East Austin Book by Miranda Petrosky

The Image of the Environment Kevin Lynch

Heather White

ooking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time. City design is therefore

a temporal art, but it can rarely use the controlled and limited sequences of other temporal arts like music. On different occasions and for different people, the sequences are reversed, interrupted, abandoned, cut across. It is seen in all lights and all weathers.

At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.â&#x20AC;Ś Every citizen has had long associations with some part of this city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings. Moving elements in a city and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as the stationary physical parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with the other participants. Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.

Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own. While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail. Only partial control can be exercised over its growth and form. There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases. No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities for sensuous enjoyment is an art quite separate from architecture or music or literature. It may learn a great deal from these other arts, but it cannot imitate them. A beautiful and delightful city environment is a oddity, some would say an impossibility. Not one American city larger than a village is of consistently fine quality, although a few towns

have some pleasant fragments. It is hardly surprising, then, that most Americans have little idea of what it can mean to live in such an environment. They are clear enough about the ugliness of the world they live in, and they are quite vocal about the dirt, the smoke, the heat, and the congestion, the chaos and the monotony of it. But they are hardly aware of the potential value of harmonious surroundings, a world which they may have briefly glimpsed only as tourists or as an escaped vacationer. They can have little sense of what a setting can mean in terms of daily delight, or as a continuous anchor for their lives, or an extension of the meaningfulness and richness of the work.

urban scale of size, time, and complexity. To understand this, we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants. Structuring and identifying the environment is a vital ability among all mobile animals. Many kinds of cues are used: the visual sensations of color, shape, motion, or polarization of light, as well as other senses such as smell, sound, touch, kinesthesia, sense of gravity, and perhaps of electric or magnetic fields. Psychologists have also studied this ability in man, although rather sketchily or under limited laboratory conditions. Despite a few remaining puzzles, it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic â&#x20AC;&#x153;instinctâ&#x20AC;? of wayfinding.

Although clarity or legibility is by no means the only important property of a beautiful city, it is of special importance when considering environments at the

Rather there is a consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment. This organization is fundamental to the efficiency

and to the very survival of freemoving life. To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and wellbeing. The very word â&#x20AC;&#x153;lostâ&#x20AC;? in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty; it carries overtones of utter disaster. In the process of way finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image

is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide experience and action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual. Obviously a clear image enables one to move about easily and quickly: to find a friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house or a policeman or a button store. But an ordered environment can do more than this; it may serve as a road frame of reference, an organizer of activity or belief or knowledge. On the basis of a structural understanding of Manhattan, for example, one can order a substantial quantity of facts and fancies about the nature of the world we live in. Like any good framework, such a structure gives the individual a possibility of

choice and a starting-point for the acquisition of further information. A clear image of the surroundings is thus a useful basis for individual growth. A vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role as well. It can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication. A striking landscape is the skeleton upon which many primitive races erect their socially important myths. Common memories of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;home townâ&#x20AC;? were often the first and easiest point of contact between lonely soldiers during the war. A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security. She can establish an harmonious relationship between herself and the outside world. This is the obverse of the fear that comes with

disorientation; it means that the sweet sense of home is strongest when home is not only familiar but distinctive as well. Indeed, a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Although life is far from impossible in the visual chaos of the modern city, the same daily action could take on new meaning if carried out in a more vivid setting. Potentially, the city is in itself the powerful symbol of a complex society. If visually well set forth, it can also have strong expressive meaning. It may be argued against the importance of physical legibility that the human brain is marvelously adaptable, that with some experience one can learn to pick oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s way through the most disordered or featureless surroundings. there are abundant

examples of precise navigation over the â&#x20AC;&#x153;tracklessâ&#x20AC;? wastes of sea, sand, or ice, or through a tangle maze of jungle. Yet even the sea has the sun and stars, the winds, currents, birds, and sea-colors without which unaided navigation would be impossible. The fact that only skilled professionals could navigate among the Polynesian Islands, and this only after extensive training, indicates the difficulties imposed by this particular environment. Strain and anxiety accompanied even the best-prepared expeditions. In our own world, we might say that almost everyone can, if attentive, learn to navigate in Jersey City, but only at the cost of some effort and uncertainty. Moreover, the positive values of legible surroundings are missing: the emotional satisfaction, the framework for communication

or conceptual organization, the new depths that it may bring to everyday experience. These are pleasures we lack, even if our present city environment is not so disordered as to impose an intolerable strain on those who are familiar with it. It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment. Many of us enjoy the House of Mirrors, and there is a certain charm in the crooked streets of Boston. This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an over-all framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole. Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time be apprehended. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable.

But these second thoughts point to an important qualification. The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to change that image to fit changing needs. An environment which is ordered in precise and final detail may inhibit new patterns of activity. A landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories. Although this may not seem to be a critical issue in our present urban chaos, yet it indicates that what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development.

Building the Image

Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggest distinctions and relations, and the observerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with great

adaptability and in the light of his own purposesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees. The image so developed now limits and emphasizes what is seen, while the image itself is being tested against the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process. Thus the image of a given reality may vary significantly between different observers. The coherence of the image may arise in several ways. There may be little in the real object that is ordered or remarkable, and yet its mental picture has gained identity and organization through long familiarity. One man may find objects easily on what seems to anyone else to be a totally disordered work table. Alternatively, an object seen for the first time may be identified and related not because it is individually familiar but because it conforms to a stereotype already

constructed by the observer. An American can always spot the corner drugstore, however indistinguishable it might be to a Bushman. Again, a new object may seem to have strong structure or identity because of striking physical features which suggest or impose their own pattern. Thus the sea or a great mountain can rivet the attention of one coming form the flat plains of the interior, even if he is so young or so parochial as to have no name for these great phenomena.

various observers. Presumably this probability can be stated with greater and greater precision as the observers are grouped in more and more homogeneous classes of age, sex, culture, occupation, temperament, or familiarity. Each individual creates and bears his own image, but there seems to be substantial agreement among members of the same group. It is these group images, exhibiting consensus among significant numbers, that interest city planners who aspire to model an environment that will be used by many people.

As manipulators of the physical environment, city planners are primarily interested in the external agent in the interaction which produces the environmental image. Different environments resist or facilitate the process of image-making. Any given form, a fine vase or a lump of clay, will have a high or a low probability of evoking a strong image among

The systems of orientation which have been used vary widely throughout the world, changing from culture to culture, and from landscape to landscape. The world may be organized around a set of focal points, or be broken into named regions, or be linked by remembered routes. Varied as these methods are, and inexhaustible as seem to be the potential clues which a

man may pick out to differentiate his world, they cast interesting side-lights on the means that we use today to locate ourselves in our own city world. For the most part these examples seem to echo, curiously enough, the formal types of image elements into which we can conveniently divide the city image: path, landmark, edge, node, and district.

Structure and Identity An environmental image may be analyzed into three components: identity, structure, and meaning. It is useful to abstract these for analysis if it is remembered that in reality they always appear together. A workable image require first the identification of an object, which implies its distinction from other things, its recognition as a separable entity. This is called identity not in the sense of equality with something else, but with the meaning of individuality or oneness. Second, the image must

include the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and to other objects. Finally, this object must have some meaning for the observer, whether practical or emotional. Meaning is also a relation, but quite a different one from spatial or pattern relation. Thus an image useful for making an exit requires the recognition of a door as a distinct entity, of its spatial relation to the observer, and its meaning as a hole for getting out. these are not truly separable. the visual recognition of a door is matted together with its meaning as a door. It is possible, however, to analyze the door in terms of its identity of form and clarity of position, considered as if they were prior to its meaning. Such an analytic feat might be pointless in the study of a door, but not in the study of the urban environment. To begin with, the question of meaning in the city is a

complicated one. Group images of meaning are less likely to be consistent at this level than are the perceptions of entity and relationship. Meaning, moreover, is not so easily influenced by physical manipulation as are these other two components. If it is our purpose to build cities for the enjoyment of vast numbers of people of widely diverse backgroundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and cities which will also be adaptable to future purposesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we may even be wise to concentrate on the physical clarity of the image and to allow meaning to develop without our direct guidance. The image of the Manhattan skyline may stand for vitality, power, decadence, mystery, congestion, greatness, or what you will, but in each case that sharp picture crystallizes and reinforces the meaning. So various are the individual meanings of a city, even while its form may be easily communicable, that it appears

possible to separate meaning from form, at least in the early stages of analysis. This study will therefore concentrate on the identity and structure of city images. If an image is to have value for orientation in the living space, it must have several qualities. It must be sufficient, true in a pragmatic sense, allowing the individual to operate within his environment to the extent desired. The map, whether exact or not, must be good enough to get one home. It must be sufficiently clear and well integrated to be economical of mental effort: the map must be readable. It should be safe, with a surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failure is not too high. If a blinking light is the only sign for a critical turn, a power failure may cause disaster. The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue

to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure be communicable to other individuals. The relative importance of these criteria for a “good” image will vary with different persons in different situations; one will prize an economical and sufficient system, another an openended and communicable one.

Imageability

Since the emphasis here will be on the physical environment. as the independent variable, this study will look for physical qualities which relate to the attributes of identity and structure in the mental image. This leads to the definition of what might be called imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of

vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. It might also be called legibility, or perhaps visibility in a heightened sense, where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses. Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was “to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance.” In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning. A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar sense would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and

participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that would be apprehended over time as a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice might be an example of such a highly imageable environment. In the United States, one is tempted to cite parts of Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, or perhaps the lake front of Chicago. These are characterizations that flow from our definitions. The concept of imageability does

not necessarily connote something fixed, limited, precise, unified, or regularly ordered, although it may sometimes have these qualities. Nor does it mean apparent at glance, obvious, patent, or plain. The total environment to be patterned is highly complex, while the obvious image is soon boring, and can point to only a few features of the living world. The imageability of city form will be the center of the study to follow there are other basic properties in a beautiful environment: meaning or expressiveness, sensuous delight, rhythm, stimulus, choice. Our concentration on imageability does not deny their importance. Our purpose is simply to consider the need for identity and structure in our perceptual world, and to illustrate the special relevance of this quality to the particular case of the complex, shifting urban environment.

