapid gentrification. Karl Marx accurately predicted many of the consequences of capitalism decades before the downfalls of the market-based economic system were most intensely felt.

David Harvey is a renowned urban geographer and anthropologist who has studied and criticized the implications of neoliberalism throughout his career. In his hallmark book A Brief History of Neoliberalism he considers its checkered history and how it arrived at its current state. To begin, much of the infrastructure that promoted neoliberalism as standard economic policy for developing countries was formalized in the 1980s, commonly known as the Washington Consensus. This consensus was a set of official economic policies that was coordinated and adopted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in which they “…all shared the view, typically labelled neoliberal, that the operation of the free market and the reduction of state involvement were crucial to development in the Global South,” (Hurt). In the 1980s, the debt crisis was growing, and the major Western powers of the world, particularly the United States under Ronald Reagan: “…decided that both the World Bank and the IMF should play a significant role in the management of that debt and in global development policy more broadly,” (Hurt). These beliefs were formally adopted by the World Bank and IMF, reflecting a set of policies that were embedded in the standard financial and loan assistance they offered to developing countries. By the turn of the century, “…it was becoming clear that the results of the Washington Consensus were far from optimal… [The Washington Consensus] refers to a dogmatic belief that developing countries should adopt market-led development strategies that will result in economic growth that will “trickle down” to the benefit of all,” (Hurt). The consequences of such policies led to a shift in approach by Western leaders. They departed from the view that development and economic growth would solve societal, economic, and political problems peripheral countries face. They shifted their approach towards “... poverty reduction and the need for participation by both developing-country governments and civil society," (Hurt).

Harvey qualifies the Washington Consensus as an imperialist fumble in international development. He explains that capitalist world leaders “… stumbled towards neoliberalization as the answer through a series of gyrations and chaotic experiments that really only converged as a new orthodoxy with the articulation of what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’,” (Harvey). Harvey promotes a more intersectional understanding of neoliberalism which is explained through the example of land commercialization which often leads to forceful expulsions of vulnerable populations under neoliberalism.

The uneven range of development that is inherent with the onset of neoliberalism allows for a partial and unjust application of policies which differ from one state to another, and is a testament to the fragility of neoliberal solutions on a global scale (Harvey 13). Harvey’s criticism of neoliberalism through the scrutiny of its historical and economic realities is best summarized in this way: he describes the largest achievement of the neoliberalization of world markets as not being the generation of wealth but the redistribution of wealth. This system is constantly being gratified because those at the top of the ruling class are continuing to consume and distribute affluence for their own personal wealth accumulation (Harvey 159). Lastly, Harvey explains perhaps most directly the lasting implications of neoliberalism through the comparison of Sweden’s socialized economic model to the dominant neoliberal model seen in countries such as the United States. He characterizes the case of Sweden as “circumscribed neoliberalism” in which there is a degree of

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? free-trade and marketization, but it is curbed and regulated. Harvey explains how Sweden has achieved far better outcomes in their society than the sustained neoliberal model of the United States and Britain. He describes: “Swedish per capita incomes are higher, inflation lower… The poverty rate is 6.3% in Sweden as opposed to 15.7% in the UK, while the richest 105 of the population in Sweden gain 6.2 times the incomes of the bottom 10 percent…” (Harvey 156). Simply put, the lived experience in Sweden is comparatively better. With lower illiteracy rates and demonstrable social mobility, Sweden is a success story of a nation that operates outside of heightened neoliberalism.

Saskia Sassen’s theory on global cities is an important one in addressing the impact of neoliberalism on urban centers. Sassen is an urban sociologist who originally coined and defined the concept of global cities. Her work has been critical in understanding the significance of cities as economic production hubs and has been essential in projecting the trajectory of cities around the world. Her book The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo makes essential the role cities play in society as epicenters of wealth, productivity, and culture. She describes cities as spaces with circumscribed social structures and complicated dynamics that exist within a global order. Understanding the nuances of urban spaces is a critical way of rationalizing why important structures of the world economy are situated within cities (Sassen 4). The significance of global cities within the context of an internationally connected economic marketplace has created a particular dynamic. Sassen further explains this urban dynamic as having “…a massive impact upon both international economic activity and urban form: Cities concentrate control over vast resources, while finance and specialized service industries have restructured the urban social and economic order,” (Sassen 4). Particularly in the 21st century, a new city has emerged: a global city — Sassen cites New York, London, and Tokyo as leading examples. Sassen’s theory relates to the pressures and influences on municipal leaders to develop their own global cities, of which will be explored throughout this thesis. Considering urban development within the context of breeding global cities is important when understanding cities as cosmopolitan incubators of global commerce and influence.

In evaluating more precisely the implications of urban renewal and gentrification, it is crucial to incorporate the rise of the creative class which has produced much of the gentrification trends seen in the Global North today. Richard Florida is a well-known urban studies and economic theorist. When addressing the theory of Bohemian artists on urban revival and unpacking the causes for gentrification, Florida acknowledges that “… urbanists have long recognized that gentrification (and the higher housing prices that follow) is set in motion by artists and creatives," (Florida 12). Highlighting the relationship between gentrifiers underscores the tie between particular types of people and the act of gentrification.

Gentrification ultimately leads to inflated housing costs and displacement. Thus, Florida’s revelations have led to a better understanding of who bears the true brunt of urban regeneration. Florida further explains how objectively: “…What looks like neighborhood revitalization from one perspective is gentrification from another; rising housing values often go hand in hand with the displacement of long-term residents, a serious problem that demands serious responses,” (Florida 222).

Throughout this thesis, particularly in chapter two, the consequences of gentrification will be addressed through case studies and solutions to such detrimental urban development will be offered in Chapter Three.

The entire purpose of challenging gentrification and problematic urban development is to unveil the broader consequences of having such a system in place that allows for urban spatial inequality. Today, in 2021, in global cities urban segregation (typically based on socioeconomic and racial differences) is

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rampant. This urban segregation extends beyond typical ethnic enclaves and has firm and devastating effects in place-based opportunity and education access.

Particularly in the United States, this is a stark reality that is broadly due to historic practices of racial and class discrimination. Raj Chetty is an economist who specializes on income inequality and the results of place-based success. Chetty’s findings are described as ground-breaking research that “…emphasizes the impact of a child’s neighborhood on their chances of social mobility,” (Cook). The National Association for State Community Services Programs’ (NASCSP)1 article describes five factors that correlate to predicting a child’s opportunity that can conclusively predict inequality, as presented by Chetty’s research. These factors are: Segregation, Income Inequality, Family Structure, Social Capital, and School Quality (Cook). Chetty advocates for: “…the idea that policies should tackle social mobility at a local level with more focus on specific neighborhoods within cities,” (Cook). Throughout this thesis, the idea of place-based civic engagement will be further examined as a remedy to detrimental urban development and exclusionary social mobility.

Chapter Thesis Outline

To begin organizationally, I will briefly outline the three chapters. This summary will allow for transparency as to what will be presented throughout this body of work. In the first chapter, I will explore how explicit, municipal-led urban development projects have penetrated developing countries globally and the significance of these processes in the larger global economy. To solidify these points, I will present two case studies with primary research from specific examples. The first case will be on the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad, India in which thousands of informal housing dwellers along the banks of the riverfront were controversially displaced. The second case study will be on the Nova Luz development proposal in São Paulo, Brazil. The project has been branded as an effort to redevelop the “Cracolândia” corridor of the city where many civilians are homeless and crack- addicted. I will further explore the tangible consequences of predatory displacement in favor of beautification in these two individual cases, and underscore the overall goal of attracting global investment, attention, and praise.

Furthermore, I will deep-dive into the direct results of international economic policy on global urban development, specifically in the Global South and reaffirm how these developments are pawns within the neoliberal order.

In the second chapter, I will explore thematically the idea of market-based speculative gentrification that is overwhelmingly developer-led. The first case study will focus on the neighborhood of Belleville, Paris. Today in Belleville, there is rapid, speculative gentrification taking place despite a strong counter-gentrification movement. I will explain the history of urban renewal in Belleville and offer a more recent example of resistance to its gentrification. In the second case study, I will present my research in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Red Hook has experienced quick and intense urban renewal in recent years which has fundamentally changed the fabric of the neighborhood. Given how unchecked urban development is in the United States, I will examine the consequences of gentrification and how it has led to a modern version of urban segregation. Then, I will compare the two cases of Belleville and Red Hook to draw conclusions 1 “…the national association charged with advocating and enhancing the leadership role of states in preventing and reducing poverty, and representing a network that works at the local, state, and federal level to revitalize communities and build individual and family self-sufficiency,” (Cook)

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? on the state of market-driven urban regeneration in developed countries.

In the third chapter, I plan to highlight the successes and disappointments of participatory urban planning by looking at two different case studies in Cape Town, South Africa and Paris, France.

The first case study examines the real estate developer BLOK based in Cape Town and analyzes how exactly they approach participatory housing development, specifically in the case of luxury housing in the rapidly gentrifying, predominantly Cape Malay neighborhood of Bo Kaap. BLOK and its housing development project prove to be a negative example of citizen participatory involvement, highlighting the realities of developer-led participation. In the second case study, I will present a positive example of citizenled participatory urban planning through the example of Paris en Selle, an urban mobility non-profit based in Paris. Paris en Selle has created an effective model for participatory governance: a democratic model that is completely volunteer-based while simultaneously fostering a close working relationship with the municipality. In the end, I will comparatively analyze the two cases and highlight trends in how to meaningfully drive civic engagement for urban development as a living, breathing model for participatory urban design.

This thesis is a two pronged one: competitive economics, introduced by developed countries in the 1980s in the form of neoliberalism, has bred deregulation and predation in cities across the globe, undermining the perceived value of its citizens in favor of creating global, beautiful cities. This disregard has been manifested in the urban development priorities of municipalities in developing countries, conceiving of urban renewal projects that target vulnerable populations while simultaneously, and similarly, developed nations allow speculative real estate development which breeds unfettered gentrification and eventual displacement of vulnerable local populations, made even more dire with the considerable repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chapter I

In our contemporary world, cities across the globe have pursued neoliberal political agendas by pushing forward contentious public urban development projects. Heavy international pressure and the development of cosmopolitan cities push local municipalities to implement contentious and ambitious urban regeneration projects. These projects are all created to attract capital investment from the private international business sector along with travel from foreign tourists. When examining the relentless urban development taking place in economically peripheral countries, it is critical to focus on how governmentdriven redevelopment efforts take place internationally across developing countries. When looking at these cases, it is startling to see how similarly intentioned and designed these initiatives seem to be. These types of explicit, municipal-led urban development projects penetrating developing countries globally are direct symptoms of a neoliberal transnational economy that is fundamentally flawed and oriented towards international capitalism at-all-costs. The following chapter makes use of a pair of individual cases in two different emerging countries: one based in Ahmedabad, India and one based in São Paulo, Brazil. The two case studies highlight the injustices of municipal-driven urban development and the implications of trickle-down urban development in pursuit of a global neoliberal order.

1.1 Case Study 1: SRDP in Ahmedabad, India — Displacement and Marginalization

The first case study explores the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project based in Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad is a sprawling city in Western India, located in the state of Gujarat. In 2011, the

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population of Ahmedabad was 5.57 million and is 179.2 square miles in surface area. It is estimated that there are 439,843 people who live in informal housing, or slums, throughout the city. The predominant religion is Hinduism, which 83% of the population practices (Borgen Project). In Spring 2018, I had the opportunity to spend a month living in Ahmedabad on IHP’s program Cities in the 21st Century: People, Planning, and Politics. While there, I studied in-depth a controversial riverfront redevelopment plan.

The project was completed in the early 2010s and was funded by a city, state, and national government collaboration but was principally managed by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), considered the governing body of the city of Ahmedabad. Since its inception, the project has been heavily debated and continues to be a point of contention today. This redevelopment initiative, called the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project, or SRDP, was initiated by the local city government of Ahmedabad, or the AMC. Since the creation of the AMC in the 1970s, it generated enough funding by the mid-2000s to begin the implementation of the SRDP, as the project was originally proposed in the mid-1990s. The land is centrally located along the desirable waterfront, and was intensely speculated on prior to the SRDP. Interestingly, the website of HCP Design and Project Management (HCPDPM), the architectural firm that designed and implemented the construction of the riverfront, envisions the project as a “… social uplift and urban rejuvenation project that will renew Ahmedabad,” (World Architects).

Ahmedabad, India is a city on the cusp of intense international investment and recognition: from its natural beauty to cultural and historical significance, it has the makings to be a true tourist and commercial destination. In 2017, Ahmedabad was named India’s first, and only, UNESCO Heritage City in large part due to its 600-year-old historic walled central city. Additionally, the Sabarmati Ashram that sits along the Sabarmati riverfront is a large attraction given its important ties to Mahatma Ghandi. Many United States-based software and technology companies, such as Apttus, have offices on the West side of the city where they have outsourced much of their technical labor. To catapult Ahmedabad onto the world stage, and in an attempt to brand it as a beautiful city with impressive technological advancements and European-like qualities, the AMC has made a concerted effort to redesign the built environment Ahmedabad. The AMC has added a Bus Rapid Transit System, the construction of the “smart” Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, and the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project — the case of interest.

All of these additions advance Ahmedabad’s image as an attractive, global city -welcome to international capital and tourism.

At the same time, these changes have been disastrous for Ahmedabad’s population. Many of these changes manifest as symptoms of the powerful post-colonial legacy present in India today. An organized public transportation system (the Bus Rapid Transit System), financial and technological industries (the Gujarat Tec-City), and a new, clean riverfront (the SRDP) are all standards of western cosmopolitan cities such as London, Paris, or New York. But they are not projects designed to help Ahmedabad’s people. Instead of retrofitting the characteristics of leading global cities to meet the needs of the citizens of Ahmedabad, the municipal, state, and federal government has essentially “copy and pasted” these development concepts from Western cities, projecting them onto a non-Western city. In the case of Ahmedabad, the results have been disastrous for the local, urban poor population: they have been displaced en masse and forced to relocate, forfeiting their communities and livelihoods.

In Ahmedabad, the Sabarmati riverfront is a defining natural resource, with the city center originally being settled and built along the riverfront. A large majority of the commercial, recreational, and religious activity for citizens take place along the riverbanks. For example, the Sabarmati Ashram is

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? located on the Northwest corner of the river, established there in 1915 by Mahatma Gandhi because of the beauty and importance of the river, considering it a source of life and prayer. Gandhi himself lived at Sabarmati for many years, and it is recognized to be one of his many residences while he was not traveling or imprisoned. Despite the cultural, spiritual, and commercial significance of the river and its banks, the AMC continued onward under the direct supervision of Narendra Modi. Today, Narendra Modi is the 14th prime minister of India, but in the early 2010s was the Chief Minister of his home state of Gujarat, where Ahmedabad is located. Prior to becoming Prime Minister of India in 2014, he presided over Gujarat and made it a central initiative to execute the SRDP. Today, it is considered a great point of pride for his administration (Mathur 68). It is no coincidence that Ahmedabad is typically one of the first stops whenever there is an official state visit from a world leader to India. Once in Ahmedabad, often the first stop on the official tour is to the Sabarmati riverfront where Modi presents the development.2 This practice continues, deliberately ignoring the deep pain and injustice that was caused on the riverfront.

In the end, the SRDP is a colossal riverfront walk, running 45 kilometers along the riverbank.

While the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project was an accomplishment that symbolized international advancement for Indian political leaders, it came with undeniable consequences for the most vulnerable citizens of Ahmedabad. Overall, the project “aimed at transforming both sides of the riverbank into leisure space,” (Mathur 65). Prior to this urban renewal development, “The riverbank encompassed 70 formal and informal settlements providing habitat to about 40 thousand families,” (Mathur 65). The riverbank was also used regularly for markets, activities related to generating livelihood, urban farming, and local laundries (dhoti ghats) in addition to cultural and communal activities for residents (Mathur 65). The thousands of informal housing settlers who lived along the riverfront prior to the riverfront redevelopment were actively displaced by the “reclamation of the waterfront.” In the end, this massive development and its years of construction displaced thousands of informal housing settlers who resided along the banks of the Sabarmati River. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation rolled onto the riverfront one morning with a fleet of bulldozers after handing out eviction notices and destroyed everything that was left standing. After widespread displacements, and local protestation, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation was cornered into offering formalized housing in specific zones of the city to those who were affected. In an effort to placate the evicted and general public, the AMC relocated thousands of civilians into governmentbuilt housing in peripheral neighborhoods of the city, the average placement being miles away from their original home along the riverfront. The resettlement sites were offered at inland locations on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.