Since image development is a two-way process between observer and observed, it is possible to strengthen the image either by symbolic devices, by the retraining of the perceiver, or by reshaping one’s surroundings, you can provide the viewer with a symbolic diagram of how the world fits together: a map or a set of written instructions. As long as he can fit reality to the diagram, he has a clue to the relatedness of things. You can even install a machine for giving directions, as has recently been done in New York. While such devices are extremely useful for providing condensed data on interconnections, they are also precarious, since orientation fails if the device is lost, and the device itself must constantly be referred and fitted to reality… Moreover, the complete experience of interconnection the full depth of a vivid image, is lacking.

You may also train the observer. Brown remarks that a maze through which subjects were asked to move blindfolded seemed to them at first to be one unbroken problem. On repetition, parts of the pattern, particularly the beginning and end, became familiar and assumed the character of localities. Finally, when they could tread the maze without error, the whole system seemed to have become one locality. DeSilva describes the case of a boy who seemed to have “automatic” directional orientation, but proved to have been trained from infancy (by a mother who could not distinguish right from left) to respond to “the east side of the port” or “the south end of the dresser.” Shipton’s account of the reconnaissance for the ascent of Everest offers a dramatic case of such learning. Approaching Everest from a new direction, Shipton immediately recognized the main

peaks and saddles that he knew from the north side. But the Sherpa guide accompanying him, to whom both sides were long familiar, had never realized that these were the same features, and he greeted the revelation with surprise and delight. Kilpatrick describes the process of perceptual learning forced on an observer by new stimuli that no longer fit into previous images. It begins with hypothetical forms that explain the new stimuli conceptually, while the illusion of the old forms persists. The personal experience of most of us will testify to this persistence of an illusory image long after its inadequacy is conceptually realized. we stare into the jungle an see only the sunlight on the green leaves but a warning noise tells us that an animal is hidden there. The observer then learns to interpret the scene by singling out “give-

away” clues and by reweighting previous signals. The camouflaged animal may now be picked up by the reflection of this eyes. Finally by repeated experience the entire pattern of perception is changed and the observer need no longer consciously search for give-aways, or add new data to an old framework. He has achieved an image which will operate successfully in the new situation, seeming natural and right. Quite suddenly the hidden animal appears among the leaves, “as plain as day.” In the same way, we must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. We are not accustomed to organizing and imaging an artificial environment on such a large scale; yet our activities are pushing us toward that end. Curt Sachs gives an example of a failure to make connections beyond a certain level. The voice and drumbeat of the North American Indian follow entirely different tempos, the two

being perceived independently. Searching for a musical analogy of our own, he mentions our church services, where we do not think of coordinating the choir inside with the bells above. In our vast metropolitan areas we do not connect the choir and the bells; like the Sherpa, we see only the sides of Everest and not he mountain. To extend and deepen our perception of the environment would be to continue a long biological and cultural development which has gone from the contact sense to the distant sense and from the distant senses to symbolic communications. Our thesis is that we are now able to develop our image of the environment by operation and on the external physical shape as well as by an internal learning process. Indeed, the complexity of our environment now compels us to do so.

Primitive man was forced to improve his environmental image by adapting his perception to the given landscape. He could effect minor changes in his environment with cairns, beacons, or tree blazes, but substantial modifications for visual clarity or visual interconnection were confined to house sites or religious enclosures. Only powerful civilizations can begin to act on their total environment at a significant scale. The conscious remolding of the large-scale physical environment has been possible only recently and so the problem of environmental imageability is a new one. Technically, we can now make completely new landscapes in a brief time, as in the Dutch polders. Here the designers are already at grips with the question of how to form the total scene so that it is easy for the human observer to identify its parts and to structure the whole.

We are rapidly building a new functional unit, the metropolitan region, but we have yet to grasp that this unit, too, should have its corresponding image, Suzanne Langer sets the problem in her capsule definition of architecture: “it is the total environment made visible.” It is clear that the form of a city or of a metropolis will not exhibit some gigantic, stratified other. It will be a complicated pattern, continuous and whole, yet intricate and mobile. It must be plastic to the perceptual habits of citizens, open-ended to change of function and meaning, receptive to the formation of new imagery. It must invite its viewers to explore the world. True enough, we need an environment which is not simply well organized, but poetic and symbolic as well. It should speak

of the individuals and their complex society, of their aspirations and their historical tradition, of the natural setting, and of the complicated functions and movements of the city world. But clarity of structure and vividness of identity are first steps to the development of strong symbols. By appearing as a remarkable and well knit place, the city could provide a ground for the clustering and organization of these meanings and associations Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace. By the intensity of its life and the close packing of its disparate people, the great city is a romantic place, rich in symbolic detail. it is for us both splendid and terrifying, “the landscape of our confusions,” as Flanagan calls it. Were it legible, truly visible, then fear and confusion might be replaced with delight in the richness and power of the scene.

In the development of the image, education in seeing will be quite as important as the reshaping of what is seen. Indeed, they together form a circular, or hopefully a spiral, process: visual education impelling the citizen to act upon his visual world, and

this action causing him to see even more acutely. A highly developed art of urban design is linked to the creation of a critical and attentive audience. If art and audience grow together, then our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to millions of their inhabitants.

Rheo Martinez

Industrialization & Urbanization

A.J. Scott

Alana Mandel

Miranda Petrosky

y theme is the emergence and trajectory of cities as centers of production and work in modern capitalist society. I am above all concerned with the ways in which cities as geographical entities are constructed around the intertwined processes of the social division of labor, the location and interlinkage of production units, and local labor market formation. I am also concerned with the ways these processes are expressed in (and are in turn dependent on) the social structure of the modern metropolis. In what follows, I seek to identify some elements of a preliminary framework for the investigation of these issues.

Toward a Reconsideration of the Urban Question Observe that in the opening lines of the above paragraph, I already distance myself from that version of the urban question that has been bequeathed to us through much of the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. In that literature, there was fairly common agreement that the central agenda for urban research was defined by a conception of the city as a locus of consumption activities, housing processes, and neighborhood dynamics. To be sure, theorists were deeply divided among themselves about just how to set about

pursuing this agenda. On the one side, neoclassical urban economists put their faith in behavioristic microeconomic analysis and liberalistic policy prescriptions (e.g., Alonso 1965; Richardson 1977). On the other side, Marxists rooted their thinking about the city in the concept of the mode of production and class struggle (e.g., Castells 1973; Harvey 1973). Notwithstanding these significant differences, almost all parties to the debate seemed ready, tacitly or explicitly, to insist on the central significance of the social space of the city (the domain of households and family life), while relegating production space (the domain of production and work) to the status of simple background and the exogenously given. As important as their writings have undoubtedly been, I shall argue that these theorists of the urban question failed to come to grips with the problem of urbanization, for they never effectively dealt

with those crucial mechanisms of production and work that secure the reproduction of city life at the outset. If we are to avoid the same failure, we must put an elaborately conceived production space before social space in the analytical order of discourse. Notice, too, that the very title of my paper is an open challenge to all those social theorists who have proclaimed the advent, here and now, of post-industrial society, and by extension, of the post-industrial city (Bell 1973; Sternlieb and Hughes 1975). As will appear more clearly at a later stage, the postindustrial hypothesis is unsound and misleading to the degree that it suggests that capitalistic relations of production and reproduction no longer dominate American society. To be sure, office and service functions are currently growing apace, especially in large metropolitan regions. These functions are precisely geared, however, to the tasks of

ensuring more effective commodity production and social reproduction in modern industrial capitalism. In the words of Noyelle and Stanback (1983, 2) the rise of office and service functions is principally associated with â&#x20AC;&#x153;the growing role of activities of the corporate complex (e.g. banking, insurance, advertising, legal counsel and the service-like functions carried out within the central offices of corporations) as inter mediate inputs in the roundabout processes of production and with the rise of public sector and non-profit (health and education) services to fulfill the demands of an increasingly complex and human capital intensive modern society (emphasis added).â&#x20AC;?

To mistake these functions for signs of an emerging information-processing utopia-as is done in some extreme versions of the post-industrial hypothesis (e.g., Dakin 1979)-is to deform their real status as normal imbricated moments in the workaday world

of modern industrial capitalism. In fact, as I intend to show, industrialization continues to be as significant for an understanding of the late twentieth-century city as it was for the nineteenthcentury city. This means that if we want to explain the urban process in its fullness, we must seek to comprehend how it is that capitalism creates and shapes those large agglomerations of capital and labor that continue to form the inner substance of the city. As a first step in this direction, we now consider some elements of the theory of industrial organization.

Proto-Urban Forms: Locational Concentrations of Production If we follow Harveyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (1973) line of reasoning, we can elucidate the urban process (within the theory of the capitalist mode of production) as a mechanism of concentrating and extracting a social surplus. So far so good.

The problem with this formulation, however, is that it cuts corners around all the really interesting meso-level analytics that might help us understand just how the mode of production is translated into specific geographical outcomes. For the moment, let us stand back a little from this issue, and by way of fixing

of the firms thus linked to the central pole begin to move into the local area in a process of import substitution. The emerging node of economic activity that is created by these events is reinforced by the development of radiating transport lines connecting it to ever-widening markets. Multiplier effects engender

Alana Mandel

ideas, let us invoke a favorite theme of regional scientists and spatial economists of the 1960s, namely, the problem of growth center development. In crude outline, this theme may be rehearsed as follows (see Hansen 1972). To begin with, let us assume that a central pole of economic activity has been located somewhere in geographical space (perhaps in conformity with Weberian locational logic). By definition, the pole has many backward linkages and many

numerous non-basic and tertiary economic functions in the vicinity of the pole and its appendages. The whole is consolidated by localization and urbanization economies, including the formation of a multifaceted labor force in the surrounding region. Now, as useful as this story undoubtedly is (when appropriately filled in with the necessary details and subtleties), it still remains silent on some of the fundamental

issues of urban development. I shall argue, in fact, that the most essential element of the whole process of geographically concentrated development and growth center activity is omitted. What is missing is precisely the organizational and local labor market processes alluded to in the

chronological order, Weber (1899), Haig (1927), Allen (1929), Perrin (1937), Florence (1948), Wise (1949), Lampard (1955), Hoover and Vernon (1959), Hall (1962), Tsuru (1963), Sjoberg (1965), Thiry (1973), and Webber (1984), among many others, have alluded to the notion of the city as an outgrowth

previous section, and, above all, the dynamics of the social division of labor. It is my contention that this latter phenomenon is fundamental in mediating general forms of capitalist production out into urban realization.

of the social division of labor and industrial diversification. This is a vein of urban analysis that differs quite markedly from the work of the Chicago School and its epigoni. Even so, this putative tradition has never successfully adduced a really strong and elaborate account of the precise mechanisms that govern these relationships between the production system and urbanization in capitalist society. My objective in this paper is to redress in part (though assuredly not in whole)

Alana Mandel

I should state forthwith that I am not the first to have made this sort of claim and indeed a long line of urban theorists has also made reference in one way or another to the same idea. In

this shortcoming. The generalized argument that now follows is based on the findings of a research project, the details of which have been published elsewhere (Angel 1985; Henderson and Scott 1985; and Scott 1983a, 1983b, 1983c, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c, 1985, 1986). There are many ways of identifying the social division of labor. One is to define it in terms of occupational structure; another is to assimilate it into the idea of sectoral differences in the production system (textiles, steel, machinery, and so on). In this paper, I propose to employ the term in yet a third way by restricting its meaning to the phenomenon of vertical disintegration. Specifically, vertical disintegration refers to the general process of the fragmentation of different elements of the labor process into specialized but functionally interlinked units of production. It thus has both intra-sectoral and inter-

sectoral dimensions. The converse phenomenon, corresponding to a narrowing of the social division of labor, is designated, of course, vertical integration, and I shall deal with this at a later stage. For the moment, note that as vertical disintegration comes about, new and increasingly specialized units of production make their appearance within the economic system. Vertical disintegration is also a highly dynamic process in the sense that when it occurs it is usually associated with deeply rooted qualitative changes in the whole organizational structure of production. A loose but simple way of saying the same thing is to observe that after vertical disintegration, the sum of the parts will tend to be greater than the initial whole. Note, too, that with increasing vertical disintegration, there is a widening efflorescence of the external transactional activity (i.e., linkages in the form of circulating capital and information

flows) between establishments. From this we may immediately aver that linkage structures are not exogenous to the production process as such, but are indeed internal subjacent moments within the system of industrial production. They are, if you will, part of the whole technology of production. These remarks call for some amplification and illustration. I do not propose here to enumerate the myriad substantive conditions under which vertical disintegration may occur. In the absence of a mature literature on the subject, such an attempt would in any case be somewhat perilous. Instead, I propose to sketch out a few suggestive guidelines using Adam Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parable of the division of labor in pin manufacture as a point of departure. Smith suggested that the fragmentation of labor tasks is posited first of all on expansion of the market, for this expansion makes

economic specialization more and more economically feasible. Often, such fragmentation will occur within the firm, thus leading to an internal technical division of labor. This will especially be the case where internal economies of scope are strong so that specialized labor tasks will be integrated under a single managerial apparatus (Brander 1981; Goldstein and Gronberg 1984). But where internal economies of scope are negligible (or negative) the fragmented labor tasks may be reconstituted within specialized individual firms. More specifically, if internal economies of scope are so small that they cannot offset the contending economic advantages of externalized transactional activity (via markets), then the whole manufacturing process will break down into a multiplicity of vertically disintegrated independent procedures. Out of the many empirical circumstances under which this

The East Side is known for many reasons, two of those reasons being the art and design culture as well as that of local businesses.

Miranda Petrosky

Economically, the two businesses are completely different, yet they each represent East Austin in their own unique ways.

latter state of affairs will occur, four would seem to be especially pertinent to the problem of urban growth and development. Thesefour circumstances are briefly described here for illustrative purposes; but under no circumstances should they be interpreted as representing the totality of the problem of vertical disintegration in industrial organization. First, fragmentation of labor processes may be expected to be a common event where the production system resists resynthesis so that labor processes are technically and economically disarticulatable from one another, in the sense that changes in production procedures at one stage in the manufacturing process have limited repercussions on production procedures at other stages. Second, as Carlton (1979) has shown, fragmentation will be accentuated in cases where output markets are uncertain and unstable so that firms will tend to disintegrate as a means of avoiding the backward transmission of

production irregularities through their vertical structure. Third, it sometimes happens that firms need services which can most efficiently be carried out on capital equipment that few individual firms are able to keep in full-time operation. Law firms, for instance, have frequent need of printing services, but this need is rarely large enough to sustain economically an in-house printing shop. In situations like this, disintegration occurs, and by pooling demands, the equipment can be operated efficiently and cheaply (Scott 1983b). Fourth, fragmentation is also often a response to the emergence of segmented labor markets in which work tasks can be subcontracted out from firms in primary labor market sectors to firms in secondary labor market sectors. Friedman (1977) has provided an analysis of this aspect of vertical disintegration for the case of the British car industry. We should notice in

passing that very general theories of vertical disintegration have been proposed by Stigler (1951) and Williamson (1975). I have tried to show elsewhere (Scott 1985), that these theories are unsatisfactory in several respects, and more importantly for present purposes, they do not take us very far along the path of urban and regional development theory. Whatever the reasons may be for vertical disintegration of labor processes, it creates what Young (1928) has described in a classic paper as increasing returns via external economies i.e., steadily falling production costs resulting from specialization as fragmentation increases. This is part of what Young also calls the increasing â&#x20AC;&#x153;roundaboutnessâ&#x20AC;? of production. Stigler (1951) has suggested that vertically disintegrating functions will be typified by strong internal economies of scale and will thus tend to be large in size. This is by no

means necessarily the case, however, for once we take into account the role of internal economies of scope (as suggested by Brander (1981) and Goldstein and Gronberg (1984)), it is evident that even functions with restricted scale economies may successfully disintegrate. Thus, vertical disintegration may well bring into being large numbers of small specialized firms with limited capacities for growth. If this is the case, increases in the extent of the market will be associated not just with vertical disintegration but rising levels of horizontal disintegration too. That is, both the variety and number of firms will tend (though not without exception) to increase. As a corollary, an industrial complex will be engendered in the form of a sectorally stratified cluster of firms with many detailed and changing transactional relations among its different levels (Coase 1937; Holmes 1986; Richardson 1972).

These transactional relations are frequently intricate and multifarious, ranging as they do from material input-output flows, through sub-contracting partnerships, to detailed exchanges of information and face-to-face contacts. They also often have onerous geographically dependent costs attached to them. The greater the magnitude of these costs per unit of transactional activity, the greater is the likelihood that particular subsets of producers will converge toward their own center of gravity. This tendency will be all the more pronounced where some particular kinds of transactions have characteristics that intensify their cost. We may note three major cases where such intensification occurs (see Scott 1983c). First, if linkages are small in scale, they are usually unable to command significant discounts and hence must pay premium

transport rates per mile. Second, if linkage structures are constantly changing, linkage partners must be continually rediscovered and contacts rebuilt, and both of these activities incur heavy fixed and variable costs. Third, if linkages are problematical in some way (in the sense that any given transaction must be carefully negotiated) then they will in general be effectuated by means of face-to-face contact, and this is notoriously expensive in both time and distance terms (Pye 1977). Industrial establishments that are small in scale, produce unstandardized outputs in small batches, and face unstable markets are especially likely to have linkage structures with some or all of the three features noted above. Such establishments are also likely to be strongly marked by vertical and horizontal disintegration. The combined effect of these organizational and transactional

relations is to encourage intense geographical as well as functional association among producers. In other words, under these sorts of conditions, producers (whether engaged in manufacturing or office and service activities) will tend to locate near to one another so as to cut the costs of external transactional activity (Goddard 1973; Mock 1976). Because geographical association reduces transactions costs, it in turn stimulates yet more vertical disintegration. Conversely, where linkages are large in scale and stable in their spatio-tempor structure, geographical dispersal of producers will be more likely to occur, as Brooks, Gilmour, and Murricane (1973) and Gilmour (1971) have shown in detailed empirical studies of manufacturing activity in Montreal and its surrounding area. Even today, however, when the physical and time costs of transport and communications are so much

lower than they once were, the heavy costs of much transactional activity enforces considerable agglomeration of producers. Each agglomeration is then spatially underpinned by the wide variety of infrastructural artifacts and other indivisibilities that are commonly supplied by local collectivities in order to enhance the workability and efficiency of dense land use systems (Scott 1980). In these ways, intensely developed clusters of producers develop on the landscape, and with the growth of markets the clusters themselves grow in size and become increasingly internally differentiated. On such terrains as these, industrial invention and innovation find an especially propitious medium of subsistence. Any one cluster or agglomeration of producers constitutes a rich stock of organizational complexities within which new specialized firms can find accommodating

niches. Further, the experienced entrepreneurs and workers in the local area are optimally positioned to seize on any new business or technical opportunity when it becomes economically feasible. Hence, so long as technical and social conditions give rise to easily appropriatable opportunities at the margins of current practices, much new economic activity is likely to be created. This occurs by â&#x20AC;&#x153;spinoffâ&#x20AC;? in both vertical and horizontal directions. In the nineteenth century, the textile region of South Lancashire was an outstanding center of such industrial invention, innovation, and spin-off, just as today the microelectronics industry of Silicon Valley has many of the same characteristics (Henderson and Scott 1985; Saxenian 1983). These examples help to pinpoint some important common features of industrial organization and complex development at different times in different places.