2 In 2018, while I was there, President Justin Trudeau was on an official visit to India and first stopped in Ahmedabad to see the Sabarmati Riverfront Development. Similarly, in February 2020 on President Trump’s official tour to India entitled “Namaste Trump” he was almost entirely in Ahmedabad for his quick 36-hour stop.

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Figure 1: Informal Housing Settlements A photo of the informal housing settlements along the Sabarmati River, prior to the redevelopment of the Sabarmati Riverfront.

Photo credits: HCP Design, Planning and Management Ltd Figure 2: The Sabarmati Riverfront Today Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project planners boasted about the resemblance of the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad to the Seine riverfront in Paris, France.

Photo credits: The Economic Times

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? 1.2 Local Voices from the Resettled Community of Santosh Nagar

In 2018, I had the opportunity to visitWhen visiting Santosh Nagar, one of the resettled communities within Ahmedabad. I talked there, one hot Friday morning in mid-February of 2018, I had the opportunity to talk with a few different riverfront-dwellers who were directly impacted by the SRDP. One of my informantsthem, a man named Mohammed Dalal, lived along the Sabarmati River for his entire life, prior to the redevelopment (he appeared to be in his late 40s). I was able to communicate with him through a translator who spoke fluent Gujarati and English. When asking him questions about his experience, he explained passionately how his quality of life, income, and well-being had suffered incredibly since being forcibly moved. Along the riverfront, in the informal housing, he described a strong community that was safe and secure with a variety of opportunities for a good, reliable income. He clarified that this was in large part due to the central location of the riverfront and the constant activity that took place there: “Along the riverfront there was fresh water that we could use whenever we wanted. We used it to cook, to bathe, and to drink. Here, we do not have that. We must pay for water or walk far to get water from the riverfront,” (Dalal). Mohammed explained this to me with wide eyes and an urgent voice.

As we continued talking, a larger group of people began to crowd around us listening to what Mohammed was describing. My translator, Sagar, explained that the group was all in agreement that something needed to be done — all they wanted was to be able to return to how things were and they were resentful and angry that the AMC had forced them into this dirty, inconvenient, and unfamiliar housing. I looked around and took note of their formalized lodging. It was built in a brutalist and bland architectural style with three stories and a square exterior.

Objectively it looked neat, but the surrounding environment outside of the buildings was undeniably unsanitary. There were mounds of garbage, mud, and hordes of flies everywhere. The flies were swarming around people, children, food — everything and anything they could land on. They were inescapable. Mohammed acknowledged this and said they lived with flies, insects, and trash. He continued to explain the community’s sentiments on the SRDP: “Everyone wants to return to live on the riverfront — if we were given the chance, we would move back tomorrow. Our livelihoods were ruined after we were forced to leave. We are at the edge of the city now, the riverfront was central to everything. The river gave us everything we needed, it was our source of life. We were promised good housing from the AMC, and that is not what they gave to us,” (Dalal).

Overall, my impression from the community was very much a feeling of resentment and deception. From Mohammed’s explanation and the mood of the crowd surrounding us, it was evident that the SRDP hit a nerve. Mohammed finished by clarifying that the AMC promised to resettle the community in a central location near the riverfront with quality, clean housing. They clearly felt this was not what was delivered to them. Despite plenty of criticism for their destructive operationse many downfalls and much criticism, Ahmedabad political leaders and planners find the SRDP to be an incredible success for the city.

Many in the ruling class of Ahmedabad believe the SRDP to be one more step towards preparing the city to receive the international investment and attention that it so clearly deserves. Much like the Bus Rapid Transit System and the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, these advancements were made not for the benefit of its civilians but for the world stage, attempting to put Ahmedabad ‘on the map ’so to speak.

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Essentially, these development projects are bids to transform Ahmedabad into a global city. Striving to become a global city allows urban centers, such as Ahmedabad, to enjoy significant competitive advantages within a globalized economic system; , qualifying it as a place that is deemed important and valuable on a global scale (Sassen). In attempting to craft Ahmedabad into a global city, leaders are buying into the idea that cities are only inherently valuable as sites of capitalistic generation, which fits within the larger Neoliberal Order.

In On a humid morning in late February 2018, I met had the opportunity to meet with the architecture firm that won the bid to design and build the SRDP. The name of the firm is HCP Design and Project Management. While visiting their office in Northwest Ahmedabad, I asked a principal planner named Pradip Jadav who directly worked on the SRDP some questions about the project. His perspective exemplified how precisely out of touch those in charge were with the reality of the entire effort. JadavHe emphasized the development’s wild success since completion. to me how the development had been a wild success in the years since its completion. He initially notedsays that the waterfront is now a democratic recreational space where festivals, marathons, and bike races can easily be held. He explained further by adding: “Ahmedabad residents will benefit from events like these. Now the city can easily host marathons and triathlons. It’s really a democratic space now,” Jadav explained(Jadav). I wanted to press him on this point, so I asked my next question was whether or not there was a dominant running and cycling culture in Ahmedabad., or not. One might reasonably expect that there is, in Ahmedabad, given the huge reallocation of space for those activities. I assumed there must be for marathons and bike races to be top of mind when conceiving of such a large and defining public space. JadavHe dropped his eyes and admitted that no, in fact there is not much of a biking or running culture currently in Ahmedabad. He clarified by saying, “No there isn’t one yet… but I’m confident that there will be one eventually,” (Jadav). After my questions, he gave a 15 minute presentation on all of the wonderful benefits of the SRDP. He added that he was especially pleased because so much of what they had planned for had actually come to fruition, such as the Riverfront Flower Park (which he stated proudly is only 20 Rupees to visit on the weekdays and 50 Rupees to visit on the weekends).

His response to my questions about the nonexistent running and biking culture in Ahmedabad, explaining how he believes there one day soon will be such a culture, demonstrates perfectly how the SRDP fits within a prescribed ideal of what Ahmedabad should be: a place modeled after Western cities, adopting their interests, aesthetics, and planning norms. Explicitly, whether he was aware of it or not, he would like to see Ahmedabad conform to Western ideals of leisure instead of identifying the kinds of recreational activities that are actually popular in Ahmedabad today and building a public space with that in mind.

Pradip also drew direct comparisons between the finished product of the SRDP to other urban riverfronts, stating that his goal was to make the Sabarmati riverfront resemble: “the Seine in Paris, or the Thames in London, or the Hudson in New York,” (Jadav). While this is objectively a nice ideal to have, it seemed to be quite unrealistic to think that Ahmedabad could feasibly be the next Paris or New York one day.

When I asked Pradip about the vulnerable population that was displaced as a result of the SRDP, he had an interesting perspective. He explained that the people were: “ungrateful and enjoyed complaining about the housing that the AMC kindly built and gave to them,” (Jadav).

When I described my conversation with the residents of Santosh Nagar and reiterated the frustration felt with their current living situation and desire to return to life on the riverbank, he frowned.

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? He said: “No, no. They are lucky. We gave them much nicer housing to live in now. When they lived along the Sabarmati, the settlements were disgusting, unclean, and unhealthy. There were many health concerns living there,” (Jadav). He emphasized how he believed them to be fortuitous in being upgraded from informal housing to formal housing so easily and free of charge. He also reenforced the idea that the riverbank dwellers were unthankful to be complaining after all that was done for them. He went so far as to point out that the AMC did not, in fact, even need to even do anything to resettle the informal housing dwellers because technically they were residing on the federal land illegally, and it was fully within the state’s right to evict and dispose of them. As he put it, the resettlement of the community was an act of grace and kindness on behalf of the AMC. At the time of our interview, the SRDP had been complete for nearly a decade, so it was fully useable. When visiting the riverfront myself, one of the first things to strike me was how it was virtually empty of pedestrians. On the section that I walked along, the only other people I saw for a quite a distance was a young Indian couple. Over the course of three afternoons on both weekdays and weekends, I spent a number of hours in total a few hours at the riverfront, taking note of my observations. Each time, I was startled by how empty the vast walkways were: both in feeling and in appearance. For something that is so huge and such a focal point of the city, it was astonishing at how bare it was in terms of use, particularly in a city of over 5 million people. The emptiness and lifelessness of the riverfront was a testament to how the development actually served the city and its residents. The fact that nearly a decade post-construction of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development, it goes largely unused and unpopulated, unlike the other riverfronts it was modeled after (the Seine, the Thames), is concerning. This reality underpins the problematic nature of urban development in the vein of explicit neoliberalism. Coupled with post-colonial undertones of Western-oriented development, the entire project does not appear to represent or serve the city of Ahmedabad well. Ultimately, Renu Desai, a research fellow at the Centre for Urban Equity at the CEPT University in Ahmedabad summarizes the SRDP best. The Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project is, at its core: “…an effort to gentrify the riverfront while branding the project as an inclusive and holistic effort… simultaneously ignoring questions of social justice which have been profoundly disregarded over the past decade and continue to be insufficiently addressed,” (Desai 49).

1.3 Case Study 2: Projeto Nova Luz in São Paulo, Brazil

This case study makes use of observations collected while conducting primary and secondary research in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, while I studied there during the spring of 2018. São Paulo is a large and vibrant metropolis in Southeast Brazil, located in the state of São Paulo. It is considered to be the financial center of the country and has a huge concentration of wealth and poverty — the epitome of social and economic stratification. In 2018, São Paulo was recorded to have a population of 12.18 million residents. In the late 2000s, the local government of São Paulo put out a request for bids from architecture and design firms to reimagine one of the poorest, most devastated areas of the city: Cracolândia. In 2009, a revitalization effort was made to promote the urban renovation of the Cracolândia district by purview of a public-private partnership. After “…numerous public consultations as well as the promotion of a few class actions questioning the legitimacy and purpose of the Municipality’s initiative, the public bidding’s winning consortium delivered the contracted urban renovation plans in 2011,” (Sotto). Cracolândia literally translates to “Crackland” as it is an open zone of the city where crack- addicts and drug dealers freely interact. This section of São Paulo is where many of the homeless and crack-addicted civilians live

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informally, having gained the nickname “Cracolândia.” The Guardian journalist Sam Cowie describes the spectacle as a brazen drug scene which is “… unlike nearly anything in any city in the world — hundreds and sometimes thousands of addicts, congregating openly in the city’s bustling downtown core,” (Cowie).

He further explains: “After Cracolândia first appeared in the 1990s, when the highly addictive smoked form of cocaine entered the city’s narcotics market, a succession of governments have tried — and failed — to end it, mostly via repressive policing,” (Cowie). Due to this fact, it is generally considered unsafe and has a dominant presence of crime and violence and “…has been a stubborn fixture of downtown São Paulo for more than two decades,” (Cowie). In 2008, 2012, and 2017, city officials have attempted to forcibly remove the dwellers through assault and aggression. Early on a Sunday morning in May 2017, tensions came to a head as police swarmed Cracolândia. The municipal government, with over 900 armed police officers, ambushed the community using rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse the crowd. They forcefully evicted all of the squatters, discarding their clothing and homes, doing nothing to relocate them. This particular crackdown was called “Operation Pain and Suffering” making their intentions fairly explicit.

After each successive crackdown, the addicts have eventually reconvened in the same area of São Paulo, so these dispersal operations have been a failure (Cowie).

Cracolândia is located in a central location right next to São Paulo’s biggest and busiest train station, Luz. Due to the presence and location of Cracolândia, the neighborhood was deemed blighted early on and became an area of intense interest for redevelopment because of its ideal location, near downtown in the Central Business District. The specific neighborhood of Cracolândia is called Luz, and the revitalization project was branded as “Projeto Nova Luz” or “Project New Luz.” In addition, the city government of São Paulo would like to revitalize this blighted neighborhood in an effort to reduce the high levels of crime and violence of the area.

Luz has openly been gentrifying in recent years, especially seen through the Projeto Nova Luz revitalization initiative which was planned to begin in 2018 and includes the addition of 1,200 luxury apartments.

Sam Cowie notes the dichotomy by explaining: “Despite being a scene of intense urban degradation, Cracolândia in fact sits on prime real estate,” (Cowie) Interestingly enough, young professionals coexist daily with the crack addicts — on weekdays workers in suits and backpacks can be seen rushing past the disturbing scenes, avoiding encounters.

In 2021, the project has yet to be implemented unlike the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. To begin the process of municipal-led urban renewal, the neighborhood of Luz was conveniently identified as a ZEIS (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social) or Zone of Special Social Interest, which allowed the government to bypass typical bureaucratic procedures in order to push Projeto Nova Luz to be adopted.

Part of the urgency of the project is due to the fact that the land Cracolândia sits on is estimated to be worth approximately 750 million Reals (or $147 million USD): “The municipality conceived the “Nova Luz” project. In a public-private partnership, the city intends to ”renovate” 45 blocks in the neighborhoods of Luz,” (Samora, 411). The plan for redevelopment was designed by Secovi-SP, a well-known organization that specializes in private-public partnerships throughout São Paulo. It has spearheaded the project and released preliminary plans. Another interested party in seeing Projeto Nova Luz come to life is the insurance company Porto Seguro. Porto Seguro has positioned itself as a prominent benefactor in the public-private partnership of Projeto Nova Luz. Interestingly enough, Porto Seguro is particularly interested in this redevelopment because of the immediate proximity of the Luz neighborhood to its downtown offices.

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? With the Nova Luz Project, stakeholder involvement and public outreach was minimally executed. The engagement that was done, as is the case with a later example in chapter three, was a formality to cross T’s and dot I’s. Although public hearings and consultations were officially held, “… the different actors involved argued that the participation process had been a mere formality intended to legitimize decisions that had already been taken by the Municipality, regardless of other proposals and contributions,” (Sotto).

Figure 3: Cracolândia in Luz This aerial photo captures the density within the Cracolândia housing settlement of Luz, São Paulo.

The informal housing structures illuminate the realities of living in Cracolândia.

Photo credit: The Guardian

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Figure 4: Projeto Nova Luz Design A sketch of the accepted Projeto Nova Luz, created and presented by SECOVI — a well-known urban development firm in São Paulo.

Image Credit: Cidade de São Paulo Subprefeituras Despite the many public objections to the project, nothing has resulted in interrupting Projeto Nova Luz from moving forward. This dissonance demonstrates a gap between, “…the Administration and civil society that needs to be bridged, indicating that existing regulations were insufficient to encourage dialogue, and public officials were thus unprepared to incite and assure civil society’s participation in the process,”(Sotto).

This disconnect foreshadows the issue of participatory governance, which will be explored more in-depth, and highlights a recurring theme of municipal negligence and lack of stakeholder inclusion within largescale urban and housing development projects, particularly within developing countries.

While in São Paulo, I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation given by Alice Dalgalarrondo.

Alice is a Brazilian woman who is a photojournalist and has documented Cracolândia in-depth, chronicling how it has changed and evolved over the years. During the presentation, she described and displayed the horrific police evictions of Cracolândia in May 2017. These evictions took place primarily in anticipation for the impending redevelopment of the area. She explained in-detail how the squatters were assaulted and forced out of their informal housing settlements throughout the neighborhood with aggressive police tactics: utilizing batons, tear gas, and dogs. After this rapid-fire, surprise-attack eviction, the government did not consider offering alternative housing for those who were displaced. By offering no alternative housing, or desperately needed residential treatment programs, many of the occupants of Cracolândia simply returned to the area and continued using crack once the police had eventually left. These raid-style

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? evictions resulted in many arrests for illegal trespassing, massive displacements, and overly violent removals of these informal settlers, who were all struggling with intense addictions and dependencies on crack. It is no coincidence that this raid was done to, literally, make way for the development plans outlined for Projeto Nova Luz. These plans included zoning for luxury condos, top-tier restaurants, and designer retail stores all to be built within the Luz neighborhood.

Despite these evictions, Cracolândia residents eventually made their way back to the borders of the Luz neighborhood of São Paulo. While visiting the area on a cloudy afternoon towards the end of March in 2018, I made note of the outskirts of Luz. Along one main thoroughfare, I watched as a handful of homeless people laid inside their well-worn, pitched tents that were scattered along the sidewalks. Some were sitting on mattresses, while many laid on only the hard concrete. I watched as one gaunt-looking woman hung her clothes along a makeshift clothesline outside of her tent. On the other side of the street, I noticed a small group of people huddled around a portable electric stove attempting to cook a chicken leg. While doing this, there was a woman hunched, squatting as she fiddled with what appeared to be a crack pipe. While she did this, a dirt-smeared toddler played in her lap. Many of the resettlements looked permanent: the mattresses, the secured tents, and the portable stoves all demonstrated a degree of permanence. These resettlements stood in defiance of the police evictions from May 2017, which was fascinating to see. While on my visit to Luz, I had the opportunity to briefly talk with a former crack dealer, who lived near Luz and previously frequented Cracolândia often to sell drugs. My informant, Nino Alves, explained the general perception of the police and the government’s priorities. He explained to me, through a translator that spoke both Portuguese and English, that the “…government doesn’t care at all about these people. They think they can get rid of them to make room for the new fancy buildings, but they will never be able to get these people to leave. They’ll always be here. Luz belongs to them,” (Alves).

Projeto Nova Luz as a proposed renewal of Cracolândia exemplifies perfectly the neoliberal idealization of Brazil and its government. It is clear that the city government of São Paulo prioritizes lucrative, luxury urban development over the needs and issues of their citizens, a population that is suffering enormously at the hands of a crack epidemic. The injustices associated with the forced evictions in Luz demonstrates the municipality’s desire to clear the city of human blight and beautify through redevelopment, specifically through capitalistic development that plays perfectly into the Neoliberal Order.

Instead of ethically and consciously moving the dwellers of Cracolândia by giving them proper housing and offering some variation of addiction treatment for their crippling dependencies, the government has pointedly chosen to dehumanize this already marginalized population by quite literally trying to dispose of them.

Professor Patricia Samora of University of São Paulo summarized the situation by explaining: “…economic interests prevail over all the others… the “Nova Luz” project prioritized real estate speculation and pushed the poor population to peripheral areas with dramatic consequences,” (Samora 412).

Socio-economic inequality is rampant in the massive metropolis of São Paulo and is an important factor in the case of Projeto Nova Luz. The economic and social divide in Brazil is stark, especially seen in São Paulo. Brazil's social and economic divide was made famous globally in 2004, when a photo went viral of a luxury high-rise condominium in Morumbi, complete with tennis courts, private balconies, and dipping pools. The high rise was nestled up to the edge of Paraisópolis, one of São Paulo’s most famous favelas. A favela is a “…slum or shantytown located within or on the outskirts of Brazil's largest cities,” (Wallenfeldt).

Typically, a favela is a type of low-income or informal housing situation where squatters “…occupy vacant

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land at the edge of a city and construct shanties of salvaged or stolen materials,” (Wallenfeldt). They are characterized as having experienced historical governmental negligence and represent today established and sustained inequalities throughout Brazil. Brazil’s dire circumstances relating to the current stresses on its social fabric is in large part due to the rapid adoption of capitalism after the fall of their dictatorship, and the predatory neoliberal economic practices that have neatly fallen into place with their geopolitical economic goals. These pressures largely resulted from international influence from countries and NGOs such as the United States, Britain, and the World Economic Forum.3 From the homeless, such as those living in Cracolândia, who make shanty shelters for themselves along sidewalks throughout the city, to the extremely wealthy like those who live in the unbelievable mansions in neighborhoods such as the Jardims and Morumbi — the intensity of social class stratification is a reality that city officials must contend with, especially as displacement continues to be on the rise and accessible drugs like crack offer an easy escape to reality. In a city of so much inequity and injustice, many of the most marginalized and vulnerable Paulistanos turn to the drug crack and have become increasingly dependent on it. This creates a challenging dimension to an already present problem: a public health crisis on top of housing precarity, all within the context of urban planning and renewal. The Cracolândia neighborhood of Luz is where many of the homeless drugaddicted citizens of downtown São Paulo reside, hundreds of them sick and in need of a serious public health, housing, and urban development intervention on behalf of the city government.

1.4 Comparison and Thematic Analysis

Between these two cities and developments, there are prevailing themes. Both have plans for or have completed large-scale urban development projects. Both municipal governments have been complicit in inflicting housing insecurity and have both actively evicted or have knowingly displaced specific, marginalized communities. Both cities exist within rapidly developing countries, with governments that eagerly subscribe to global neoliberal economic forces that allow for: flowing trade, global competition, and international commerce between countries across the globe. Whether it is an urban revitalization initiative that targets a community of addicts, or a development project that has been complicit in displacing thousands of the urban poor — urban development projects share very similar injustices around the world.

Regardless of the project stage, city governments globally are pursuing large urban regeneration projects — in pursuit of their global neoliberal agendas — at the cost of the wellbeing and housing security of the most marginalized stakeholders. Future city planners need to utilize inclusive urban planning, where citizen input is not only a norm, but a genuine priority. Urban change needs to be for the people and by the people in order for it to be a real success — not only for politicians with an agenda, or architects with a vision. There are deep, enduring consequences of predatory and explicit displacement in favor of urban beautification as an overall effort to attract global investment, attention, and praise. These consequences are even more severe in countries of the Global South, where there are fewer social services and protections in place to safeguard the urban vulnerable. As is typically the case, repercussions are most deeply felt by those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder — be it homeless, crack-addicted users in São Paulo 3 The World Economic Forum is a global non-profit organization that was established in 1971 and works to engage political, business, cultural, and societal leaders to shape global, regional, and industrial agendas (World Economic Forum).

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? or informal riverfront dwellers in Ahmedabad. As I read in an article once written by New York housing activist Pablo Estupinan of Community Action for Safe Apartments: “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.”

Chapter II

In the 21st century, as cities evolve and emerge as sophisticated places for people to live, work, and play, geographers and scientists have seen metropolitan populations steadily grow at an exponential rate. The days of urban sprawl and suburban dominance are slowly coming to an end as humans are overwhelmingly choosing to reside in cosmopolitan centers throughout the world in search of opportunity, culture, and work. With this urban population influx, cities are going through exciting and turbulent changes that creates a chasm for rethinking our urban centers. Notable turbulent change includes lowincome civilian displacement and widespread neighborhood gentrification. Considering the limited physical space of cities, urban epicenters are undergoing impressive yet oftentimes problematic urban regenerative changes. These changes are overwhelmingly dictated by real estate speculation and capitalization. In some cases, it is institutional and municipal redevelopment projects imposed on cities and civilians, and in other cases it is the slow-burn of neighborhood transformation and resident overturn: dominated by the fluxes of free-market neoliberalism and real estate speculation. In this chapter, I will present two case studies that demonstrate the impact of gentrification in two cities existing within two developed countries: Belleville, Paris and Red Hook in the United States. Not only will I describe the on-the-ground, physical dimension of gentrification in both cases, but I will also explore its more intangible aspects. In Belleville, I will dive into the politics and systems of resistance; in Red Hook, I will explain the long-term impact of placebased opportunity and its influence on social mobility. At the end of the chapter, the two cases will be comparatively analyzed.

2.1 Case Study 1: Gentrification in Belleville, Paris — Realities of Resistance

Belleville, a neighborhood located in the northeastern corridor of Paris in the twentieth arrondissement has had the rare opportunity to experience both a public, city-ordained urban gentrification project and the process of intense and disruptive market gentrification. In the past 30 years of Belleville’s history, there have been various points of contention, specifically one from the past and one present-day. In the 1990s, there was fierce backlash over a redevelopment project proposed by the city in the lower section of the Belleville neighborhood, Bas-Belleville. Today, there is controversy over a community building in the Parc de Belleville where developers have proposed to transform the space into a gourmet restaurant.

Meanwhile, citizens are calling for the building to remain in the public domain and to be used as a public space.

There is a strong legacy of community organizing and interventionist urban policy that grew out of Belleville in the wake of the 1990s Bas-Belleville redevelopment proposal with grassroots resistance against gentrification taking place today. The organization La Bellevilleuse, a grassroots entity against imposing urban policy in Belleville in the 1990s, has continued in a more local anti-gentrification resistance in Belleville today, specifically exemplified by the fight for “La Maison de L’Air” in the Parc de Belleville.

In both cases, Belleville citizens have organized to lay claim to their rightful place. In this section when examining the case of Belleville, the dynamic between the dominant population of immigrants and the incoming population of white Parisians will be further unpacked: “The entire world can be found here

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in Belleville…” (Terrier)4. Belleville has a powerful history of being home to the unwanted, the resettled, the immigrant — it has “…been a place of social and ethnic mixing, with strong urban activism and mobilization," (Nez, 4) and continues today to be an energized neighborhood that is increasingly vulnerable to speculative development and gentrification, especially given its central location in Paris. According to the 2009 census, the neighborhood is made up of the following non-French born immigrants: 10.4% Maghreb, 7.5% Asian, and 3.9% Sub-Saharan African (Stott, 40). With 21.8% of Belleville’s population alone being made up of non-native French immigrants, it is clear that along with first-generation French immigrants, Belleville is incredibly diverse — specifically in the range of immigrants who call it home. Given this surprisingly successful mélange of ethnic enclaves, researchers hypothesize that this neighborhood “… where Jews and Muslims, Chinese and Africans, cohabit, has never [had an] ethnic conflict… because the street and its permanent interactions play a hyper-integrating role. If this disappears, it's a social catastrophe,” (Pincetl, 452). Much of Belleville’s signature diversity has been threatened in the past, most overtly with the Bas-Belleville urban renewal project that was proposed in the early 1990s.

In 1991, Didier Bariani, the twentieth arrondissement mayor at the time, had a municipal redevelopment plan in the works for the lower Belleville section of the neighborhood. This plan included the leveling of, “… up to 90% of its buildings because of their insalubrious condition… to be transformed into a large commercial center,” (Pincetl, 449). The buildings that were proposed to be demolished in the Bas-Belleville section of the neighborhood were majority used for housing immigrants through public, subsidized housing from the City of Paris. This project was perceived to be a tool for ethnic cleansing (Pincetl, 442). In reaction to the project proposal, Belleville civilians felt the need to organize and create a community organization that would fight this. Thus, the organization La Bellevilleuse was born which is self-described as a “volunteer neighborhood association.” La Bellevilleuse is largely credited with having saved Bas-Belleville from “a process of radical urban renewal and gentrification,” (Yaari, 274). After battling with La Bellevilleuse for seven years, fielding formal complaints and contentious town halls, the Paris City Council finally folded and unanimously voted to adapt a new project where 80% of buildings would be retained and rehabilitated, and the new construction would not be a commercial center, but instead social housing.

When La Bellevilleuse was created in 1988, the forces of gentrification were undoubtedly at play. The organization was composed mostly of newly settled middle and upper middle class citizens who were committed to “…collective action, aimed at defending the right of immigrants and the workingclass to remain in Belleville…” (Simon 226). The geographer, Patrick Simon, argues that while this organization was successful in killing the Bas-Belleville renovation proposal, La Bellevilleuse is effectively a coalition between new Belleville residents who belong to the middle and upper-middle classes and the native immigrant, working-class residents of Belleville. Simon explains that by advocating for immigrant and working class civilians who would have been marginalized and displaced by the Bas-Belleville redevelopment, these gentrifiers ultimately advocated for the working class in order to manifest their own interests: “Speculating on the transformation of the population of Belleville: they wish to prevent the toorapid gentrification of the neighborhood and preserve the atmosphere they came for in the first place,” (Simon 226). Additionally, the act of community organizing by the bourgeois themselves represents a form of compensation — an attempt to make up for the power imbalances between the local and longtime 4 “Le monde entier se trouve ici à Belleville…”

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? residents and the infringement into their cultural enclaves (Simon, 226). This is so often the reality of neighborhoods experiencing gentrification. Ultimately, the leaders of La Bellevilleuse used their own social, cultural, and political capital to act as mediators in the contestation of the Bas-Belleville redevelopment, and were able to successfully end the project in large part due to their own privilege. Understanding the context and subversive motivations behind the creation of La Bellevilleuse is critical to grasping the larger context that bourgeois gentrifiers play in neighborhood transformation, interventionist activism, and cost of living inflation. Today, Belleville continues to face an existential threat to its multicultural urban landscape: manipulation of the real estate market and lack of local protective regulations have led to an arrival of middle and upper middle class Parisians to the neighborhood — all in search of what Belleville has to offer: multiculturalism, exoticism, and edge.

In Belleville today, the neighborhood is undergoing an intense wave of gentrification and urban regeneration. The forces that are influencing the identity of the neighborhood are much more intricate — it is dictated by a market-based system where real estate speculation and middle-class bourgeois citizens play a pivotal role. Before visiting Belleville in person, I reached out to a local Belleville community and literacy activist, Perrine Terrier, who works at a non- profit that fights against illiteracy in immigrant populations called Savoirs pour Réussir. One rainy morning in early December 2019, we had the chance to meet inperson at her office on Rue de Tourtille. Perrine has lived and worked in Belleville since 2009. I began by asking her about the changes taking place in Belleville and how she felt about the obvious gentrification forces at play. She explained that the urban renewal taking place in Belleville today is very controversial and is heavily criticized by activists and local residents alike. She prefaced our interview by explaining that while yes, the “ABC’s” (art galleries, bookstores, and cafes) that come with gentrification are convenient, enjoyable, and have interesting products to offer, and she sometimes does indulge in them, they are so clearly for a certain type of clientele: middle and upper middle class Parisians (Terrier). She underscored the tangible differences between the low- income, working class residents who live in the social housing in and around Belleville and the newly arrived, middle class “bohemian bourgeois” (commonly referred to as bobo’s in French) to Belleville. These differences are so visibly evident: “There is no mix,” (Terrier)5. She described it as a type of social segregation: separated by class distinction, where bobo residents are attracted to hip new restaurants, cafés, and bookstores and “… they replace the local residents,” (Terrier)6. She noted that in the daytime, with the central market along Boulevard de Belleville7, the neighborhood appears to be much more diverse with people from all over the world shopping and selling goods. At night, when the market is closed, the demographics of the neighborhood completely change. At night, students, professionals, and families can all be observed — generally well-resourced Parisians who have recently moved to Belleville: “Because it's a very cool neighborhood at the moment,” (Terrier).8 When describing how Belleville has changed, Perrine cited two specific examples that were around the corner from her office: the Napoleonstyle pizzeria, Tripletta, and the organic health foods grocery store, Belleville en Bio. She emphasized 5 “Il n’y a pas de melange.”

6 “…ils remplacent les résidents locaux.”

7 Le Marché de Belleville is an open-air daily market that sells local foods and items. Everything from North-African delicacies to Chinese noodles to Kosher baked goods are all featured. It is well-known throughout Paris for its multiculturalism.

8 “Parce que c'est un quartier tres à la mode.”

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how it was obvious that paying 13 Euros for a Margherita pizza was not in the price range of the working class immigrants who mostly resided in Belleville — it is clear that the restaurant is intended for a specific clientele. She used the same explanation for the health-foods grocery store: paying 9 Euros for a bar of natural hand-made Castille soap is not intended for an average working class Parisian. Both Tripletta and Belleville en Bio settled in Belleville in 2015, so they are relatively new to the neighborhood landscape. After speaking with Perrine, I visited Tripletta to make my own observations. The outside façade of the pizzeria appeared to have a specific aesthetic that was different from the other local businesses. I noticed the patrons enjoying lunch at Tripletta were nearly homogenous: young, white, middle class, and dressed eclectically.

I stopped in for a coffee and asked the server Joël why the restaurant owners had chosen this specific neighborhood in which to establish their restaurant. He hesitated for a moment, and then responded with a shrug saying, “Probably because it's a neighborhood that's really cool and has affordable rent,” (Favier)9.

This effectively confirms Perrine’s assessment of why people and businesses are moving to Belleville: it is a cool, interesting, and central place with affordable real estate prices, especially when compared to the rest of Paris. The artistic appeal of Belleville contributes to its branding as a cool neighborhood which real estate agents themselves “…affirm that the artistic dimension of Belleville adds symbolic cultural and potential economic value to the neighborhood,” (Stott 45). This artistic appeal is attractive to middle and upper-class intellectuals because they want to be in the epicenter of the “…changing socio-cultural trends and are keen to profit from the changes instigated by the artists,” (Stott 45).

Figure 5: Tripletta Pizzeria The exterior and interior of the gentrified pizzeria Tripletta seen in Belleville, Paris.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath 9 “Probablement parce que c'est un quartier qui est vraiment cool et il a un loyer abordable.”

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? Figure 6: Belleville en Bio Façade and peering interior shot of the organic foods store Belleville en Bio seen in Belleville.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath When visiting Belleville en Bio, I found a similar case: a diverging aesthetic, exorbitant prices, and young, white, upper-middle class patrons. Belleville’s changing landscape and rapidly evolving reputation as a place of energy, creativity, and culture are all undeniable contributions to its expedited gentrification.