Organizational fragmentation and locational convergence of producers is observable today both in the long-established metallurgical and assembly industries of the Manufacturing Belt and in the newer high technology industrial complexes of the Sunbelt. Each of these patterns of industrial agglomeration is associated with characteristic urban forms. More specifically, disintegration and clustering are typical of such urban industries as clothing, furniture, foundry work, plastics molding, machinery assembly, electronics, instruments, business services, and research and development. The degree of breakdown and interconnection within these sectors is often so great that they form specialized-industrial quarters within large cities. We will often find that the functional core of any urban industrial complex is constituted by a dominant central pole of activity with many transactional ramifications (such as the car industry in Detroit).

It is, however, by no means always necessarily the case that urban growth will be posited on such a dominant pole, and sometimes (as demonstrated in the account by Allen (1929) of nineteenth-century Birmingham) the urban process will flourish where only small-scale disintegrated industries occur. By the same token, it is indeed possible, as already noted by Pred (1965) and Smolensky and Ratajczak (1965), for major urban centers to appear in areas that lack a significant natural resource base. Whatever the idiosyncrasies of the local situation may be, it is the potent increasing returns to scale engendered by rising levels of externalization of the production process that basically drives the local development dynamic forward. As we have seen, any particular city may contain several different overlapping complexes (as, for example, in the case of the aerospace, film, and clothing

industries of Los Angeles) all held together locationally by reason of the stock of urbanization economies that they jointly call into being. In addition, complexes in one city are invariably connected to complexes in other cities, and so the whole urban system becomes locked together within a structure of long-distance multiplier effects, input-output relations, and information flows (Hermansen 1972; Pred 1977). As a result of these forces, nucleated complexes of industrial production appear at various locations on the landscape, and grow together. Nevertheless, these agglomerations of economic activity are not yet fully and finally urban, for to be so, they must be complemented by a working population together with all the emergent effects that are set in motion as that population sets about the task of occupying a residential space. Before we deal with this

crucial matter, however, we need to consider some of the counter-vailing tendencies to deconcentration and decentralization that sometimes act as dissolvents of established industrial complexes and their associated urban communities.

decentralization has become a flood tide, with important consequences for the course of urban and regional development. In particular, there has been much recent readjustment within urban production systems and much recent growth in the geographical spaces that separate big cities from one another. As we

Brianna Kindell

Urbanization and the New Spatial Division of Labor Localized industrial complexes do not necessarily grow indefinitely, and units of industrial production do not necessarily always continue to locate within them. From the very beginnings of capitalist urban development, indeed, some decentralization of industry away from major foci of production has been observable. In recent decades, such

shall see below, these events have helped to bring the space-economy into new focus within an overarching metropolis-hinterland system. I have written extensively elsewhere about the many different accounts given in the literature of the process of industrial decentralization (Scott 1982). These accounts range from descriptions of an eclectic assortment of “push” and “pull” variables to elaborate discussions of product cycle theory. I shall not

enter into the intricacies and relative merits of these different accounts here. Instead, I shall try simply to show how much of the problem of industrial decentralization can be captured within a few simple but powerful general principles adduced by extension from the analysis already sketched out above.

in considerable reintegration, resynthesis, and streamlining of production systems. An example of this kind of reversal might be the invention of a pin-making machine that then causes the collapse of the division of labor by resyntthesizing whole sets of disintegrated activities within

Katherine Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill

At the outset, let us take cognizance of the obvious but important point that technological and organizational change in production systems is endemic in capitalism. Sometimes, as we have observed, this change is manifest in a widening social division of labor and the fragmentation of production processes. Sometimes, however, it is associated with decisive reversals of these tendencies, resulting

one mechanical operation (see Robinson 1931). This sort of capital deepening often results in horizontal (as well as vertical) integration of industrial processes. It is usually associated with significant stabilization of markets, standardization of products, and a shift to large-batch and mass production processes (Abernathy, Clark, and Kantrow (1983); Piore and Sabel (1984)). One critical consequence of such developments

is that the external linkages of restructured production units become larger in volume and more predictable in their spatiotemporal structure, all of which leads to dramatic reductions in unit transactions costs (Scott 1983c). These developments are also, as it happens, capable of inducing severe erosion of old industrial complexes based on intricate social divisions of labor. This has been demonstrated dramatically by Allen (1929) for the case of the Birmingham gun industry, which was almost wholly reconstructed in organizational and spatial terms after the development of large integrated capital-intensive forms of production in the 1850s and 1860s. These remarks still leave open the question of the locational proclivities of resynthesized, standardized production units with simplified external linkages. The fact that such units face greatly

reduced transactions costs across space means that they no longer need to locate close to some central industrial complex. In any case, a given complex will invariably generate many different kinds of agglomeration diseconomies, and when (restructured) establishments are no longer dependent on the compensatory external economies of the complex, they will tend to decentralize. In brief, the high land prices, high wages, high taxes and recalcitrant labor of many central complexes will eventually drive establishments (both new and old) with streamlined external linkages to peripheral areas. The existence of an experienced and organized working class in older centers of production is an especially strong inducement to industrial decentralization, and I shall return to this important point in the next section of the paper. If, in addition, the labor processes in these establishments have been deskilled, they are all

the more likely to seek out cheap labor at scattered hinterland sites, or in Third World cities, or, indeed, anywhere where historical and geographical circumstances have created reservoirs of politically passive underemployed people. These tendencies to decentralization are further accentuated by the improvements in transport and communications technologies that have gone on steadily with the course of time. Once all of this has been said, however, there is still much that we need to learn about the underlying economic mechanisms of industrial decentralization. In particular, we also need to attempt to comprehend it as a process of the spatial switching and re-switching of techniques (along the neo-Ricardian lines suggested by Barnes and Sheppard (1984) and Huriot (1981)) in which critical decisions are made between alternative locations and

forms of production relative to the prevailing rates of profit and wages. With the evolution of firms into multi-establishment organizations, the entire decentralization process is raised to a new level of activation. To begin with, multi-establishment firms are typified by a drive to largeness of scale through the pursuit of managerial economies of scale and scope (Penrose 1959). As a consequence, such firms tend to become increasingly vertically integrated in terms of organizational span while simultaneously experiencing geographical disintegration of their various internal components. Here we have, as Dunning (1981), Rugman (1982), and other theorists of the multinational corporation have proposed, a process that combines the benefits of internalized transactions (especially in cases where proprietary advantages can be put to use) with locational

specialization of the aliquot parts of the firm. This geographical disintegration is encouraged by the circumstance that the manufacturing activity of multiestablishment firms is often (though not without many exceptions) constituted within standardized mass-production branch plants. Like standardized deskilled production generally, these branch plants are frequently assigned to low-wage peripheral regions where they function within the overall network of corporate activity, as Dunford (1986) and Perrons (1986) have shown in their studies of branch plant development in Southern Italy and Ireland, respectively. Taylor and Thrift (1982), among others, have suggested that the spatial extension of the multinational corporation is further encouraged by the increased operating flexibility that comes from the ability of such corporations

to control a series of far-flung constituent elements. Thus, such forms of corporate behavior as parallel production strategies, global scanning, the manipulation of differential labor turnover and wage policies at different locations begin to emerge. These forms of behavior enhance the commercial viability of the spatially extended multi-establishment corporation and help to underpin its widening geographical range. Simultaneously, the unstandardized labor-intensive white-collar functions within the corporation start to emerge as separate, geographically specialized units of production. These functions locate preferentially in centralized metropolitan business complexes. Here they perform in many ways like much urban manufacturing activity. They have a strong tendency to vertical disintegration (hence their strong association with broad constellations of

business service functions), they are tightly interlinked within intricate transactional structures, and they cluster closely together within the geographical area of the metropolis, especially, of course, within the central business district. Even within these business complexes, there is a tendency for subnuclei of specialized activities to form around locally intense transactional structures, as Gad (1979) and Goddard (1973) among others have demonstrated. These several locational trends are the basis of a new spatial and indeed international division of labor (Frobel, Heinrichs, and Kreye 1980) consisting, in essence, of (1) a peripheral branch plant economy controlled and managed by office staffs located in the metropolis, combined with (2) increasing production subcontracting out to the periphery in cases where direct investment carries

no particular advantages over partnership arrangements. Partly as a consequence of this, many of the large cities of the United States have experienced relative and absolute losses of blue-collar jobs while white-collar jobs have tended to increase. As important as the new spatial division of labor may be, however, we must not exaggerate its overall significance (Sayer 1986). It consists for the most part of an overlay of corporate functions and subcontracting linkages superimposed upon a prior and coexistent pattern of industrial location and regional specialization. It would be especially an error to suppose that corporate management and control activities are now the sole vocation of the large global cities of America. Many of these cities are important providers of governmental and personal services. Many continue to operate

as major, and in some cases even growing, centers of manufacturing employment; as will be pointed out later, however, much of this manufacturing activity is nowadays more and more comprised of small sweatshop industries and subcontract shops. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that whereas the extensive margin of industrialization is not usually much given to in-depth economic development (Dunford 1986), it occasionally happens that new industrial complexes (and hence new patterns of urbanization) may spring up at formerly undeveloped sites. This has been especially the case with the rise of the new high-technology growth centers of the Sunbelt, but it is also the case in parts of Europe and the Third World, as we shall see below. These new centers exert strong competitive pressures on the older industrial complexes. Such pressures have recently helped to transform many

of the traditional industrial labor relations and practices that have been painstakingly built up over the decades in American cities; these pressures have resulted in new threats to the wages and working conditions of many working-class Americans-a point that Bluestone and Harrison (1982) have made insistently in their study of the impacts of plant closures and industrial restructuring on urban communities.