Though this subtle takeover of Belleville is hard to form resistance against, as real estate speculation and up-selling is difficult to subvert, there is an opposition movement fighting against a new restaurant in the public park of Belleville.

Despite the influx of new, gentrified businesses into Belleville, the neighborhood is still practicing its signature interventionist urban policy activism. While interviewing Perrine, she explained a contentious situation involving urban renewal taking place in Parc de Belleville today. In Parc de Belleville, there is a building that sits in the center of the park that is called La Maison de l’Air and was used as a publicgathering site. In 2013, without any explanation, the city shut down the municipal building. In 2015, the city put a request out for proposals to purchase and transform the empty building, specifically with the intention of generating economic activity. In 2016, local neighborhood activists created “Collectif pour une Maison de l’Air aux Habitantes”10 to work to save La Maison de l’Air. In 2017, the city announced that La Maison de l’Air will be turned into a restaurant and will effectively become a private, commercial space.

In 2018, to diffuse the collective backlash against La Maison de L’Air, the city compromised by granting a temporary residency for a community organization that promotes democratic civilian engagement to occupy the building until 2020.

10 Collective for an Open Air Center for Local Inhabitants

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The backlash against this project stemmed from the belief that public spaces should not include or evolve into privatized spaces. Perrine Terrier explained: “The restaurant, by nature, would exclude certain parts of the Belleville population, exclusively by its prices or the affordability of its prices. This is fundamentally contrary to the purpose of public parks,” (Terrier)11. Perrine also described how it is hard to resist urban development projects that are directly in favor of gentrification and real estate inflation because the City of Paris — more specifically the mayor of the twentieth arrondissement — is very much in-favor of commercial investment into the district because of the arrival of capital and commerce. The mayor of the 20th arrondissement, Frédérique Calandra, is specifically interested in beautifying Belleville and attracting more tourism to the area. In the end, she said, the mayor is interested in money: “[Belleville] could be rehabilitated to provide decent, low-cost housing to the poor, while maintaining the middle class as well.

Figure 7: Fliers for La Maison de L’Air The outside of La Maison de l’Air, which was papered with fliers of planned protests against the proposal for a new restaurant. but the city has been more interested in the possible revenues to be generated by raising the ground rent than in maintaining a successful, integrated neighborhood,” (Pincetl, 453). To this end, Perrine explained how the City of Paris is passive and idle when it comes to counter-gentrification measures and protection of vulnerable populations to displacement.

While describing the controversy of La Maison de l’Air in Parc de Belleville, Perrine offered an example of successful, participatory development in the Belleville neighborhood: the construction of a small playground directly outside her office. She explained how citizens had been surveyed by the municipality to see what they would like to see built in their immediate courtyard, a courtyard that was surrounded by public housing, home to mostly African and Asian immigrants. The surrounding citizens voted for a playground for their kids to use, and that is precisely what the city built.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath

11 “Le restaurant, par nature, exclurait certaines parties de la population de Belleville, juste par le prix ou le prix abordable de ses prix. Ceci est fondamentalement contraire à l'objectif des parcs publics.”

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? Figure 8: La Maison de L’Air Movement Left, a screen capture of the facebook group “Collectif pour une Maison de l’Air aux Habitantes.” Right, a picture of La Maison de l’Air in Parc de Belleville.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath Perrine stated, “And there you have it — this is a perfect example of neighborhood engagement by collecting community input for a project that will affect them most directly. This is what the city should have done for the Maison de l’Air: asked for the input of citizens,” (Terrier).12 When visiting Parc de Belleville personally, I noticed that there were many indications of regular manifestations in support of keeping La Maison de l’Air a public space, organized by the grassroots collective. While there, I made observations on the patrons of the park to better understand who was benefitting from this public space and who might be people comprising the “Collectif pour une Maison de l’Air aux Habitantes.” I noticed a surprising number of young and middle-aged white couples who seemed to be characterized as bobo’s.

From couples walking their dogs, families playing with their young children, single people jogging — they all appeared to be middle and upper middle class, majority white, gentrifiers and not immigrants: the population that most dominantly lives in the surrounding social housing of the park. These observations forced me to question how much of the resistance to the restaurant in the Parc de Belleville is being done by the most vulnerable populations themselves. Patrick Simon’s theory explaining how the populations most affected by gentrification are the least likely to form the resistance to said gentrification because of lack of involvement and resources could have some validity in the case of Belleville and the battle for La 12 “Et viola, c’est un parfait exemple d'engagement communautaire et de collecte de contributions communautaires pour un projet qui les affectera le plus directement. C'est ce que la ville aurait dû faire pour la Maison de l'Air — a demandé l'avis des citoyens.”

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Maison de l’Air: “… the influx of “marginal gentrifiers” – the ones I have called the multiculturals – started a collective dynamic based on opposition to the urban renewal project and in the process reaffirmed local identity,” (Simon 228). While gentrification is a complex and nonlinear process, when gentrifiers attempt to “…slow down its gentrification, they also unwittingly facilitate the process by helping to revalorise Belleville, justifying further investments by property developers,” (47 Stott). This challenging dichotomy is important in understanding the reality of neighborhood gentrification in cities throughout developed countries.

2.2 Case Study 2: Gentrification in Red Hook, Brooklyn — Legacy of Segregation & Unequal Opportunity

In the case of New York City, gentrification and segregation go hand in hand. The United States has a long and tumultuous past littered with racial oppression, discriminatory housing practices, such as white flight and redlining, and increasing social and racial stratification in the 21st century. The process of redlining and the act of white flight are important historical catalysts for the changing urban landscapes of the United States. The process of redlining, particularly in the U.S., perpetuated race-based housing discrimination across urban America, where mortgage lenders could and would refuse to grant loans and extend credit to applicants in specific neighborhoods, largely based on their racial identity. More explicitly redlining is the: “presumed practice of mortgage lenders of drawing red lines around portions of a map to indicate areas or neighborhoods in which they do not want to make loans,” (Weintraub). Similarly, the act of white flight contributed to the state of segregation in American cities seen today. Especially in the Jim Crow era, white families moved en masse to suburban communities out of urban centers with significant minority populations, to avoid perceived home depreciation due to the presence of black and brown families. Both of these widespread processes of the 20th century resulted in deeply segregated and divided cities which continue to have a legacy today. Present-day, it is widely known the parts of Brooklyn are understood to be some of the most rapidly gentrifying areas in not only New York City, but within the entire United States (Chronopoulos 553). Williamsburg, a once industrial, working-class Brooklyn neighborhood residing on the banks of the East River has now earned the unaffectionate nickname of “Condoburg” because of how quickly luxury condos cropped up by overly eager real estate developers along the riverfront.

The unfettered speculative urban redevelopment, the unprotected residents (majority lowincome and minority), and the unregulated housing market all contribute in major ways to the current crisis Brooklyn is experiencing. Predictably, the neighborhood hotbeds of gentrification run along the East River in North, West, and Southwest Brooklyn. These neighborhoods include: “… Greenpoint, Williamsburg, DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Gowanus, and Park Slope… Very few African Americans live in west and north Brooklyn and every neighborhood in that area is currently majority white,” (Chronopoulos 553). The dynamic between the dominant population of black and brown minorities compared to the incoming population of white New Yorkers will be further dissected.

The rapid gentrification of Brooklyn has been met with minimal opposition or restriction by the City of New York. City Council members and the New York City Department of City Planning have been particularly accommodating by approving the rezoning of specific sections of Brooklyn to further allow for gentrification to take place. This complicity has led to a concerning white-washing and commercialization of West Brooklyn and fundamentally altered the borough’s urban fabric. Many anti-gentrification activists have condemned the City of New York in their enablement of gentrification, specifically criticizing the Brooklyn Queens Connector (BQX) which is a, “…proposed streetcar that will connect a dozen neighborhoods along

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? an 11-mile corridor from Red Hook, Brooklyn to Astoria, Queens. The BQX would be efficient, accessible, resilient and sustainable, and would improve streets in neighborhoods along the corridor,” (New York City Economic Development Corporation). This proposed streetcar transportation system would run along the East River, specifically reaching all of the neighborhoods that have experienced gentrification the most intensely. These neighborhoods are now largely occupied by middle and upper-middle class white residents who have lobbied for increase access to transportation. This project was strategically presented in January 2016, as gentrifying forces were coalescing in Brooklyn. It has been well-documented that neighborhoods in close proximity to public transportation result in inflated property value. When the plan was released in 2016, it was backed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Due to budget restrictions, infeasibility, and length of time for the development, it has not yet been formally adopted or built. Yet, this transportation project is a clear example of the explicit regenerative forces at work — forces which are often times supported by the local municipality and lead and amplify gentrifying forces. Once considered a borough of tight-knit ethnic enclaves with a range of immigrants from every corner of the globe, the historic Brooklyn is quickly fading into the past with the onset of gentrification.

When addressing the Southwest Brooklyn- Red Hook, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens- section of the borough, much can be learned by evaluating the current gentrification processes taking place there.

In Red Hook, there is a large public housing complex called the “Red Hook Houses”, which is a sprawling, connected public-housing complex. In neighboring Gowanus, there is a public housing complex called the “Gowanus Houses.” Both of these complexes have been in the area for years — built in the late 1930s and early 1940s respectively. The Red Hook Houses were completed in 1938 and were originally built for families of dockworkers. They are considered today as one of the first and largest Federal housing projects in the United States which predominantly house low-income Latino and African-American minorities (Angotti). In recent years, there has been much contention over a variety of different developments in the Southwest corner of Brooklyn. In 2008, the first IKEA in New York City opened on the waterfront of Red Hook. In order to attract customers from Manhattan to Brooklyn, IKEA set up its very own private ferry which is free for customers with proof of purchase. The ferry runs from Pier 11 near Wall Street at the tip of Manhattan directly to Red Hook, delivering customers to the front steps of the store. At the time of approval for the IKEA, there was a noticeable divide amongst the Red Hook community. This divide was overwhelmingly between, “… residents of Red Hook Houses, a public housing project where about 70 percent of the neighborhood population lives, and homeowners in “The Back” … The majority of people in the Red Hook Houses are people of color, and the most vocal residents of "The Back" seem to be white.”

(Angotti).

Other, more recent developments, such as Industry City, which sits along Sunset Park (around the corner from Red Hook), created further fractures in the already-divided community. Once an industrial manufacturing building from the 1890s, Industry City reopened in February 2016 rebranded and renovated as “Brooklyn’s vibrant creative hub” and was packaged up as a community of foodies, entrepreneurs, designers, explorers, and creators (Industry City). Developments such as Industry City contribute to a feeling of bourgeoise-exclusion, catering to higher echelon of socially and economically resourced patrons which very intentionally exclude the local, original residents. The opening of Industry City coincided with the debut of the sprawling Tesla showroom in Red Hook. In April of 2016, Tesla opened its first and only showroom in Brooklyn, choosing a former workshop warehouse that once rebuilt diesel engines for cargo ships (Williams). In a New York Times article published around the time of its opening, the author

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noted the aesthetics of the clientele at the showroom on one of the first Sundays it was open to the public: “…skaterish black knit caps, or on-trend Italian sneakers, or minimalist single-line tattoos,” (Williams).

The journalist noted the obvious cultural and demographic divisions in the neighborhood of Red Hook by underscoring how much the sparkling new showroom stood out in the neighborhood landscape. He characterized Red Hook as an “Industrial-chic neighborhood once known mainly for its public housing complex (Red Hook Houses) and its IKEA, but, these days, increasingly for its craft distilleries… Euro-retro bike shops… and single-origin organic beans-to-bar chocolate factories…in addition to its many galleries and art studios,” (Williams).

The showroom was clearly not built with the intention of attracting neighborhood customers from the Red Hook public houses, especially considering the starting price for a Tesla Model S luxury sedan was, at the time, $71,500.

In trying to better understand the current state of gentrification on-the-ground, I connected with a grassroots housing and labor non-profit called the Carroll Gardens Association (CGA). CGA is an organization that focuses its efforts on housing and workers’ rights, including organizing tenants and protecting the rights of domestic employees. Their guiding objective is to realize housing justice for all.

They are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2021, as they were established in 1971. Additionally, they own and operate a handful of rent-stabilized affordable housing units in the Gowanus and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods. In early October 2020, I was able to talk with the Director of Programming and Planning at CGA, Ben Fuller- Googins. In our interview, he explained the changing landscape of the Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, and Gowanus neighborhoods: “There are certainly more white people moving into the area, and it really is starting to feel like two neighborhoods in one.” (Fuller-Googins).

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? Figure 9: IKEA Store The IKEA store on the waterfront of Red Hook, in its typical style. It is a sprawling store, making a statement in the physical feel of the neighborhood.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath

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Figure 10: Tesla Showroom The Tesla showroom seen at the entrance of the Red Hook neighborhood: notice the Red illuminated Red Hook sign in the upper corner of the building.

Photo credits: the author, Alyssa Heath Much of the area is zoned for industrial use given the history of maritime manufacturing and industrial importation, given that the majority of buildings were built at the turn of the 20th century. He explained that across the borough, housing has become increasingly expensive and unaffordable — especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, attempted evictions and landlord harassment have been at an all-time high. Fuller- Googins explained an important caveat of gentrification with the influx of white residents in Red Hook and Southwest Brooklyn — despite overtly sharing the same values as CGA and being politically liberal, they are uninterested in the activist work CGA does. Though many of the new residents are well-meaning and want to contribute to social good, they are typically uninvolved in

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? the immediate community and unaware of local movements or issues that do not relate to them directly.

This contributes to an overall cultural shift of the neighborhood and plays into unspoken racial and socioeconomic dynamics. Due to this reluctance, he explained that it is a challenge to get new neighborhood residents involved in CGA’s work, which relies heavily on community support and engagement.

Fuller-Googins connected me with his colleague, Balanda Joachim, who is CGA’s in-house Community Organizer. We had the chance to meet in mid-October 2020, where she explained the need for an Eviction Defense Network in Southwest Brooklyn to help prevent evictions from taking place. This initiative would work cross-organizationally, specifically with other tenant unions based in Brooklyn.

Joachim hoped to create eviction protection for tenants, establish a network for physical eviction blockades to prevent marshals from removing tenants, and provide educational materials with 311 violation information and resources for reporting landlord harassment. Despite the Tenant Safety Harbor Act passing in the state of New York, the eviction moratorium officially ended in October 1st of 2020 and thousands in Southwest Brooklyn became vulnerable to eviction and removal in the fall of 2020. Using public online resources such as justfixnyc.org (developed by the Housing Data Coalition nonprofit), Joachim and I collaborated on gathering data from Brooklyn landlords with 311 violations to set the foundation for a useful and informed Eviction Defense Network. When asking Joachim about the changing neighborhood of Red Hook and the surrounding area, she looked down, sighed, and then looked back at me before answering. She started by emphasizing how industrial the Red Hook neighborhood once was, describing a working-class, bluecollar neighborhood filled with manufacturing and importation. Then she smirked and said, “You know, an industrial neighborhood like Red Hook is a developer’s playground,” (Joachim). And the first step to turning industrial neighborhoods into a gentrified dreamland is rezoning. Joachim continued to explain, “Well, it all started with the Barclays Center which was built in 2012. Businesses were forced into taking buyouts, and the area was completely rezoned for high-rises and commercial activity. And, of course, before that the IKEA being built in 2008. But the whole Downtown Brooklyn redevelopment in the mid to late 2000’s is what really ignited the gentrification of Brooklyn,” (Joachim). She told me about how the Bloomberg Administration (beginning in 2002 and ending in 2013) amplified and encouraged the gentrification that made Manhattan much more expensive. She described how in recent years activists have caught on to the fact that politicians (city council members, specifically) are often enabling developers by cutting closed- door deals and promising their support to lobby for rezoning to allow for their developments to be approved.

She mentioned the example of Industry City, “Residents really fought hard against that development. The developers had to get the building rezoned for commercial use which was pushed through by the city,” (Joachim).

In Julian Brash’s Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, Brash explores the urban policy and political infrastructure that has delivered the New York City seen today, specifically looking at the approach of the Bloomberg administration. Fundamentally, Mayor Bloomberg understood civic governance through a lens filtered by the private sector: running government like a business. This ideal for Bloomberg illustrates the explicit partnership between neoliberalism (unregulated, market-based, and capitalistic) and his administration’s goals for the City of New York. His method had a very visceral impact on the city. Bloomberg’s ideology went hand in hand with curating and branding a “luxury city” to attract tourism, investment, and commerce from around the world. In his “State of the City” address of 2003, Bloomberg packaged up the principles of his administration’s strategy for economic development: “New York is in a fierce, worldwide competition; our strategy must be to hone our competitive advantages.

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We must offer the best product — and sell it, forcefully,” (Bloomberg 2003). Brash explains that in his 2003 address Mayor Bloomberg, “… argued that exploiting the city’s competitive advantages required nothing less than an aggressive transformation of its physical form in order to produce an environment appropriate to the needs and desires of well- educated professionals and those businesses in the financial, media, and business services sectors that employed them…” (Brash, 121). He called for a complete transformation of New York’s physical environment to make it as attractive as possible. His comprehensive urban development program had two main tenants — both of which strived to enhance New York City’s brand.

Brash explains that the first objective was to create “…a high-quality residential and recreation environment. This included the facilitation of housing development, primarily luxury housing, throughout the city, but especially in Williamsburg/Greenpoint, West Chelsea, Harlem, and downtown Brooklyn,” (Brash 122). The definitiveness of Bloomberg’s administration to cure urban blight and fully realize a luxury city to attract the attention of the world exemplifies the direct link New York has to the Neoliberal Order in the 21st century.

This intentional development that unapologetically promoted luxury housing and amplified gentrification has real and tangible consequences. The first of which is the phenomenon of modern urban segregation in which New York City is universally considered to be one of the most segregated cities in the United States. This large-scale segregation is a product of a free-market based real estate industry and property-tax funded public-school district system. The economist, Raj Chetty, has done groundbreaking research on the reality today of class mobility in the modern century within the United States. In his work, it is evident that the clearest indicator of upward socioeconomic mobility in the United States specifically can almost entirely be determined by one’s housing: place-based success. Specifically, it is the location, the neighborhood, and the area in which they live: “High mobility areas have (i) less residential segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family stability,” (Chetty, 1554). This divide is further exacerbated by the process of gentrification and the social, economic, and racial lines which are drawn from neighborhood to neighborhood. The residential segregation that is produced as a result of gentrification offers a partial explanation as to why urban centers throughout the United States remain so incredibly segregated in the post-Jim Crow era. In 2021, these residential divisions underscore the immense social, economic, and racial stratification seen in American society today. Chetty’s hypothesis qualifies that intergenerational mobility varies enormously across the United States, “…the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose,” (Chetty, 1554). New York, for example is on the higher end at 9.6% (Cohen). The profound impact that housing and locality has on ones’ social and cultural capital is unique to the United States and can largely be attributed to the market-driven real estate industry that is predicated on deregulation and neoliberalism. Urban renewal, such as the kind Mayor Bloomberg initiated in New York during his administration to further the ideal of the “luxury city” plays an undeniable role in the degree to which New York is segregated. In the case of Red Hook and Southwest Brooklyn, housing can and should be understood as the single most important determining factor or influence in determining upward mobility within the United States — underscoring the visible consequences of gentrification and its destructive, cyclical nature.

While attending the New York Times’ live event “Creating More Equitable Cities,” in September 2020, Sonja Trauss, a San Francisco Bay Area activist, who founded Yes In My Back Yard outlined the gentrification process: beginning with priced-out artists, teachers, and creatives (more often

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? than not, racially white) moving to a certain area within an urban setting because it is all that they can afford for rent. Then, keen developers and real estate speculators take note and buy up property, lobby for rezoning, and revitalize and renovate entire neighborhoods. Thus, fixing them up from blighted, lowincome, minority neighborhoods to shiny, curated, and expensive neighborhoods for the bourgeoise, explicitly capitalizing on this movement. Then, building owners notice and increase rents to match the market rate for the neighborhood, literally fluctuating prices year to year, continually pricing residents out and ultimately pushing those making the least to other, peripheral sections of the city. This process thus leads to a full realization of the idea of the “luxury city.” Frequently, there is the impression that those who are culturally or financially bourgeois (“hipsters” or “bobos”) who move into the neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification are responsible for the gentrification that is taking place. In reality, the process of gentrification is initiated by developers, enabled by local city government, and maintained by landlords.

Why, though, are white residents considered inherently valuable? Why is the presence of white citizens a gentrifying force? And how is it equitable that this inherent value of white residents trickles down into the public-school system? Specifically, in New York City predominantly white schools receive exponentially more funding than schools with a majority population of black and brown students. As Raj Chetty and his economic ethnographic research explains in plain terms, the predictability of future success of a student is directly related to where they live and what zip code in which they were raised: codifying place-based opportunity. Universally accepting this reality within the United States would allow for designing more equitable cities which begins with fair housing opportunity and education access for all. Chetty’s research, “… supports the idea that helping recipients of federal affordable housing vouchers identify and move to higher- opportunity areas could make a big difference [in predicting student success],” (Chetty). This reality compounds the need to regulate gentrification, if not for preventing displacement but for allowing children in low-income and low-resource households to have a chance at success.

2.3 Comparison and Thematic Analysis

On paper, Red Hook and Belleville share many similarities. Yet, they have two very different realities. In Belleville, gentrifiers have advocated for their immigrant and low-income neighbors who frequently do not have the resources or platform that this group has (largely white, upper class Parisians), evidently by creating La Bellevilleuse and “Collectif pour une Maison de l’Air aux Habitantes.” Many of the wealthy families moving to Red Hook and neighboring Carroll Gardens, though politically liberal, were consciously disengaged from the activism work of the Carroll Gardens Association, frequently ignoring and rejecting CGA’s attempts to involve all residents. There is a clear distinction between the gentrification practices seen in Belleville, Paris and Red Hook, Brooklyn. Despite wanting to preserve the neighborhood of Belleville for their own multicultural interests, and this being somewhat problematic and exclusionary in itself, the privileged Parisian newcomers cared about protecting their vulnerable neighbors and the soul of the neighborhood. In Belleville, there was a motivated grassroots effort to defend the original residents through targeted and well-organized activism. The City of Paris and the Mayor of the twentieth arrondissement were receptive to the movement against redevelopment and gentrification of the neighborhood. The effort was local yet scaled to a point where there were tangible results.

In Red Hook, and with the Carroll Gardens Association, there is clear, actionable activism and organizing taking place, yet the overarching political structure that supports gentrification and its various components (developers, rezoning efforts) is overpowering enough to diminish whatever resistance there

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is. In New York, the city is committed so strongly to its own development objectives that the wishes of local residents in targeted neighborhoods go completely unconsidered. In the United States, this citizencity government disconnect can be attributed to the powerful grip that neoliberal development and capitalistic growth has on how cities are planned and conceptualized. This differs from the European, or more specifically, French approach to civic governance. Capitalism and global neoliberalism has not permeated the French societal ideals to the extent that it has in the United States. This, in part, can offer an explanation for the difference in method, results, and current state between Belleville and Red Hook. The hands-off versus hands-on approach by those gentrifying a neighborhood themselves as seen in Red Hook compared to Belleville is representative of the governing ideologies and ethos of the countries in which the neighborhoods exist: socialism versus capitalism. The influence of neoliberalism and market-based economics is palpable in the United States on a whole, but can be seen at the micro-level in particular neighborhoods, with devastating and visible results of segregation and displacement; these are predictors of social and economic mobility of residents. Furthermore, the role that systemic and sustained racism plays in housing access and physical distribution is undeniable. The reality that racism plays in the degree of segregation and socio-spatial distribution throughout New York, and specifically Red Hook, is important to contend with and is a critical difference between France and the United States. The United States’ dark and deep history with racial prejudice against black and brown citizens is a clear differentiator between the two cases. The consequences of gentrification are felt by those at the receiving end and stand as examples for the real-life effects of how trickle-down neoliberal economic policies contribute to hardships for those most disenfranchised in a society.

Chapter III

As development and developers become increasingly predatory and damaging, the process of public and private transformation needs to be reimagined. Evidently, there are major flaws with the current, market-based process of urban change. In advanced countries, this system is predicated on developers (who are supported and enabled by city governments) purchasing real estate in low-income or minority communities and then replacing or renovating the building to create luxury housing to attract a wealthier clientele, which in turn leads to more affluent neighborhoods. Alternatively, developers will build or gentrify commercial spaces for expensive, luxury commercial businesses that cater to particular demographics, as seen in Red Hook with the Tesla showroom. This neighborhood inflation results in vulnerable community members, who were original to the neighborhood, to be priced out and forced to move to peripheral neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. In emergent countries, much of this development is propagated by local cities that conceive of and promote expansive and expensive urban renewal projects that specifically target urban blight and forcibly displace undesirable populations — most notably informal housing dwellers, as was the case in Ahmedabad with the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. These developments are encouraged as a part of the Neoliberal Order which has promised developing countries that efforts to become cosmopolitan, opulent cities will attract international investment and visitation — much like Western cities, such as New York and Paris, which are both undeniably considered to be global cities. The entire system must be reexamined, as it is against many of the fundamental interests of residents in these urban centers. Preferably, the global infrastructure and culture of “development at all costs” proliferated by global neoliberalism will be dismantled and abandoned as we venture further into the 21st century. If nothing else, there must be some degree of accountability between city governments, developers, and local

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? citizens.

The idea of participatory budgeting, a faction of the larger idea of participatory democracy, has become a popular alternative to the model of neoliberalism. Participatory budgeting is a bottom-up approach which provides an alternative to top-down measures which are typically favored under neoliberal systems. The concept of participatory budgeting was introduced in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 as an anti-poverty tool which measurably helped reduce inequality. Participatory budgeting can be defined as: “…a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget.

It gives people real power over real money,” (Participatory Budgeting Project). It has been described as “revolutionary civics in action” which can help deepen democracy, build stronger communities, and create a more equitable distribution of public resources (Participatory Budgeting Project). I propose participatory urban planning, something that goes a step beyond participatory budgeting. This would involve giving city residents a position of power and a seat at the table in determining rezoning, developer-proposed projects, and the fabric and physical experience of the city in which they live. Adopting this practice would empower residents of certain neighborhoods to have autonomy over what their city looks like. Civilian engagement and citizen-led participatory planning is a feasible and productive way to counteract the neoliberal economic forces that are defining cities in the current century, and it would successfully hold municipalities accountable by working hand-in-hand with citizens as partners. In this chapter, there will be two case studies presented that juxtapose a failure of insincere and shallow community outreach with a successful model for meaningful public-civilian partnership through participatory urban planning. This chapter will highlight the successes and disappointments of participatory urban planning. In looking at these two case studies, much can be learned from the missteps and accomplishments of each situation.

3.1 Case Study 1: BLOK Developers in Bo-Kaap, South Africa — Ineffective Inclusion

The first case study examines the neighborhood of Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, South Africa. This particular case is centered on a new, modern for-profit developer named BLOK which is headquartered in downtown Cape Town. BLOK is a real estate contractor that has made numerous developments throughout Cape Town, specifically in downtown, central locations. According to the website of BLOK, they characterize themselves as “… a property development brand with a difference,” (Blok). They distinguish themselves as a developer that is “… designed and curated by passionate urban dwellers themselves and this understanding results in a product that delivers on every aspect of city living,” (Blok). They describe themselves as not only a property brand, but essentially a lifestyle brand — offering the opportunity to rediscover urban living in a contemporary way. This sort of superfluous, self-important description in the industry of real estate development perhaps offers a foreshadowing as to how they approach communities in which they build their luxury housing developments. Many of the neighborhoods, Bo-Kapp included, are low-income, immigrant sections of the city — with people who may not see their corporate mission as strongly as BLOK themselves sees it. The specific development of BLOK’s in question is their “Forty-on-L” luxury apartment building, situated in the heart of the Bo-Kaap neighborhood, to the west of downtown Cape Town.

Bo-Kaap is a neighborhood nestled at the foot of Signal Hill, right around the corner from the Central Business District of Cape Town. This corridor of the city was once known as the Malay Quarter due to its dominant population of South Africans descendant from Cape Malay immigrants. Bo-Kaap has a long and rich history, dating back to the 1790s when a handful of rental houses were built and

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subsequently leased to slaves: “These people were known as Cape Malays and were brought from Malaysia and Indonesia to work on the Cape as slaves,” (Cape Town Travel). Even today in 2021, the houses of Bo-Kaap continue to be a mix of Cape Dutch and Georgian architecture, both historic and distinctive.

The most striking characteristic of Bo- Kaap is the vibrant urban feel — the houses are brightly painted in hues of pink, orange, yellow, green, and blue: practically every shade of the rainbow. The bright colors can be credited to the regulation that the houses, while on lease, had to be white. Although, “When this rule was eventually lifted, and the slaves were allowed to buy the properties, all the houses were painted bright colors by their owners as an expression of their freedom,” (Cape Town Travel). This vibrancy is a reflection and continuation of the history of liberation of the Cape Malay residents who continue to live in Bo-Kaap today, many of them direct descendants of the slaves who were brought over to Cape Town in the 18th and 19th centuries. With cobbled streets, charming houses, and bright facades, Bo-Kaap has become a destination for tourists. There are specialized Bo-Kaap tours today with curious tourists wandering throughout the neighborhood, snapping Instagram photos in front of the colorful streetscape and historic thoroughfares. These tours are quite controversial however, as they objectify and commodify a community of minorities who are descendants of slaves, rarely experiencing the profits of these tours for themselves.

Not only are the residents of Bo-Kaap ethnic and racial minorities, but they are also religious minorities.

The Cape Malay community is overwhelmingly Muslim which is why the first established Islamic mosque in South Africa, the Auwal Mosque, is located in Bo-Kaap. The reality of Bo-Kaap residents: being ethnic, racial, and religious minorities who are very much working class people defines their experience in BoKaap and contributes to the resentment and hostility they feel towards the tourists and tour companies that occupy, commercialize, and fetishize deeply personal aspects of their identity within the context of Cape Town.

The complicated dynamic already present in Bo-Kaap made for an even more complex dynamic when the “Forty-on-L” development was first proposed to the local residents of Bo- Kaap. The “Fortyon-L” proposal was presented in a way that was unapologetically and knowingly exclusive. The condos boast priceless views of Table Mountain, comfortable amenities, and an aesthetic edge with the exterior appropriating the style of the Bo-Kaap neighborhood, designed with vibrant colors. The exterior of the building mimics the colors of Bo-Kaap with yellows, blues, greens, reds, and oranges painted on the exterior of the building. Obviously, this was an intentional design decision to make a seemingly natural assimilation of the modern, expensive building to the historic, working-class neighborhood. This decision by BLOK to propose and build a luxury housing development in Bo-Kaap was clearly not a coincidence, and ultimately a foreseeable occurrence. The intrigue by tourists, proximity to downtown, and overall charm made it an obvious choice in terms of location. According to an article published in the journal Urbani Izziv entitled “The impact of gentrification on the Bo- Kaap, Cape Town,” the author compares property values of BoKaap (from those sold to those purchased) in 1981, 1991, 2001, and 2011, with alarming market increase in recent years. From the data, it is evident that incredible changes have taken place over this period of time.

Prior to 2011, the property value increase in Bo-Kaap was relatively linear. The most dramatic difference is between the years of 2001 and 2011, where the average price of properties sold more than quadrupled.

In 2001, the average price was R282,633 and in 2011 the average price was R1,292,387 in South African Rand (Kotze 130). This exponential, measurable growth explains through data why a luxury real estate developer would perhaps want to capitalize on this particular segment of Cape Town’s real estate market.

While studying in Cape Town in the Spring of 2018, my cohort and I had the opportunity

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? to listen to a presentation from a Project Coordinator at BLOK. One morning in early April 2018, we met with her at the Cape Town Central Public Library and listened to her present on the “Forty-on-L” development. When we learned of the proposed development, many of us questioned the intention behind it — particularly being in the Bo-Kaap neighborhood, especially as a handful of us lived in Bo-Kaap with homestay families. These families were almost entirely Cape Malay, and we heard first-handedly of the local frustration of the encroachment into Bo- Kaap by tourists and developers. As per the City of Cape Town regulations with any new development, much like the requirements of New York City and other municipalities, the private developers must complete community outreach in order to better understand the sentiments of the incoming development by local residents. The Project Coordinator Sam Johnson was a young, white, Afrikaan (meaning of Danish colonial decent) woman in her mid-to-late twenties who began to outline the project plan to us. Before diving into BLOK’s methodology and motivations, she clarified that she was experienced in urban design as she had studied architecture at the University of Cape Town. At this point in time in Spring 2018, the project was still a proposal on paper. It is important to note that today in 2021 “Forty-on-L" has been realized and is fully completed.