The Employment Relation, Community, and Locale The growth of dense complexes of economic activity on the landscape of capitalism also brings in its train the localized growth of large satellite populations. These populations supply the labor skills and human attributes necessary for the functional continuity of any system of production. Furthermore, as local labor markets come into operation, innumerable additional external economies are created,

and these also help to hold the entire complex together as a geographical entity. Hence, just as the production system defines the territorial coordinates within which polyvalent pools of urbanized labor come into being, so it in turn depends increasingly on that which it has engendered at the outset. Agglomerations of jobs result in parallel clusters of workers, and these labor reserves then attract more jobs into central agglomerations. In this manner, the city proper emergesanalytically, that is from the proto-urban processes and forms discussed above. By its very nature, capitalist society represents a tense forcefield of conflicting and centrifugal pressures. It is universally structured by the capital-labor relation (itself a domain of considerable political turmoil) and at the same time, it is fractured by many different localisms and narrowly defined

territorial interests. Nowhere are these fracturing effects more evident than in the urban arena. Thus, each different city is marked by a specific local history that is shot through with the peculiarities of place and locale; and each city is also invariably internally subdivided into different communities and neighborhoods (Fincher 1984; Harris 1984; Foster 1968). Here we are face to face with one of the central puzzles of social history and urban geography. Does the spatial structure of urban settlements hinder the formation of class consciousness by dividing workers (including, nowadays, large numbers of white-collar workers) into widely varying communal/residentialaffiliations, as Katznelson (1981) suggests? Or does the massing together in cities of large numbers of workers (thus facilitating political mobilization and organization) constitute the precondition of its formation, as Calhoun (1982) has claimed in his

dense study of popular agitations in early nineteenth-century Britain? In what follows, I shall propose that in a political-cum- ideological climate such as the current one, of massive depoliticization and sharply attenuated social conflict, there is much in city life that helps further to assuage the tense capital-labor relation. It must be added forthwith, however, that I see no clear way of answering these questions as a straightforward matter of abstract principle. What we undoubtedly most need at this stage is a multiplicity of careful empirical studies dealing with the ways in which class and community

intersect with and act on one another in different historical and geographical situations. If we examine the contingent social space of the modern metropolis, one of the first observations we are likely to come up with is how strongly fissured it is by detailed occupational categories (Duncan and Duncan 1955; Green- berg 1981; Schwirian 1974). In particular, over the course of the twentieth century, as the division of labor in the production system has become ever more deeply divided between two primary groups (namely the blue-collar and white-collar fractions of the labor force), residential neighborhoods in the city have come increasingly to reflect this same split. Why, precisely, this division of labor should reappear with such evident insistence as a social division of urban space remains far from clear.

Miranda Petrosky

In part, no doubt, it can be accounted for in simple economic terms via an analysis of commuting costs and income differentials, as suggested by much detailed empirical work on this issue (see Gera and Kuhn 1978). I propose, however, the further hypothesis that spatial segregation is boosted to yet higher levels of resolution by the operation of the contrasting logics of social reproduction among these different occupational categories. The hypothesis can also be expressed as the idea that the useful reproductive capacities of intraurban space become fully appropriatable for specified fractions of the labor force only when that space is also reconstructed (through the housing choices of individuals) as a system of quasi-homogeneous neighborhoods. In the blunt and functionalist terms of Hoselitz (1955, 181) such neighborhoods help to sustain â&#x20AC;&#x153;morale, discipline, and steadfast devotion to a

given task.â&#x20AC;? The same point may be made rather less crudely by considering the more subtle emergent effects and use values of segregated neighborhoods as foci of socialization, tokens of status and labor market capacity, and seats of socially sanctioned forms of family life (see Scott (1980) for a fuller discussion of these issues). Thus, neighborhoods are instruments of social integration (by binding people together in shared, useful, and collectively dependent spaces); but they simultaneously drive wedges between different segments of the working population (by dividing

Miranda Petrosky

social groups in a residential mosaic). Neighborhood politics, if anything, help to reinforce the latter tendency since they provoke much competition between different intraurban groups. All of this speculation, of course, is extremely provisional, and I need hardly add that my remarks here are subject to revision on further investigation. At the same time, urban social space is further subdivided by many additional lines of social cleavage. Superimposed upon the system of neighborhoods defined by occupational category are other levels of geographical disaggregation defined in terms of such variables as age, lifestyle, religion, and ethnicity (Ley 1983). This observation suggests at once that we must exercise caution in the ways in which we set about investigating the logic of urban social space, and we must certainly not attempt to push the

connections to production space to extremes. On the contrary, there are many specific human activities and geographical patterns in urban social space that either have a highly mediated relation to the production system, or else have no relation to it at all. Better yet, neighborhood formation is often an expression of an intricate articulation of both work-related and nonwork- related forces. Ethnic neighborhoods in the city exemplify this latter point especially well. A brief scrutiny of this problem throws much further light on the whole problem of industrialization and urbanization. One of the most familiar aspects of the growth of large industrial cities in the U.S. over the last century has been their reception of wave after wave of ethnic immigrants drawn in to their expanding employment base (Ward 1971, 1983). The low-wage unskilled labor needs of the large metropolis have continually been

replenished in this way. Wherever, in the world at large, historical and geographical circumstances have created local instabilities (as a result of poverty, famine, political repression, war, and so on) the resulting streams of migrants have time and again been eventually caught up in the functional orbit of industrial urban capitalism (Portes and Walton 1981). In this way, over the years, migrant populations have moved in, and continue to move in, to the sweatshops, factories, and unskilled service industries of urban America. Irish, Italians, Poles, Eastern European Jews, Southern blacks, have all in their turn made up these migration streams (Ley 1983; Ward 1971). And now, most recently of all, Latinos and Asians have started to move en masse into large American cities (Sassen-Koob 1982). A scrutiny of recent census data reveals that much of this latter movement has been directed to the burgeoning high-technology centers of the Sunbelt.

As these populations become, each in turn, embroiled in the daily activity patterns of the city, their ethnicity is socially renegotiated, as it were, on new terms. Typically, these ethnic groups form dense segregated neighborhoods close to those foci of employment where unskilled low-wage jobs abound. Such foci have characteristically been located in old inner city areas, but now with the development of peripheral industrial complexes, they are also increasingly to be found in suburban areas and in newer growth centers, as I have recently demonstrated for the case of Orange County (Scott 1986). These ethnic neighborhoods are then held together as spatial units by reason of the tight social networks (built up around idiosyncrasies of language and culture) that commonly develop within them. In such neighborhoods, immigrants remain (in some degree) socially and politically cut off from the

broader indigenous urban working class (Bodnar 1982; Katznelson 1981). Ethnicity in the American metropolis is thus preeminently a contingent outcome of labor market needs and pressures. These involve the recreation over and over again of pools of cheap and malleable labor (including women and adolescents) suitable for employment in the disintegrated complexes of laborintensive manufacturing and service industries that cluster within the metropolis. Urban ethnicity is at once durable as a general social phenomenon, and yet it is also largely transient in so far as any specific group is concerned. With perhaps the single stubborn exception of blacks, groups with particular subdominant cultural identities have been assimilated over the course of three or four generations into the mainstream of American life (Massey and Mulligan 1984; Rodgers 1981;

Zunz 1981). Thus, the socialization processes characteristic of American urban society have continually eroded the conditions under which cheap exploitable labor at the bottom of the employment ladder can be internally reproduced. The concomitant vacuum has then invariably been filled by new rounds of immigration, new rounds of ethnic neighborhood formation, and new rounds of social and political fragmentation. All of this is a far cry indeed from ecological theories of urban social space with their central emphasis on moral order and cultural solidarity and their abstraction away from basic production and labor market activities. By massing workers together in large communities, urbanization generates some of the preconditions of political mobilization; but, as we have observed, it also always cuts away at this possibility by reinforcing the social fragmentation of capitalist

society and by radically divorcing workplace and homeplace as experiential domains. Perhaps the last great urban-based alliance of workers in the U.S. consisted of the loose coalitions of unionized craft labor forces that flourished in the industrial cities of the North and East in the decades just before and after World War II. As noted earlier, however, industry has in part responded (and continues to respond) to this state of affairs by various combinations of technical change, restructuring, and relocation (Storper 198 1); and where these responses have not been feasible, we see alternative strategies being brought into play: local political accommodations with selected population groups such as workers with seniority (Clark 1986), increased subcontracting activity into more easily manageable labor market niches (Scott 1983b), or in situ substitution of cheap immigrant labor for more expensive nativeborn labor (Scott 1984b, 1984c).

The results of these various developments have been dramatic. On the one hand, many older metropolitan centers give evidence of a deepening social and labor market segmentation characterized by (1) increasing white-collar management and control functions and other office and service activities (2) the movement of immigrant labor into secondary labor market positions in both manufacturing and services, and (3) the steady decline of skilled blue-collar occupations as jobs at that level are restructured, destroyed, and decentralized (Sassen-Koob 1982). On the other hand, new cycles of growth, complex formation, and urbanization are now starting to appear at certain highly selected locations within the world system. The emergent high-technology industrial complexes of the American West and South are a major case in point (Rees 1978; Saxenian 1983; Scott 1986). So

too are the many new growth centers in Europe such as EmiliaRomagna in northeast Italy, the Cambridge region of England, or the developing industrial areas of the South of France (Brusco 1982; Keeble 1984; Planque 1984). And so are the rising metropolitan regions of the newly industrializing countries, as exemplified by places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sao Paulo (Chen 1979; Storper 1984). In all of these cases new rounds of local history (based on revivified growth in the context of the capitallabor relation) are beginning anew. It largely remains to be seen what peculiar articulations of class, community, and locale will eventually crystallize out in each case. The broad lesson of all this is that cities are implicated in the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism in complicated, contradictory, and unpredictable ways; and, in turn, those ways that are given in history produce widely varying versions of the urban process.