Figure 11: The Bo-Kaap Above is an aerial view of the Bo-Kaap neighborhood. The vibrant cityscape can be seen, with the stunning backdrop of Table Mountain to the left and Lion’s Head on the right.

Photo credits: TripAdvisor

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Figure 12: “Forty-on-L” Above is the exterior of the Forty-on-L development in Bo-Kaap. The bright exterior can be seen, clearly mimicking the aesthetics of the neighborhood in which it occupies.

Photo credits: booking.com After running through her PowerPoint and explaining the general ethos of the company, she started to divulge their supposedly extensive experience in engaging with the local Bo-Kaap community.

She acknowledged that community leaders in Bo-Kaap had reservations about the development, but BLOK soothed those fears through reassurance and continued to emphasize the incredible opportunity of “Fortyon-L.” Additionally, she unveiled that some major concerns by residents were the look and feel of the large high-rise in their quaint, two story-dominated neighborhood. She responded to those qualms by describing how BLOK chose to honor the cultural heritage of the neighborhood by consciously choosing to decorate the exterior of the building in the same style as the neighborhood: with bright splashes of color. Quickly, students began to pepper her with questions specific to the community outreach they had done with local residents. She responded by explaining: “It is not as if we just checked a box on a to-do list but rather hosted an open meeting for Bo-Kaap residents — we truly wanted to engage with them and hear their concerns,” (Johnson). She seemed to be genuinely earnest in her desire to connect with locals, yet it was clear that there was strong push back to the development overall, and many concerns went unaddressed. More students began to question her and BLOK’s perceived sincerity — was the concern only for optics? Others brought up issues of cultural appropriation and predatory capitalism, specifically citing their design choice of the outside of the building: “We wanted to honor the beautiful aesthetic of Bo-Kaap and the stunning colors that fill the landscape. This is why we made the aesthetic decision to decorate the exterior in the way that

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? we did,” (Johnson).

After some more questioning and a tune change to defensiveness, she ultimately admitted that there was forceful and persistent backlash by local residents to the “Forty-on-L” project, and BLOK learned this in their community meetings. Concerns over price inflation, affordability, and cultural appropriation were all strongly voiced in these outreach meetings. After Sam was challenged further, she became exasperated: “Well we tried to reach out and receive their input, but they were so against the project from the beginning that it was hard to get any cooperation,” (Johnson). In the end, the development marched on without a second consideration or genuine rethinking of the potential repercussions for this particular community. This example of participatory engagement through citizen outreach reveals the realities of developer-led participation: by-and-large a failure that resulted in an even stronger feeling of negativity towards the real estate developer by the affected community. An explicitly commodifying culture, complete with a stylistic matching of the physical urban landscape, is an affront to the local community members who exist as minorities in a predominantly white space. Despite what Sam said, the public forum meeting was evidently a bureaucratic formality that needed to be completed, so that BLOK could report back to the City of Cape Town to say that they received general approval from local residents — if they truly cared about engaging with the Cape Malay residents of Bo-Kaap, they would have gathered their legitimate concerns and then revised their building plans. Or perhaps they would have allowed residents a degree of autonomy in determining the course and design of “Forty-on-L.” Yet, none of this took place. Once Sam was questioned by my cohort, it seemed as if she suddenly understood the wrongdoings that had taken place and how the Bo-Kaap residents might truly be feeling. In essence, developer-led citizen participation, while ideal theoretically, is ineffective and disingenuous as there are powerful competing interests, and it is treated essentially as a rubber stamp for real estate developers. The powerful act of democratic engagement must be initiated and maintained by citizens themselves and actively supported and promoted by local city governments in order for participatory engagement to be achievable and genuinely applied.

3.2 Case Study 2: Paris en Selle in Paris, France — Effective Participation

The second case study presented examines the democratic, grassroots organization based in Paris, France named Paris en Selle (PeS). Paris en Selle is a citizen-led participatory urban-mobility organization that advocates for a more bike-able Paris. The organization was founded in 2015 by Parisians passionate about biking and access to reliable and green forms of transportation. They are a politically charged organization that has a small army of volunteer supporters which enables them to offer programs and events that help promote safer and more accessible biking experience throughout Paris. They aim to engage Parisian citizens in advocating for urban cycling as a form of legitimate and functional transportation for all.

Their hallmark campaign was the conception of the idea for a “Vélopolitain” — the biking equivalent to the Parisian Métropolitan. Their two central initiatives, Mon Quartier N’est Pas Un Sourci13 and Vélopolitain, have produced actual results and pushed real progress throughout Paris, pointedly executed by Anne Hildago’s administration. The City of Paris encourages the practice of participatory planning, and this is in large part why PeS has been able to cultivate a productive working relationship with the municipal city government.

PeS has held the City of Paris accountable for enacting and delivering upon their bike lane and cycling infrastructure plans and are credited with having helped see these projects to fruition. In January 2020, 13 My neighborhood is not a shortcut.

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PeS held a political debate on the future of cycling in Paris called the Grand Oral Vélo. All six of the Paris mayoral candidates attended and presented their cycling plans publicly, ahead of the March 2020 mayoral elections of which Mayor Anne Hildago won reelection. At the debate, the candidates were given fifteen minutes each to discuss their positions on cycling in Paris and working towards a Vélopolitan. The purpose of the forum was for Paris en Selle to hold the mayoral candidates responsible for their cycling agendas and reaffirm the expectation that each candidate has a detailed plan. In better understanding their proposals, if they were elected, PeS and the general population could better understand the future of urban mobility in Paris. PeS considered this to be of the highest interest for Parisians, and they wanted to see the nature of the commitments candidates would make for the future. Major news networks in Paris (France24 and Le Parisien) covered this event and gave Paris en Selle as an organization even more credibility. Especially after this debate, Paris en Selle’s public presence and online visibility became that much more relevant and commanding.

The powerful ethos of the Paris en Selle organization drives its success and the way in which they internally structured themselves. It is so powerfully supported by volunteers and passionate citizens that there is only need for one salaried, full-time employee: Camille Hanuise, the director of campaigns. Both the volunteers and board of directors are incredibly dedicated and help share a large part of the work with her, yet they are unpaid. In the Spring of 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the opportunity to intern with Paris en Selle and gain intimate access to the organization. When talking with Camille on the second day of my internship, she explained to me: “The majority of volunteers are in their late twenties or early thirties and do not yet have their own families,” (Hanuise).14 The team is young and committed.

Additionally, their annual budget runs at about 50,000 Euros, largely supporting Camille’s yearly salary.

Her own personal mission and interests align with the organization as a whole. From my observations, I could see that she was able to balance the goals driving the non-profit along with the diplomatic partnership she had cultivated and maintained with the City Hall of Paris, which proved the success and effectiveness of a participatory organization, such as Paris en Selle. During my time at PeS, I was able to understand first-handedly how grassroots political activism and the advocacy of the organization succeed in a palpable way. For Paris en Selle, it is accomplished by playing a direct role within the political landscape of Paris, and arguably France as a whole.

Organizationally, Paris en Selle has intentionally put effort into how to best capture and project the mobility desires of Parisian citizens. To start, PeS will submit ideas or requests for particular biking infrastructure projects to the City of Paris. Once the administration has received the range of requests and projects, they will be presented for a civilian vote which then dictates which initiatives are adopted. Paris en Selle is a major player in this participatory process, as they garner support and identify which current issues of biking mobility within Paris are the most pressing. This entire system exists within a framework of the participatory budget process in order to influence the policy and infrastructure initiatives of the City of Paris. As stated on Paris en Selle’s website — the idea of participatory planning is quite simple in practice: “…citizens and associations submit project ideas, the town hall filters and then citizens vote; projects will be carried out if they receive the most support from citizens.

14 “La majorité des volontaires sont dans la fin des vingtaine ou au début de la trentaine et n'ont pas encore de famille.”

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? Figure 13: Grand Oral Vélo Below is an image from Le Grand Oral Vélo in January 2020. Mayor Anne Hildago is engaging with PeS’s event and legitimizing the organization by attending and presenting her bike vision.

Photo credits: La Parisien

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Figure 14: Le Vélopolitain Above is an illustration of the Vélopolitain network proposed by Paris en Selle. Mayor Hildago’s administration committed to adopting this plan and has begun implementing it.

Photo credits: European Cyclists’ Federation.

For our cycling association, this is the ideal opportunity for citizens to express their desire to put Paris in the Saddle!” (Paris en Selle).15 Each year, the City of Paris has a budget of approximately 100 million euros for participatory governance. In order for the ventures proposed by Paris en Selle to be adopted and ratified, they need to receive the majority of votes by Paris citizens. To circulate the work that they are doing, Paris en Selle and their mission heavily rely on their commanding social media presence — Camille was proud to tell me that they had over 15,000 Twitter followers. Additionally, their internal organizational infrastructure heavily rely on the workplace messaging software, Slack. They use Slack principally as a way for passionate citizens to directly engage with the organization and with other invested Parisians on the future of cycling in the city. Slack is truly a democratizing tool: allowing Paris en Selle to productively organize themselves and their events.

The most substantial takeaway from the work that PeS does is the astounding effectiveness that an outside, community-driven organization can have on influencing structural urban change. I experienced time and time again Paris en Selle hold the City of Paris accountable for its biking infrastructure plan (the Vélopolitain, for example), and then seen, in return, the responsiveness and openness of the municipality 15 “…les citoyens et les associations déposent des idées de projet, la mairie filtre puis les citoyens votent ; les projets seront réalisés s’ils ont été les plus soutenus par les citoyens. Pour notre association vélo, c’est l’occasion idéale pour que les citoyens expriment leur envie de mettre Paris en Selle !”

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? to that activism. As bureaucratic as France is and as strong as its government institutions are, it is a living, breathing, and thriving democracy that is perfectly exemplified through the respectful and collaborative relationship Paris en Selle has forged with the mayor’s office. Of course, the success of PeS and their work depends enormously on who is in office, but they have managed to expertly steer the expectations of the municipal government towards being bike amenable. Throughout the mayor elections of 2020, PeS has driven conversation by holding public forums for the candidates, generating press around the subject of urban cycling, and using social media to educate and amplify. The success of PeS provides a blueprint for citizen-civic partnerships and has better illustrated the role civilians can and should play in participatory governance, specifically when it comes to how to plan cities, including their infrastructure and mobility objectives.

In both the United States and France, non-profit organizations such as Paris en Selle face potentially existential issues of funding. In order to remain truly apolitical and citizen-oriented, PeS has opted out of receiving funding from any government or state actor — remaining truly untethered to the whims of governmental funding. Understanding funding sources and the organizational ethics behind those decisions, particularly as they relate to participatory governance, through the lens of each organization’s specific relationships with local governments is one way to examine this issue. Paris en Selle acts completely independently and does not receive funding or grants from the City of Paris, the State of Île de France, or the federal government of France. Due to their strict organizational ethos and the need to be participatory and democratic both in perception and practice, they do not accept funding from any layer of the French government. Under no circumstances would they apply for local, state, or federal grants. This way, they can claim to be entirely independent under no influence or obligation to a particular entity. They are strictly apolitical and exist to fundamentally support the interests of urban cycling by magnifying the voices of Parisian citizens. The majority of their funding comes from personal donations, fundraising campaigns, and “contrepartie” incentives.

Despite these self-imposed regulations, they worked quite closely with the City of Paris. From my own observations, they appeared to view themselves and their role as a sort of “check and balance” — they kept the city in line and on track to implement their Vèlopolitain biking plan and other initiatives, which had been previously committed to by Mayor Anne Hildago’s administration. They have a collaborative relationship with the city where Paris en Selle holds the City of Paris accountable and pushes them to act on their cycling infrastructure promises. Because of PeS and their advocacy, the City of Paris has installed and maintained 80% of its Vèlopolitain plan to-date. Although this appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship between the two actors, it is important to note that PeS’s relationship is quite variable and certainly administration dependent. Mayor Anne Hildago has made urban cycling a keystone of her development plan for Paris, so she is very amicable to PeS and is open to having a working relationship with them.

Paris en Selle’s vocally neutral stance — so much so that they would not even explicitly endorse a candidate for the March 2020 mayoral elections, even when asked — is interesting when examining the nature of their relationship with the municipal government and how this has a greater effect on the organization’s funding and the work they are able to accomplish. Despite being externally apolitical, PeS has a very close working relationship with the Hildago administration which has made the effectiveness of their participatory organization even greater. In late February 2020, I attended an open-forum meeting at City Hall with Paris en Selle. The subject of the meeting was the state of bike lanes throughout Paris and

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the implementation status of Mayor Hildago’s cycling plan: a meeting open to all for relevant stakeholders and concerned citizens on the state of cycling in Paris. At this meeting, the city unveiled their plans for certain cycling thoroughfares and updated those in attendance on specific cycling metrics and future plans for Paris. After the meeting, there was a special reception held in the dedicated office of City Hall for urban cycling and biking development. While at the reception, I began to grasp exactly how tight knit the relationship was between PeS and the City of Paris. At the end of the reception, one staff member was kind enough to invite us for a private tour of City Hall the following week. It was incredible to see such a powerful and productive collaboration between PeS and the local governing body. I witnessed a very friendly relationship with Anne Hildago’s administration, which allowed PeS to achieve many of their urban cycling goals. Simultaneously, Mayor Hildago was actively trying to secure Paris en Selle’s endorsement for the upcoming mayoral elections in March, which they would not give, even when pressed. To me, this proved the symbiotic relationship between the two entities: they both are better served by working with each other, and this working relationship helps legitimize the work being done on both sides. In trying to swoon PeS for a candidate endorsement, this assisted the non-profit in feeling a certain degree of political clout which exponentially helped their mission.

One day while in the office, only a few weeks ahead of the election and right after the Grand Oral Vèlo, Camille received a personal note from Mayor Hildago along with a booklet on her mobility development plan for the city. Camille was a bit giddy when opening the envelope and reading the note from Mayor Hildago, acknowledging that it was “très cool” with a big smile. Watching this moment as an outsider (in terms of nationality, culture, and language), I could see that this gesture felt incredibly legitimizing. It was interesting to witness this dichotomy between PeS and the City of Paris, especially as France is a very “statist” society — with a strong state that provides the majority of social services to its citizens. Despite this, the non-profit sector does have a remarkably strong role in policy formation. French academic Edith Archambault explains the normalcy in having non-profit/public partnerships in France: “Nonprofit organizations have recently played a leading role in the definition of social policy in France,” (Archambault, 22). Archambault describes this relationship as a “partnership type” which is precisely how participatory governance should be structured. This mutual collaboration between public and non-profit created a productive dynamic between a small, minimally- resourced non-profit (Paris en Selle) and a powerful municipality of an undeniably global city (the City of Paris).

Research completed in the United States by psychologists at the University of Arizona uncovered the influence of state-funding on the political vibrancy and effectiveness of organizations receiving public funds. In their study, they uncovered the nature of the perceived “transactional” relationship between the government and organization. In their conclusion, the researchers stated: “We are tempted to conclude that government funding in fact enhances nonprofits’ political activity, but a more cautious interpretation of our results is that government funding does not suppress it whatsoever,” (Chaves, 314). While this research was completed in the United States, I am inclined to believe that the situation is comparable in France. I would conclude that Paris en Selle should not hinder their efforts of urban cycling advocacy by limiting the places from which they would accept funding. Especially considering they already have a close and productive working relationship with the City of Paris, this would firmly solidify the City of Paris’s desire to engage in participatory urban planning and governance. Their funding restrictiveness is ultimately hurting the scope of their work and should the non-profit fully embrace their ties with the local government, specifically by accepting funding from the city, they would be able to fully legitimize the civilian participatory process and

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? increase the impact of their work.

Much of Paris en Selle’s work and the overall principle of participatory governance plays directly into the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s idea of every citizen having a fundamental right to occupy and take up space within the urban communities in which they live, thereby having a profound “Right to the City.” It is a vital human right, the affirmation of the city space to the citizen. Lefebvre’s assertion of the right to the city exists in contrast to the practice of profitability and commodification that is largely the reality in cities today. It is a practice at its core of democracy through the strengthening of civil society that shapes day to day life and the actual lived experience. Specifically, it “… stipulates the right to have access to urban centrality, to urban life, to meeting places, exchanges, gatherings, and to play,” (Costes). In realizing the full form of the right to the city, a true civilization is formed. Engaged and earnest civilians with participatory civil governance is the modern sense of the right to the city and is undeniably advanced by giving directly affected citizens autonomy over their communities and urban spaces.