Conclusion As noted in the introduction to this paper, the urban discourses of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to create a curiously truncated view of the city, i.e., a view in which the basic everyday world of production and work was subsumed as mere stage scenery to a series of consumptionist phenomena. To be sure, these discourses made available many useful and important insights. If the arguments presented above have any validity, however, the urban theorists of the recent past clearly failed to come to terms with the mainsprings of urbanization in capitalist society. In contrast to these theorists, I claim here that industrialization as a generalized process of economic organization and social integration is the basis of modern urban development. Above all, the intricate ramifications of the social division of labor, the transactional

structure of production, and the dynamics of local labor market formation create a field of forces that pervasively underpins the whole spatial pattern of the metropolis. Of course, we must always keep in mind the principle that humans are the active agents in historical and geographical eventuation, and we must take care always to allow for all the social and political open-endedness that dwells within these processes. I have tried to sketch out above the bald lineaments of a framework for approaching the problem of urbanization in contemporary capitalism. I believe that this framework can prove useful as a means of shaping scientific enquiry. I am also convinced that it brings to the fore a series of practical social questions that will surely over the next few decades increasingly be seen as politically significant. These questions, indeed, are already highly charged in political

terms, no matter whether we are addressing the issue of the changing fortunes of Snowbelt and Sunbelt cities, or the steady expansion of the new international division of labor around a handful of global cities, or the recent resurgence of ethnic immigration into the large American metropolis. In the end, these questions are all of a piece, for they are all derivative from a central set of processes-and a corresponding theoretical problematic-built up around the logic of production, work, and territorial development in capitalist society (Scott and Storper 1986). The geographical agenda referred to in the title of this paper is a way-station to the full realization of this problematic in both theoretical and empirical terms. I see it as part of the broader political effort to construct and reconstruct the critique of capitalism as we accumulate historical experience of its operation on our lives.

Rethinking Class in Industrial Geography Katherine Gibson & Julie Graham

Katherine O’Neill

Miranda Petrosky

“industrial restructuring” is a process of class restructuring; it is one of the mechanisms by which the social structure is re-shaped, social relations changed and the basis for political action broken down or reconstructed (Massey 1983, 74).

ascendancy, whether by virtue of its increased mobility and internationalization, or by virtue of a complex transition in the nature of advanced industrial societies. By contrast, and by extension, workers have experienced declining standards of life and work, a decrease in bargaining leverage and political power, and a general waning of effective militancy.

Unfortunately, recent episodes of class restructuring seem to have been largely a negative experience for the “working class.” In the eyes of many observers, capital has achieved a new

Given the new economic conditions that are widely acknowledged to characterize the 1980s and 1990s, industrial geographers and other analysts often give the restructured working

t has become a matter of consensus in industrial geography that the restructuring of industry involves a simultaneous restructuring of class:

class an unpromising political prognosis. The industries that were bastions of working-class militancy have declined, while at the same time we have seen the rise of high-technology and service industries without the long tradition of solidarity and the unambiguous “working-class” image of traditional industrial jobs. The influx of women into the labor market and the increase in part-time and temporary jobs have created a labor force that is less likely to experience work as the primary basis of identity (Clark et al. 1986, 30). In general, then, it seems that in spite of (and perhaps even because of the rapid proletarianization of women, both the work experience and the consciousness traditionally associated with the “working class” have declined, and with them the possibility of a viable politics of class.

Many recent geographic studies of industrial change directly or indirectly communicate a discouraging picture of the potential for a contemporary class politics. For Soja (1989, 208) in Los Angeles, for example, industrial and urban restructuring have created a regional labor market “more occupationally differentiated and socially segmented than ever before.” The resultant demoralized and “K-marted” labor force experiences greater “social control than [has] hitherto marked the historical geography of capitalism” (Soja 1989, 207, 221). For Storper and Scott (1989, 35), the successful development of “flexible production complexes” has occurred in “places without a prior history of Fordist industrialization, where the relations of production and work could be reconstructed anew.” In many of these places, “neoconservative attitudes about

work and life have remarkably pervasive.

become

For Thrift (1989, 207), who sheds light on the dual processes of class formation and industrial change by examining the “new middle classes” emerging in late twentieth century capitalist societies, “the heroic age of class struggle has been replaced by a more prosaic age of class dealignment.” In each of these cases, the decline of militant class politics is traced to the changing structure of industries and occupations, among other forces. At the same time that it portends the decline of traditional class politics, restructuring has contributed to a realignment of gender and class. McDowell (1991, 417) argues that “the feminization of the labour market is amongst the most far-reaching of the changes of the last two decades.” While men are increasingly subject to

the terms of the feminized labor market, with its proliferation of part-time and temporary jobs, women have become a central component of the restructured labor force. Together they constitute a new working class, one that may have lost its industrial muscle but within which opportunities for solidarity exist across gender lines: In the present era, it seems as if the interests of working class men and women are drawing closer together as both sexes are adversely affected by the reconstruction of large areas of work as “ feminine.” In this latest round in the continuous struggle over the control of women’s labour, the majority of women and men are losing. Capital is the beneficiary (McDowell 1991, 416).

At the moment, however, opportunities for solidarity are overshadowed and perhaps jeopardized by the greatly increased demands on women both in the labor market and in the sphere of reproduction, where social

supports that were the hallmark of “patriarchal capitalism” have been withdrawn (McDowell 1991). For McDowell (1990) and Johnson (1989), the new sexual division of labor associated with restructured capitalist industry has intensified women’s exploitation and reconstituted and reasserted gender

misfortunes of the traditional working class coalesce with images of social and political development “beyond” class, producing a vision of the decline of class politics as a potent social force. It is or view that images of class powerlessness, decline, and

Brianna Kindell

oppression in the workplace and at home. What we find interesting and alarming in the restructuring research program is that it has created, as one of its byproducts, a discourse of working-class decline and disempowerment. This discourse is often associated with intimations of the decreasing social importance and political relevance of class. Narratives tracing the

irrelevance have discursive as well as nondiscursive origins, and it is the former that we wish to address. In particular, we wish to focus on the role of particular conceptions of class in generating the disheartening prognoses for class politics that have emerged from the restructuring research program. In the discussion that follows, we first consider some of the ways in which class is understood in industrial geography and then present an alternative

Marxist conception of class. In each case, we are attentive to the ways in which concepts of class are embedded in visions of society and implicated in conceptions of the political subject. In the latter part of the paper, we explore some ways in

different political insights that may accompany a reconceptualization of class.

Class as Power, Property, Production Relations, and/or Politics: Problems of Social and Personal Identity

Chee Sim

which an alternative theory of class and an associated retheorization of societal and personal “identity” can make visible a politics of class that is largely invisible in restructuring research. As one of the “by-products” of our discussion, we suggest a new dimension to the articulation of gender and class. This is put forward not as a general resolution to the troubles that have plagued this relationship in theory, but as an example of the

Various concepts of class coexist in Marxist industrial geography and in the wider world of Marxism, often within the writings of the same person. Without attempting an exhaustive survey, we can perhaps safely generalize that most Marxists understand the term “class” as referring primarily to a social group. Individuals are members of a class by virtue of some commonality, either structurally or experientially defined.

Within Marxism, three shared attributes and experiences are commonly invoked in defining social groups as classes. One of these is power, with control over the labor process and/or domination in other aspects of social life distinguishing ruling classes from the ruled. Classes may also be distinguished on the basis of property ownership, especially of the means of production. Finally, classes are defined by their relation to exploitation, the question of whether they produce surplus labor or appropriate it. All or several of these dimensions may be embraced in the term “relations of production,” which is the most familiar marker of Marxist conceptions of class (Wolff and Resnick 1986). Very often, two or all three of these dimensions are linked in a composite conception of class. Walker (1985, 169, 170), for example, invokes what he calls the

“classic triad-extraction of surplus, ownership of means of production, and control of the labor process” in characterizing Marx’s “bare bones” definition of class. Massey (1984, 31), in a variation on this theme, sees two of the three dimensions entailing the third. She defines the bourgeoisie as having ownership and possession (the latter involving control of the labor process), while the working class is excluded from both. By virtue of this dual exclusion, the bourgeoisie is able to extract surplus value from the working class. In general, Marxist geographers- including those cited above are dissatisfied with simple conceptions of society structured by two major classes that are constituted by the relations of production. They begin with this conception as a kind of foundation, but they wish to go beyond it to embrace the complex multiplicity

of classes in the historical setting of particular social formations (see Sayer and Walker 1991). Massey, for instance, appropriates and modifies Wright’s (1976) triangular conception of three major classes: the bourgeoisie, the working class, and the petit-bourgeoisie.’ Along the axis between the bourgeoisie and the working class are many intermediate locations, distinguished by degrees of economic ownership and of possession, from managing director to production supervisor to laborer. Along the axis between working class and petit-bourgeoisie are workers with varying degrees of control over the labor process, from self-employed to semi-autonomous worker to laborer. And along the axis between the bourgeoisie and the petit-bourgeoisie are those with greater or less control over the labor of others. The proliferation of intermediate class locations refines and complicates the conception of class.

While this type of elaboration is intended to rectify the oversimplifications of the twoclass model, other formulations attempt to go beyond what is seen as the economism of theorizing class solely in terms of relations of production. Presuming that in order to be a class a group of individuals must achieve a unity other than a shared location in an economic structure, these formulations are concerned with “class formation” as a complex process involving political, cultural, ideological, and other forces (e.g., Bagguley et al. 1990). Most often invoked are political processes, which may raise consciousness and help to transform a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself. Following Laclau (1977) and Thompson (1963), among others, many geographers see classes as social groups constituted as an “effect of struggle,” sometimes in the workplace but often in the arena of the community or the local

Chee Sim

Yet they all live and work together in that community, in business and in leisure, and contribute to the essence of the neighborhood.

East Austin is a community that houses a plethora of different people, with different backgrounds and different ambitions.