3.3 Thematic Comparison and Analysis

In looking at the two case studies- the community outreach done by BLOK in Bo-Kaap, South Africa compared to the ground-up participatory governance demonstrated by the non-profit Paris en Selle in Paris- France delivers distinct differences. BLOK clumsily attempted to engage with the local Bo-Kaap community in order to rubber stamp the process and get skeptical residents on-board with the monetization of their extraordinarily culturally and historically significant neighborhood. This acts in tandem to the community falling victim to exploitative tourism. Ignoring concerns and reservations from local neighbors, BLOK forged on with their luxury housing development, “Forty-on-L,” and it stands in Bo-Kaap today.

On the other hand, Paris en Selle has successfully built an authentically grassroots, well-organized movement that has allowed Parisians to have a seat at the table — with the support of the City of Paris.

Each year, because of the work of Paris en Selle, Parisians themselves are empowered to decide exactly how a portion of the municipal budget will be spent, dictating the initiatives of the city to ultimately better serve the citizens themselves. The earnest, grounded motivations of Paris en Selle are in stark contrast to the purely capitalistic intentions of BLOK. These divergent intentions speak volumes to the effectiveness of each venture and the overall public sentiment towards each organization. In short, Paris en Selle is a fundamentally democratic organization with open forums and free flowing discourse supporting active and vibrant democracy. Paris en Selle serves as a leader of genuine and successful public-civilian partnership and should be understood as a model in participatory governance.

Conclusion

The questions explored have challenged the reality of urban development in cities existing in both developed and emerging countries, underpinned by structural neoliberal economics. The purpose of this study was to expose the very real downfalls of urban design within the framework of neoliberalism and the consequences of such an approach. Through the presentation of the various case studies and comparative analyses, many of the fissures within this current system were clearly seen. Understanding the current urban development crisis through the framework of global neoliberalism, or the Neoliberal Order, the ongoing issues are evident. A global economic model normalized in the 1980s has influenced the local, lived experience around the world, unquestionably. Conceptualizing urban development through the current global economic systems in place has profoundly affected my interpretation of urban development,

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particularly in relation to its impact on the most vulnerable populations within an urban area — especially in a post-COVID world. The impact of global neoliberalism on urban centers and cities around the world is undeniable. Overwhelmingly, these impacts are related to some forms of displacement: either forcibly or gradually by being priced-out to peripheral areas of the city. Such displacement can lead to loss of income, loss of community, loss of quality of life, and loss of identity. Regardless of location, either in the Global North or Global South, this displacement is a reality in some form or another. As summarized in the first chapter, when explaining the two case studies from the Global South, premeditated, targeted, large-scale urban renewal projects in developing countries such as the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad, India and the Nova Luz Project in São Paulo, Brazil led to unapologetic displacement of some of the most vulnerable factions of the population: the urban poor living in informal housing.

In the Global North, as seen in the case studies presented from Belleville, France and Brooklyn, New York, there is rapid and unhinged market-driven gentrification taking place which is ultimately displacing original residents who are overwhelmingly minorities, immigrants, and low-income. In the case of Belleville, activists were undeniably more successful at preserving the original character of the neighborhood and dampening the effects of gentrification. The activism of the incoming population in Belleville exemplifies efforts to protect housing security and mitigates the power of market-based real estate.

This success can generally be attributed to a cultural difference in the perception of civic engagement and the role of the government — the gentrifiers, though problematic in their own right, truly advocated for their less privileged neighbors in Belleville. They understood that the immigrants living in public housing were the citizens who would truly pay the price for the gentrification taking place. In other words, the City of Paris and the residents of Paris seem to be more interested in the wishes of all residents when compared to another metropolis in an advanced country, such as the City of New York. Especially considering the Bloomberg administration — they openly acknowledged their friendship to all developers — in fact, offering friendship to anyone that wanted to invest in New York.

In Chapters I and II, the two case studies demonstrate the overarching need for increased civic engagement and civilian input when it comes to urban revival and development. In Chapter III, the snafus of developers attempting to engage with the target population was illustrated clearly through the first case study of BLOK in Cape Town. The successes of Paris en Selle in Paris as a democratic organization that meaningfully engaged with the municipality indicated the potential partnerships that can be formed in order to hold city governments accountable for creating metropolises that better serve the interests of the people. Approaching urban development in this way, though it is radically antithetical to the principles of global neoliberalism as it calls for more regulation, allows for a more democratic process that would lessen the harm done by speculative and overt gentrification. This is precisely why the Global Neoliberal Order must be reassessed and retrofitted to accommodate all citizens, not just those with the most resources and capital. In opposing the global effort to create “luxury cities,” political leaders must end their enablement of development projects for the sake of capital influx. The issues raised throughout this thesis challenge citizens to ask themselves: Where is this flow of money going to? To corporations, real estate owners, or actual people? And with what tax concessions? If wealth is only generated for those at the top of the capital hierarchy in the name of building a luxury city, perhaps this is where the real answers can be found.

Urban renewal and redevelopment can be also tools for good, as they can be used to beautify and revitalize the urban fabric of cities. The triumphs of Paris en Selle and the local advocacy of Belleville proves that more regulation in the space of urban development results in better and stronger accomplishments

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DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? of equality. Now more than ever, with the numerous global crises taking place- a public health crisis, a global financial catastrophe, and a long due reckoning with racial persecution- we must rethink the systems of development in place and challenge its drivers. The inflection point that the United States, and the world at-large, is experiencing at the moment requires an intersectional, holistic solution which merits and seeks citizen-empowered input. The current global devastation that humans are experiencing at the hands of COVID-19 must be used as an opportunity to rebuild our cities in a way that serves all better and fosters civic practices that allow for more opportunities for organizations like Paris en Selle. The United States specifically, as an instigator of neoliberal economic practices, needs a fundamental cultural shift that encourages and delivers on participatory governance — making it a norm instead of an exception.

Furthermore, there must be a shift away from deregulated urban development in pursuit of crafting luxury cities, regardless of the consequences of which are principally housing displacement and insecurity.

The COVID-19 crisis has left millions of Americans to become housing insecure and increasingly vulnerable to eviction. In 2019, homelessness rates in the United States increased by 3%, marking the third consecutive year of nation-level increase (State of Homelessness: 2020 Edition). The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that although “… homelessness has decreased by 12 percent since 2007, the year nation-wide data collection began, the current COVID-19 crisis has the potential to diminish or completely wipe out these modest gains,” (State of Homelessness: 2020 Edition). There will be vast and penetrating repercussions that could likely last for generations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These repercussions will assuredly affect future urban development trajectories, so the fundamental change must take place today. Perhaps a silver lining of the immense difficulties experienced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic are the massive societal chasms that have been exposed — challenging nearly every aspect of our society and forcing a reckoning of the way in which the world is structured, most poignantly in the United States. Politicians and city leaders globally must take this opportunity to rebuild cities and urban epicenters to be even better: not exclusively with beautification and commerce in mind, but also prioritizing the lived experiences of its citizens. There must be mechanisms of adjustment to allow for this systemic reexamination of the Neoliberal Order to take shape, through meaningful questioning of the current structure. This fundamental questioning must move in the trajectory towards communal investment, cooperative civic engagement, and collective property rights. It is essential for this transformation to take place on a global scale for cities to become stronger, more inclusive, better preserved, and more equitable places.

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Archambault, Edith. “France: A Late-Comer to Government– Nonprofit Partnership.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 8 Oct. 2015.

“Budget Participatif.” Paris En Selle, 17 May 2018, parisenselle.fr/budget-participatif/.

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Brash, Julian. Bloomberg's New York : Class and Governance in the Luxury City, University of Georgia Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ nyulibrary- ebooks/detail.action?docID=3038940.

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The Game Theory Analysis of the Section 301 Investigation in 2018: The Role of Threat Power Huijie Xu

There have been many discussions on the U.S.-China trade war since 2018, but few has applied game theory and threat power to analyze the inner logic of this event. This paper focuses on the lighting of the fuse of the U.S.China trade war, that is, the Section 301 Investigation initiated by the United States towards China in 2018. It models the trade war in the payoff matrix of Game 49. The movements of the players are studied by applying threat power: as they both possess and have applied threat powers (though in different stages), the United States moved away from the Nash Equilibrium (NE) and Nonmyopic Equilibrium (NME) state in the first place and China maintained its original strategy, causing the trade war. This study finds that the “irrational” movements of both the United States and China are because of their threat powers, which are influential on the process of the two players to gradually achieve the equilibrium condition in the game.

1. Introduction

The foreign policy of the United States is like a pendulum, and since 2016 has swung back to trade protectionism. To protect American interests, the United States became more concerned with high-tech protection as shown in Figure 1.1, the high-tech exports proportion has decreased steeply after 2016. As the biggest trade partner of the United States, China has received particular attention. The United States officially began to deal with China’s flawed intellectual property management regarding high-tech products such as information technology, electronic appliances, biomedicine, new energy and new materials, which has caused heavy losses to the United States. The trade conflict between China and the United States gradually intensified, with the Section 301 Investigation initiated by the United States in 2018 finally causing a trade war.

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This paper will focus on the lighting of the fuse of the trade war: the Section 301 Investigation initiated by the United States towards China in 2018. It will model it in the payoff matrix of Game 49. The movement of the players are studied by applying threat power to explore why none of the equilibriums in the game has been achieved so far. The following sections of introduction will review the background of the U.S.-China trade war, and the Section 301 Investigation as well as the related literature. The game will then be modelled in a payoff matrix, and the role of threat power will be analyzed in details. The final part will be conclusion and future prediction.

1.1 Background: The U.S.-China Trade War and Section 301 Investigation

The United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued the report of the Section 301 Investigation in March 2018 (Office of the United States Trade Representative 2018), stating that the Chinese government’s policies on technology transfer and intellectual property were unreasonable and discriminatory, thereby limiting the trade of the United States. The United States then filed a lawsuit with the WTO, arguing that China’s laws did not protect America’s rights and discriminated against it after the termination of technology transfer contract. In April 2018, the USTR announced that the United States will “impose 25% tariff on $34 billion Chinese exports to the United States on July 6” (Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China 2018). China filed an appeal with the WTO on the following day. On July 6, the United States imposed the tariff, and China “requested additional consultations that supplemented its consultations request of 4 April 2018” (World Trade Organization 2018). As a result, the tit-for-tat trade war between China and the United States officially began under the Section 301

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Investigation.

Since the official start of the U.S.-China trade war, the amount involved has gradually increased from $50 billion to $250 billion. On August 23, China sued the United States for its taxation measures on $16 billion Chinese exports. On September 9, China submitted a trade retaliation authorization request to the WTO. The United States then escalated the scale of the trade war on September 17, claiming that it would impose 10% tariff on $200 billion Chinese exports. The China’s Ministry of Commerce announced on September 18 that it would impose 10% or 5% tariff on $60 billion American exports. The trade war had been officially escalated since then, but the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) did not hold a special meeting until September 21 to discuss China’s prosecution of the United States’ anti-dumping measures; nor did it set up an expert panel on the case until January 28, 2019.

As shown above, the Section 301 Investigation marked the start of the trade war. The investigation itself, however, is debatable. The legitimacy of the section has been questioned globally and historically, as it must be authorized by the WTO before it is implemented, which is usually not the case. The Section 301 Investigation “has been brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (the Trade Act)” (Office of the United States Trade Representative 2018). The United States has been dissatisfied with the slowness of the WTO adjudication process (Yin and Hamilton 2018), so it usually turns to other methods to solve conflict. The Section 301 allows the USTR to initiate unilateral and compulsory retaliatory measures when it determines that a trading partner’s policy violates trade agreements or is determined by the United States to be unilaterally unfair or unreasonable.

Since its entry into force, this aggressive unilateralist section has been repeatedly implemented by the United States as a threat to enforce trade sanctions to open up foreign markets and resolve the trade deficits of the United States. Since 1974, “the United States has initiated 125 Section 301 Investigations” (X. Zhang 2018), which has aroused dissatisfaction among other WTO members. The European Union filed a consultation on the legitimacy of the section in the WTO in 1998, but the WTO expert panel believes that the section does not violate the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) (Pauwelyn 2001). The expert panel only attached a statement that the legitimacy given by it would no longer be valid if the United States fails to be authorized by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) (He 1997). However, the conclusion of the expert panel circumvents several important legal issues and political issues. In fact, the statement offers the United States the privilege of using unilateral threats to open other countries’ markets as the importance of the Section 301 Investigation lies most in threats rather than sanctions. As a result, most of the developing countries would voluntarily open their markets under the threat of trade sanctions or achieve bilateral agreements with the United States to solve their trade disputes (Zhou 2013). In addition, once the threat does not work, the United States may turn the threat into real sanctions, such as in the case of the U.S.-China trade war.

In the case of the U.S.-China trade war, the investigation was not authorized by the WTO, and the WTO has been inefficient in resolving the conflict. The WTO neither authorized the investigation; nor held a special meeting until September 21, 2018. Furthermore, it did not set up an expert panel until January 28, 2019 to discuss the case of China’s prosecution of the United States anti-dumping measures.

To this day, the trade war is still going on.

1.2 Literature Reveiw

There have been many discussions on the event, but most of them are about its process and

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legitimacy, especially on the inefficiency of the WTO. However, the inner logic and the role of the Section 301 Investigation in the trade war have not been studied in detail yet. In this literature review, first, I will review the existing research on the event in a broad sense. Then, by going over the classic literature in game theory and international relations, I will illustrate why game theory is applied to the event. Finally, I will introduce how this paper contributes.

Several studies on the U.S.-China trade war have been conducted. On the one hand, some reports provide quantitative data and qualitative analysis to examine its different impacts on China and the United States. Lai and Xia (2016), Rosyadi and Widodo (2017), and Bollen and Rojas-Romagosa (2018) utilize GDP as the primary measure to ascertain the impact of protectionism and retaliatory protectionism in the trade war, while Bouět and Laborde (2017) use welfare as the primary measure of the impact when border tariffs are implemented at a very high level of 45%. Lai and Xia (2016), for instance, note that the United States will be affected less than China’s losses in terms of GDP losses’ effect on jobs, consumption, and investment, etc.

On the other hand, some scholars are motivated to analyze the defects of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) from a broader context, which is not just confined to this trade war and has been a traditional topic in the field. Zhang and Huang (2019), for example, apply the Hormone Case of European Union to analyze the defects of the DSB retaliation system. They apply the theory of Prisoners’ Dilemma and conclude that the defects are caused by the fact that cooperation under the WTO system remains unstable because of national interests. Countries would always choose the trade policies that are beneficial to their national interests to protect their domestic industries and reject trade cooperation; the game of Prisoners’ Dilemma is thus inevitable in global trade. Guzman and Simmons (2005) test ed the defects of the DSB by selecting and analyzing the basic data on dispute resolutions in multiple cases. Their finding was that the behavior of poor countries was very different from that of their rich counterparts due to a of lack of capital to participate fully in the DSB system.

Studies like these focus on the impacts of the trade war and the role of WTO, which are significant because the impacts are influential and the WTO is the main platform for solving trade conflict. It is thus urgent to discuss these issues and improve the weaknesses of the mechanism. These studies, however, emphasize too much on the macro-level of institutions and economy, while paying little attention to how the two countries made and will make movements in the trade wars. The game players themselves, including the interactions between their actions and the inner logic of the trade wars, are rarely explored.

There are several reasons for applying game theory to analyze this event. A considerable amount of literature has discussed the modelling applications of game theory to international trade and negotiation.

According to Neumann and Morgenstern (1953), the initial goal of game theory is to explain economic behavior through mathematical notions of suitable games of strategy, describing solution concepts through induction. Nash (1950) illustrates that economic situations like states engaging in international trade are “bargaining problems” that can be solved with non-zero sum two-person games. Brams (1994) refines Nash Equilibrium (NE) and proposes a more advanced concept of Nonmyopic Equilibrium (NME). He applies the different powers in game to analyze various forms of cases, including stories in the Bible, wars, elections, and everyday events. Other scholars also discuss the applications of game theory: Snídal (1985) provides arguments on the modelling capability of game theory, Jervis (1978) describes how game theory could be used as a model, Howard (1971) defines the chicken game in a manner that emphasizes inducement, and key terms and definition are cited by Turocy and von Stengel (2001). Scholars of international relations also

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explore the value of cooperation and competition in game theory when applying to international relations (Axelrod and Keohane 1985, Axelrod 2000). These classic pieces of literature in game theory and its application in international relations show how game theory can work in explaining international conflicts such as trade wars.