Miranda Petrosky

or national state. Geographers, of course, also see place as an important constituent of actual classes (e.g., Walker 1985; Thrift and Williams 1987; Massey 1984), and those involved in localities research have explored the relationship between class politics and the politics of place (e.g., Cox and Mair 1988; Herod 1991). In general, these formulations create images of classes defined initially (or in the last instance) by the economy and comprised of individuals with objective (albeit sometimes ambiguous) locations in the relations of production. But these objective conditions are understood as defining class only in the narrowest sense. A full or complex conception of class takes into account the ways in which groups are formed and the subjective bases of group identification: production relations indicate the sites of class relations in the economic structure,

but those sites do not designate whole classes as integral, empirical groups of men and women. The fact that people occupy similar places in the relations of production does not in itself imply any other empirical level of coherence, still less any kind of necessary political unity about pre-given common interests. Wright talks of class capacities, the social relations within a class which determine how internally coherent it is. All of which means . . . that â&#x20AC;&#x153;whole classesâ&#x20AC;? are rarely actual political subjects . .. (Massey 1984, 43).

From our perspective, these interesting and complex conceptions of class contribute to a number of theoretical and political problems, including difficulties in conceptualizing class transformation and in theorizing individual and group identity in relation to class. If we define class in terms of power over the labor process, ownership of industrial property, and exploitation, how do we understand a situation in which one of these dimensions

changes? When a capitalist industry is nationalized, for example, what are the implications for the production and appropriation of surplus labor in value form (i.e., capitalist exploitation) and for worker control of the labor process? Neither democratic control of the workplace nor the end of capitalist exploitation necessarily or even readily follows from the nationalization of a particular industry or of an entire industrial system. A change in ownership, even a radical one, may not mean a transformation in other dimensions of class. Such a change thus confronts the analyst with a choice between theorizing an ambiguous instance (e.g., neither wholly capitalist nor wholly socialist) or giving one aspect of the composite conception priority as the fundamental constituent of class. Either choice may have profound political consequences (Wolff and Resnick 1986). In the case of the former Soviet Union, for example, those who refused to emphasize

ownership tended to see socialism as something that was yet to be achieved and the existing regime as something to mobilize against. Those, on the other hand, who saw ownership as the principal dimension of class were more likely to support and defend the existing regime. Similar problems arise when we attempt to understand the nature of social groups using a composite definition. If workers who have surplus value extracted from them also control their labor process, are they less authentic members of the working class? What about individuals who are exploited in a capitalist labor process and also own a small business? Are they members of the working class or of the petitbourgeoisie? Below we offer an alternative Marxist conception of class that may help to circumvent such conceptual and political dilemmas.

Our Conception of Class As an alternative to layered and complex ways of defining class as a social grouping, we define class simply as the social process of producing and appropriating surplus labor (more commonly known as exploitation) and the associated process of surplus labor distribution (Resnick and Wolff 1987). By defining class in this “bare bones” fashion, we hope to counteract the tendency to emphasize the social effectivity of property ownership, domination, and consciousness while ignoring exploitation. For a moment, then, we wish to hold exploitation up to the light and to analyze-rather than presume-its relations to power, ownership, consciousness, and other social dimensions. Our goal is to create a knowledge of exploitation as a social process, continuing and extending the project initiated by Marx. In Capital, Marx explored the specifically capitalist form of the class

process, focusing in Volume I on the conditions of existence of capitalist exploitation (the production and appropriation of surplus labor in value form) and in Volume III on distributions of surplus value to various social uses and destinations. This dual focus enabled him to theorize some of the ways in which capitalist exploitation was both constituted by, and constitutive of, other aspects of society. Marx’s work created an awareness, which had not previously existed, that processes of production frequently involve the performance and appropriation of surplus labor. Individuals produce more than is necessary to sustain them at a socially adequate level, and their “surplus labor” is appropriated, in a variety of forms, by other individuals and groups (sometimes including the performer of surplus labor her or himself. This process of producing and appropriating surplus labor (exploitation) is an integral part

of social experience but one whose effects are still largely unexplored and unopposed. By creating a knowledge of exploitation as a social process, we hope to contribute to a greater awareness of class and to a new politics of class transformation. Though concepts of class and exploitation have tended to be associated with capitalism, Marx and Marxists have identified a variety of noncapitalist forms of exploitation, including ancient, primitive communist, feudal, slave, and communal class processes. In addition, Resnick and Wolff (1987) have distinguished the “fundamental class process” of exploitation from an allocative moment that they call the “subsumed class process” of surplus labor distribution. This proliferation and expansion of class categories facilitates the analysis of different forms and different moments of the class process, making possible the development of a complex knowledge of class.

For us, creating a knowledge of class implies not only a concern about exploitation but a commitment to an antiessentialist theoretical position (Graham 1990; 1992a). We do not wish to contribute to another Marxist knowledge that justifies itself by claiming that class is more fundamental or influential than other aspects of society and that, therefore, a knowledge of class has more explanatory power than other knowledges. Historically, such attempts to marginalize or demote other social processes and perspectives have created irresolvable conflicts and antagonisms between Marxism and other discourses of social transformation. At the same time, however, we do not wish to subordinate or subsume class to other social aspects such as power or property or consciousness or agency or struggle. We therefore theorize class as a process without an essence. Like other

social processes and like societies themselves, class processes have no core or condition of existence that governs their development more closely than any other and to which they can be ultimately reduced. This is not to say that class processes are not affected by all the other dimensions of existence. On the contrary, we understand class processes as overdetermined, or constituted, by every other aspect of social life (Graham 1990). By this we mean that we “think” the existence of class and of particular class processes by initially presuming overdetermination rather than by positing a necessary or privileged association between exploitation and some subset of social processes (such as control over the labor process or consciousness or struggle or ownership, to rename the familiar few). In this initial presumption, class is constituted at the intersection of all social

dimensions or processes-economic, political, cultural, natural-and class processes themselves participate in constituting these other dimensions of social life. This mutual constitution of social processes generates an unending sequence of surprises and contradictions. As the term “process” is meant to convey, class and other aspects of society exist in change and are continually transformed in novel and contradictory directions. Theorizing class as an overdetermined social process rather than as a social grouping has certain implications for the nature and purpose of class analysis. Rather than involving the categorization of individuals and the disaggregation of societies into social groups, an overdeterminist class analysis examines some of the ways in which class processes participate in constituting and, in turn, are constituted by other social and natural processes. Class

analysis theorizes society from the “entry point” of class, an entry point being a particular starting place for the analysis of infinitely complex and therefore only partially comprehensible social formations (Graham 1990; Resnick and Wolff 1987). Just as class is only one among an infinity of social processes, class analysis is only one among an infinite number of ways of analyzing society. It produces a distinctive kind of knowledge, an anti-essentialist Marxist knowledge that focuses on but does not accord explanatory privilege to the process of class. The process of producing an overdeterminist knowledge is, however, itself contradictory. In a sense, the actual analysis of a particular class process involves the violation of the initial presumption of overdetermination. Examining, for example, the role of property law or of heterosexuality as a condition of existence of capitalist

exploitation, we necessarily come into conflict with the presumption of ceaseless change and transformation of each of these social aspects. We posit for the moment processes that exist outside overdetermination (i.e., not in change and not in contradiction) so that we can consider the ways in which they interact: Discourse is an attempt to freeze, to handle the ceaseless revolutions implicit in the concept of overdetermination, to do so by denying them in the fashioning of meaning... Discourse is an attempt to proceed as if-as if the objects it treats were secured, self-identical, reliable (DeMartino 1992, 339-40).

Overdeterminist discourses cannot “reflect” overdetermination any more than essentialist discourses can correspond to the true state or essential nature of the world. But a form of social explanation that starts from the initial presumption of overdetermination will differ

from one that starts from the initial presumption of essence (i.e., from the presumption that a complex reality can be analyzed to reveal a simpler reality, an essential attribute, or a set of fundamental causes at its core). An overdeterminist discourse produces necessity (in the form of a determinate relationship between

Like class defined as a social grouping, class defined as a social process is associated with particular ways of theorizing both society and political subjectivity. Through their distinctive treatments of these theoretical objects, the two definitions of class yield very different implications

Brianna Kindell

events or objects) as an effect of analysis rather than as an initial presumption (DeMartino 1992). In this way, causation/determination becomes a specific discursive effect rather than a pre-analytical ascription of ontological privilege.

Society and Self: Alternative Conceptions of Social and Individual Identity and Their Implications for Class Politics

for the nature and viability of class politics. The Marxist conception of a class as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;conscious coming together of those who are similarly situated by production relationsâ&#x20AC;? (McIntyre 1991, 153) has historically been associated with images of industrial society as a centered singularity. Society is typically theorized as a homogeneously or hegemonically capitalist formation

centered on an industrial economy, with class theorized as a social relation originating in that center. Perhaps because of its association with structural and systemic images of the social totality, “capitalism” in these conceptions tends to fill the

capitalist class processes are often theorized as capitalist formations, domestic labor is seen as capitalist reproduction, and the state and other institutions are implicated in capitalist regulation. Such unitary and centered conceptions of capitalist society

Katherine Hunt

available social space, incorporating the noneconomic dimensions of social life such as culture and politics as well as noncapitalist economic realms such as household production. Whether they are integrated with the economy through structural articulations, systemic logics, or hegemonic practices, these other aspects of society are colonized to some extent by the capitalist sector. Thus, social formations incorporating

have fostered a conception of class as a (binary or expanded) structure founded in the relations of capitalist production. They have also given class struggle a leading role in social change. In a social “system” or coherent formation centered on an industrial capitalist economy, projects of class transformation are privileged sites of social transformation. The “working class” becomes the “subject” of history, the collective agent of fundamental change.