Unfortunately, few studies have applied game theory to model the U.S.-China trade war that began in 2018. The paper by Yin and Hamilton (2018) is one of them, which models the trade war in a modified Prisoner’s Dilemma matrix, with a chicken game matrix as a subgame in the event of mutual defection outcome. They consider the role of Expected Utility Function and the credibility of threat as a result of sequential game. The model is applied to two different scenarios of conflict: “one where the United States implements border tariffs on Chinese imports, the other where the United States utilizes sector-targeted protectionism”. This study is enlightening in its discussions on the subgame of chicken, the sequential form of movements, and the two different scenarios. However, the authors do not explore the significant role of threat in the context of payoff matrix as well as the significant points happened in the event, such as the Section 301 Investigation. Although they consider the situation of the chicken subgame, the model is neither specific nor dynamic because it does not track the player’s continuous and following movements.

This paper, therefore, will try to fill the gaps in both the broad topic of the U.S.-China trade war by applying game theory, and the specific application of game theory in the event. I will focus on the Section 301 Investigation in 2018 as the beginning of the U.S.-China trade war, and model it in a payoff matrix with threat power. The players’ reference rankings, the payoff matrix, the equilibrium states, and the threat powers in the game will be explored to understand the current outcome and the future direction of the game.

2. Game Theory Modeling

2.1 Game Settings and Payoff Matrix

There are three players in the game, the United States, China and the WTO. The core players, however, are limited to the United States and China as the initial purpose of the event is to solve the conflict between them. Therefore, the event is modeled in a two by two game, which is game 49 as showed in figure 2.1. The analysis of the model will utilize the following four prerequisites: 1. Players are assumed to be strategic, forward-thinking, rational actors, limited only to pure strategies.

2. Players have symmetric perfect information regarding each other’s trade policies as both countries announce and implement their trade policies publicly.

3. This trade game is modelled in game 49, with its payoffs reflecting different trade movements. The United States has two strategies: Enact and Not Enact. China also has two strategies: Improve or Not Improve.

4. The game will be analyzed in sequential and cyclic form using payoff matrix and decision tree. The United States has priority action, implementing some protectionist policies such as the Section 301 Investigation. China acts reactively and responds from that point. Then the game continues by cycling.

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China

Enact US Not Enact

Improve

Not Improve

Compromise, Better Global Trade System (3,3)

Trade War, Conflict Exposed but Unsolved (1,2)

China Takes the Intiative to Improve (4,1)

Status Quo (2,4)

Figure 2.1 Game 49 Note: (x,y), x = the payoff of the US, y = the payoff of China; NE is (2,4); NMEs are (2,4) and (3,3).

Specifically speaking, the strategies in this game are defined to Enact and Not Enact for the United States, and Improve and Not Improve for China. Enact means that the United States launches the Section 301 Investigation directly and illegally rather than solving the conflict through the WTO. Not Enact, by contrast, has two interpretations: either the United States does not take actions to solve the conflict, or it solves it by some other negotiation means that are legitimate, like through the WTO. The reason of classifying the two interpretations together is in consideration of duration and legitimacy. Solving conflict through the WTO takes much longer time and more efforts than implementing sanctions directly, as mentioned above. And most importantly, legality is not violated for both interpretations. Improve refers to the outcome in which China takes actions to improve its intellectual property management regarding high-tech products. Not Improve means that China keeps the status quo, that is, it continues to apply a loose intellectual property protection system, especially towards the high-tech products imported from the United States.

The four states can thus be defined as follows. (Not Enact, Not Improve) is the status quo of 2017, before the United States has enacted the section. (Enact, Not Improve) is the situation since 2018: the trade war, describing the situation that the United States has enacted the section, exposing the conflict, while China has not improved and the conflict remains unsolved. Then it is the compromise state (Enact, Improve), which means that the United States enacts the section and China concedes to improve, creating a better global trade system. (Not Enact, Improve) refers to the situation that China takes the initiative to improve.

2.2 Preference Rankings

The main factors considered in the preference rankings are intellectual property, the legitimacy/ reputation of the action, the cost of the trade war, and the display of political power in global stage. To protect intellectual property is the original intention of the United States in the event, while to prevent the United States’ intellectual property protection is what China wants. The reason why the legitimacy

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of the action is also considered is because of that implementing the Section 301 would put the United States at a disadvantage: as illustrated above, the legitimacy of the section has been questioned globally and historically. If the United States does not adhere to the prerequisite of the WTO, then acting without legitimacy would be disputable on the global stage. For China, this factor refers to the global reputation that which country’s action is more reasonable and legitimate in the event. Then, falling into trade war is harmful to the interests of both the United States and China. Ultimately, the global political position is what the two superpowers are competing for.

After listing out the four goals of the two players, however, they are all the main objectives of both the United States and China in the event, and it is hard to rank them accurately. Protecting intellectual property may be the most important goal for the United States, but the cost of trade war also cannot be underestimated. Ranking between the political power and the legitimacy of the action is also difficult.

One of them may be more important to some extent, but the distinction is not obvious. Thus, how many numbers of the factors are achieved becomes the grading standard here.

For the United States, first of all, it gets its most optimal state at (Not Enact, Improve), where its intellectual property is protected as China takes the initiative to improve, and it does not violate the legitimacy requirement of the section. The cost of the trade war is avoided, and America’s political power is displayed to some extent as China does not challenge it. The United States gets its next-best outcome at (Enact, Improve), where its intellectual property is protected, the cost of the trade war is avoided. Its political power is displayed as China improves itself under its pressure, but enacting the investigation is not legitimate and is questioned on the global stage. The United States gets its next-worst outcome at (Not Enact, Not Improve), where it does not violate the legitimacy requirement of the section. The cost of the trade war is avoided, but its’ intellectual property is not protected and its political power is not displayed to any extent. The United States gets its worst outcome at (Enact, Not Improve), where none of these aims are achieved as it violates the legitimacy of the section and its intellectual property is not protected.

Additionally, trade war breaks out, and its political power is challenged by China since China does not improve its system even under the pressure of the United States.

For China, first of all, it gets its best outcome at the status quo, (Not Enact, Not Improve), where China can keep “studying” the advanced high-techs of the United States, by doing which largely benefits the development of China. Its political power continues to rise without being hindered by the United States’ sanctions. China gets its next-best outcome at the compromising state, (Enact, Improve), where it is receives sympathy on the global stage as the sanction of the United States is illegal, and its trade reputation becomes better by taking the initiative to improve management. The trade war is also avoided, but its goals of strengthening political power and keeping “studying” advanced technology are not met. China gets its next-worst outcome at the trade war state, (Enact, Not Improve), where its goals of showing political power and copying techniques are met, but it must face the heavy cost of trade war and losing reputation in the global market without the improvement of intellectual property system. Finally, China gets its worst outcome at its voluntarily conceding state, (Not Enact, Improve), where only the goal of avoiding the trade war is achieved.

Thus, the payoff matrix is built. The Nash Equilibrium (NE) in this game is (2,4), (Enact, Not Improve). Neither the United States nor China has an incentive to depart unilaterality because their departures “would immediately lead to a worse state” (Brams 1994). But NE is myopic and players do not “anticipate all possible rational moves and countermoves from the initial state” (Brams 1994), which can be

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accomplished by the Nonmyopic Equilibrium (NME). The Nonmyopic Equilibriums are (3,3) and (2,4), i.e.

(Enact, Improve) and (Not Enact, Not Improve).

However, none of these equilibriums has been achieved in practice. So far, the United States has enacted the Section 301 Investigation and China has not improved its property system, which lead to the outcome of trade war (problem exposed but unresolved), (1,2). Why does the United States move from (2,4), which is both the NE and NME? Why is the outcome not the equilibrium so far? Will the players move to any of the equilibriums in the future? The gap between theory and reality can be explained, and the future direction can be predicted, by exploring the threat power possessed by both players in this game.

3 Threat Power in the Game

The idea of threat power is discussed in several classic books. In his book Theory of Moves (1994), Brams used threat power to model the conflict between the Polish Communist Party and the independent trade union, Solidarity, during 1980-1981 period. Threat power is defined as “the ability of a player to threaten a mutually disadvantageous outcome in the single play of a game to deter untoward actions in the future play of this or other games” (Brams 1994). It includes threat of corpulence, which seeks change in a relationship’s status quo, and threat of deterrence, which seeks to maintain the status quo (Brams 1994, Snídal 1985, Treverton 2000).

The following sections will first examine the sequential and cyclic attributes of the game by referring to moving power, then explore the possession of threat power in the game and how it is applied.

3.1 Irrelevant Moving Power and Moderately Cyclic Game

The game of 49 is a moderately cyclic game and its moving power is irrelevant. Firstly, it is moderately cyclic, which means that the game is cyclic in a counterclockwise direction with only one impediment: in the lower right-hand cell in the matrix, the United States does worse moving to the upper right-hand cell. Specifically, China is willing to move from (1,2) to (3,3), the United States is willing to move from (3,3) to (4,1), and China is willing to move from (4,1) to (2,4), but the United States does not want to move from (2,4) to (1,2). The game is cyclic and the players move in sequence, so when the United States takes the initiative to move from (2,4) to (1,2), China could move continuously, which is in line with reality.

However, the moving power in the game is irrelevant. Moving power “ is the ability to continue moving when the other player must eventually stop; the player who possesses it uses to induce a preferred outcome” (Brams 1994). In this game, either player can induce the Pareto superior outcome of (3,3) if it has moving power, making moving power in this game irrelevant. Therefore, (3,3) might be the most likely outcome to expect, whoever has moving power.

In sum, the game is a moderately cyclic game and its moving power is irrelevant, making sequential and cyclic movements possible and threat power the only influential power in the game.

3.2 The Possession and Application of Threat Power

Applying the threat power into the U.S.-China trade war, there is only the threat of corpulence because the United States took the initiative to implement the Section 301 Investigation and both players seek to move away from the situation of the trade war. Both China and the United States suffer heavy losses when staying in the situation of trade war, though the degrees of suffering would be different: “GDP projections follow a pattern that suggests the United States will suffer fewer losses than China in a ratio of

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1:4, United States to China, when both sides engage reciprocal protectionism” (Lai and Xia 2016).

Their movements would be the following if the United States or China possess the ability of compel threat and desires to threaten each other by announcing that “I would persist on this strategy”.

On the one hand, the United States can threaten China by staying at strategy Enact and compel China to choose between Improve, (3,3), and Not Improve, (1,2). China’s rational choice would then be (3,3) because 3 is better than 2, which is also ideal for the United States because 3 is better than 1. On the other hand, China can threaten the United States by staying at strategy Not Improve and compel the United States to choose between Enact, (1,2), and Not Enact, (2,4). The United States’ rational choice would then be (2,4) because 2 is better than 1, which is also the most ideal state for China since it gets 4. Therefore, if the United States implements the threat power, the result would be (3,3), (Enact, Improve), and if China implements the threat power, the result would be (2,4), (Not Enact, Not Improve). The result would be either of the two Nonmyopic Equilibriums (NMEs). If they both possess and apply the power (though in different stages), however, the outcome would be (1,2), (Enact, Not Improve): the United States sticks to Enact while China sticks to Not Improve, causing a deadlock.

In practice, they take turns to possess such compelling threat power, and their movements are not limited to “announcing” but “practicing” the threat. Whoever possesses the threat power is evaluated through conducting backwards induction in the sequential and cyclic game, which is a process that “considers the moves that are the last in the game, and determines the best move for the player in each case. Then, taking these as given future actions, it proceeds backwards in time, again determining the best move for the respective player, until the beginning of the game is reached” (Turocy and von Stengel 2001).

As shown in the decision tree of figure 3.2, both China and the U.S. possess compelling threat power, but in different stages. The part marked blue is the expected outcome of the United States’ compel power, the part marked red is the expected outcome of China’s compelling power, and the part marked green is the outcome in reality.

China

Enact US

Not Enact

Improve

Not Improve

(3,3)tc [2,4]

(1,2) [2,4] / [3.3]

(4,1) [2,4]

(2,4)Tc [3,3]

Figure 3.1 Game Analysis Note: (x,y), x = the payoff of the US, y = the payoff of China; Tc is the compel threat power possessed by the United States; tc is the compel threat power possessed by China; [] are the NMEs of the state.

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Figure 3.2 Decision Tree Note: (x,y), x = the payoff of the US, y = the payoff of China Blue: The expected outcome of the US' compel threat power Red: The expected outcome of China's compel threat power Green: The outcome in reality

The attitudes and policies of the United States and China have remained unchanged since 2018. The United States enacted the investigation, and China has not improved its intellectual property management system. On the issue of tariffs and export controls, the Biden Administration has even continued and tightened export control measures, such as prohibiting the United States from exporting sensitive technologies to China. China has always sought to establish an international order free from the “hegemony” of the United States, while ensuring that its core interests, such as territorial sovereignty and economic development, are not violated. There is no sign yet that China has made significant changes in its protection of intellectual property, and it is reasonable to predict that China has no incentive to compromise in the early years of the Biden Administration before it knows how tough the new government will be. In sum, the two players both have stuck to their original strategies: Enact for the United States and Not Improve for China, leading to the trade war state of (Enact, Not Improve).

Therefore, their movements are irrational on the perspective of traditional game theory, but are rational if taking the threat power into consideration that they both want the other to make changes under pressure when they have the upper hand. The threat power is influential on the process of the two players to gradually achieve the equilibrium condition, which can be achieved if one of them is not that tough. We can predict from the model that the near future situation would stay at (1,2), the trade war, if both players keep applying their threat powers. One of the equilibriums can be eventually reached if the “deadlocked

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balance” is changed by any of them: if the United States gives up its demands, the outcome would return to (2,4), the status quo before the trade war; and if China concedes and compromises, the outcome would move to (3,3), a better trade system.

4 Conclusion and Future Prediction

The U.S.-China trade war is one of the largest-scale trade wars. However, little analysis has been conducted in game theory, and the situation of deadlock has not been explained. This paper thus models the game between the United States and China in the case of the Section 301 Investigation in 2018 by building a payoff matrix on Game 49 and applying threat power to illuminate the inner logic of the game players’ movements. The conclusion is that the “irrational” movements of both the United States and China are because of their threat powers in the game, which are influential on the process of the two players to gradually achieve the equilibrium condition. The explanation for leaving from (2,4) and staying at (1,2) instead of the NE or NME so far is that, the possession and display of the threat power has caused an impasse and stuck the players at (1,2), the trade war. This study does not challenge the rationality of the players, but shows a slow process to achieve the NE or NME, in which process the threat power is influential.

Then where will the game’s outcome state go in the future? The continuous trade war shows that the trade positions of Biden administration are very similar to those of the Trump administration.

Biden supports the return of American manufacturing and strives to maintain the hegemony of the United States in the field of science and technology. Case in point the United States announced new restrictions on the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, further cracking down on its semiconductor chip supply.

The Bureau of Industry and Security of the United States Department of Commerce announced new regulations that require manufacturers to obtain export licenses from the United States government when exporting chips that use the United States technology or designs to Huawei, even for manufacturers outside the United States. Actions like this show that the U.S.-China trade relationship is still tense.

However, there is a difference between the two administrations . Several efforts regarding bilateral trade cooperation between the United States and China have been made after Biden came into power. Following the first exchange between Biden and Xi on February 10, 2021, the official media of China said it showed “in-depth communication” and remarked that it was a “very positive” sign that the call lasted for more than two hours (Feinberg 2021). As the United States has rejoined the WHO and Paris Agreement, the Biden administration seems to hold a more positive attitudes toward globalization, international organizations and cooperation.

In conclusion, it is unlikely that the United States will end the trade war. Rather, there are two possible outlets: China compromises to the United States, reaching some kind of new agreement on technology property, or develops its own high-techs rapidly and decreases the demands of core high-tech imports.. As the United States is affected less than China’s losses in terms of GDP losses’ effect on jobs, consumption, and investment (Lai and Xia 2016), China may be forced to transform if it is losing too much in the trade war. No matter how the trade war ends, the general circumstance is that China and the United States will continue to be in a relationship of “confrontation, competition and cooperation” (Friedberg 2011).

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