Because transformative efforts are seen as directed at systemic or hegemonic objects (e.g., capitalist societies in their entirety), class transformation is often portrayed as a difficult, indeed, nearly impossible task. The politics of class transformation is enabled only at particular historical moments-usually those in which structural crisis (weakness) and working-class mobilization (strength) coincide. Given the heroic role that it is asked to play, class struggle is often viewed as a military confrontation in which an army of workers is strategically deployed (Metcalfe 1991). Such a concerted and coordinated effort is required to confront the hegemonic unity of a coherent capitalist formation. Social theorists have challenged images of social singularity (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) and, more particularly, the notion of a homogeneously capitalist society centered on

an industrial economy, with its privileged role for workingclass actors, its military metaphors of struggle, and its holistic conceptions of social transformation (of capitalist society into something else). Yet this vision, or elements of it, retains a degree of influence in industrial geography and other domains of political economic thought (Graham 1992b). We are concerned explicitly to divorce class from structural or hegemonic conceptions of capitalist society because of the ways in which such conceptions disable a politics of local and continual class transformation and obscure social diversity in the dimension of class. Concepts like the “mode of production” and the French regulationists’ “model of development” tend, by virtue of their structural integrity, to confer unity and stability on otherwise amorphous social formations

(Graham 1992b). At the same time, by virtue of the centrality they accord to production, they identify the politics of class as the “structural politics” of the singular social. In the familiar script for class politics, the unified and coherent society can be ameliorated and reformed through everyday political activities but can only be transformed through systemic upheaval (e.g., the breakdown of a social logic or structure in the context of a coordinated transformative struggle). In order to liberate class politics from these restrictive yet privileged scenarios, we envision society as a complex disunity in which class may take multiple and diverse forms. Primitive communist, ancient, slave, feudal, capitalist, and communal class processes can, and often do, coexist. In this conception, then, an “advanced” industrial social formation is not a coherent and

stable unity centered on capitalist class relations. It is a decentered, fragmented, and complexly structured totality in which class and other processes are unevenly developed and diverse. An industrialized social formation is the site of a rich proliferation of class processes and a wide variety of class positionsproducer, appropriator, distributor, or receiver of surplus labor in a variety of forms. Class processes are not restricted to the industrial or even the capitalist economy. They occur wherever surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed. The household is thus a major site of class processes, sometimes incorporating a feudal class process in which a woman produces surplus labor in the form of use values to be appropriated by a man (Fraad et al. 1989). The state may also be a site of exploitation, as may educational institutions, self-employment, labor unions, and

to change the way in which surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed.

Classing Sue and Bill

Brianna Kindell

other sites of production that are not generally associated with class. Because class is a process and exists in change, the class “structure” constituted by the totality of these positions and sites continually changes. Projects of class transformation are therefore always possible and do not necessarily involve social upheaval and hegemonic transition. Class struggles do not take place between groups of people whose identities are constituted by the objective reality and subjective consciousness of a particular location in a social structure. Rather, they take place whenever there is an attempt

When the systemic fantasy of a homogeneous capitalist social formation is replaced with a decentered and complex heterogeneity, class like other processes becomes visible as heterogeneous and unevenly developed. Ancient, communal, capitalist, slave, feudal, and other class processes-obscured by the “regulatory fiction” of a singular and systemic social identity-can be acknowledged and theorized as constituents of contemporary social formations. Like the “identity” of social formations, individual class identity can be understood as decentered and diverse. Individuals may participate in multiple class processes, holding multiple class positions at one moment and over time. To exemplify the notion of multiple and fractured class

identity at both the personal and social levels, we recount below the stories of an Australian nurse, Sue, and her coal miner husband, Bill. Sue and Bill moved to rural Queensland several years ago to take advantage of jobs opening up (for men) in the modern â&#x20AC;&#x153;open cutâ&#x20AC;? mines. Bill is currently a coal hauler, a job for which he has no formal qualifications. He is defined by the company as a wages worker (i.e., he plays no supervisory role). With overtime and weekend work, he earns about $65,000 per annum, well above what truck drivers in other industries earn and on a par with senior university professors. At his mine, a profit-sharing scheme has been introduced to encourage productivity gains and discourage industrial disruption, so Bill receives an additional payment to complement his wage. Bill has saved part of his income and invested his savings. He owns

Rheo Martinez

a block of rental units on the coast and a portfolio of shares in leading companies operating in Australia (some productive, others financial). As a country boy by origin, Bill is a strong supporter of the conservative National Party, but as a coal miner he is required to belong to the United Mineworkers Federation of Australia. This industrial union is one of the more militant worker organizations in the Australian economy. In his time off from work, Bill runs his own small business shooting pigs and arranging for them to be

frozen and shipped to market. His role at home is very traditional. The only domestic work Bill regularly performs is keeping the yard tidy, putting out the garbage, and driving the kids to sporting activities on the weekends. Bill keeps tabs on his income and allocates a portion to Sue for housekeeping purposes. If we understand class as a social group, Bill’s class location is difficult to ascertain. He is a wage laborer from whom surplus value is derived. He has little control over his own labor process. Yet he owns shares in productive capitalist enterprises and receives a small share in the profits made by the mining company that employs him. He is a member of two political organizations with quite antithetical philosophies and is active in both. If we were to give priority to his role in the relations of production at the mine, we might be tempted to see his actions

in the Mineworkers Federation as being in his “true” class interests, explaining his participation in the National Party as a product of a “false consciousness.” But if we were to give priority to his relations of production as a pig shooter, the opposite might apply. Bill’s membership in the “working class” can only be secured by emphasizing some of the relations in which he participates and deemphasizing others: that is, by ranking the components of his experience in a hierarchy of importance, or by reducing his total social experience to a set of fundamental or essential elements. Sue’s story is even more difficult to tell in traditional class terms. Sue is a trained nursing sister who had to give up paid employment when she moved with Bill to the remote mining town. She is now a full-time carer for her husband and three children. She shops for provisions, produces

food, clean clothes, and an orderly and comfortable environment, and is the primary manager of family relationships with friends and service providers. In fact, Sue is the classic multiskilled flexible worker. Her hours of work are usually longer than Bill’s. When Bill is on day shift, she rises to cook his breakfast at 5 A.M., and when he is on afternoon shift, she irons and does other chores in the evening while waiting for him to come home at midnight. When Bill goes pig shooting on weekends, Sue takes over his parenting role, driving children to sporting events and supporting their leisure activities. Bill and Sue have a joint bank account, and they jointly own the block of rental units on the coast. At the same time, Sue is dependent on her relationship to Bill for access to the company-owned house in which they live and for he means of her domestic production. She is not a member of a political party

but votes for the National Party along with her husband. If we emphasize Bill’s role in the construction of Sue’s class identity, she is a member of the working class by virtue of her marriage, her reproductive role, and her allegiance to the wage-earner social set. Before she moved to the mining town, however, she was employed as a nurse in a supervisory position that distinguished her from those with no control over their own labor or that of others. Given that one of these “class locations” belongs to her husband and one to her past, class as a social category would not seem directly relevant to an understanding of Sue. From a class process perspective, however, it is not difficult to ascertain Sue’s class position, nor is it necessary to ignore or demote any of Bill’s experiences in order to “place” him

with respect to class. Sue is engaged in a fundamental feudal class process of surplus labor production and appropriation in her role as wife and mother in the household (Fraad et al. 1989; Gibson 1992). Her labor is appropriated by Bill in return for the provision of shelter and access to the commodified means of domestic production. A host of familial and companionship practices also provides conditions

Chee Sim

of existence of Sue’s exploitation, as does the widely held view that Bill “brings in the money” and therefore deserves to be served and sustained (Gibson 1992). Sue’s lack of public political involvement is influenced by her participation in this class process as well as by a whole set of class and nonclass processes, including the social construction of an “emphasized” femininity and motherliness in the unique culture of the mining town. From this perspective, then, Sue is involved in a class process that is one constituent of her complex subjectivity and that is overdetermined by her role in the traditional gender division of labor. When her experience is theorized in this way, her occasional struggles with Bill over his performance of household chores can be seen as struggles over the degree of exploitation she is willing to accept. In other words, Sue is not unconcerned with class,

nor is she apolitical as her husband and his union mates think. Rather, she is intermittently involved in a nonsolidary politics of class.

While a class process approach makes visible the role of class in constituting Sueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subjectivity, it allows us to theorize Billâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s class identity without giving priority to one aspect of his activity and experience. Bill performs surplus labor that is appropriated from him in the fundamental capitalist class process of surplus value production and appropriation. He also receives a distributed profit share as well as dividend checks, thus participating in a subsumed capitalist class process of surplus value distribution. As a self-employed pig shooter and marketer, he is involved in an ancient class process in which he produces and appropriates his own surplus labor. In the home, he appropriates the unpaid labor

of his wife in a feudal class process that is a familiar constituent of the traditional household. The political processes in which Bill participates are influenced by his participation in all these different class processes as well as by a whole set of nonclass processes, like the social construction of hegemonic masculinity and the ideology of solidarity among the working class.

Miranda Petrosky

Like the social formation of which he is a part, Bill is a contradictory and fragmented social site, the intersection of many different class processes. No one of these processes defines his true identity or his “class” interests, though each participates in doing so, along with many other class and nonclass processes. To search for Bill’s true and singular class identity in this complex and shifting intersection would involve a quest for the type of “regulatory fiction” that Butler (1990, 339) sees gender coherence to be. Both rely on a conception of identity as singular, homogeneous, and fixed rather than multiple, fragmented, and shifting. The involvement of Sue and Bill in a variety of different class processes has changed over time and overlapped in different ways. In their adult lives, however, they have never not been engaged in class processes. In fact, these

involvements have participated in constituting them as acting and powerful subjects in many political arenas, both publicly (at the minesite, or the hospital, or the school) and privately (in the home and family). Because their relationships to class have not constituted them as members of a particular social group (e.g., the “working class”), a class analysis of Sue and Bill does not threaten to subsume or subordinate their identities as gendered or ethnic or otherwise differentiated subjects, nor does it necessitate positing a unified class identity. This decentered approach to identity and class has a variety of implications for understanding class politics, some of which we explore below as we examine several dimensions of women’s involvement in the politics of class.

Women and Class

Largely because class

debates have concentrated upon the definition and nature of capitalist classes, women have often found themselves in a problematic position vis-a’-vis class. Those women not in the capitalist labor force have assumed class positions only through their relations to others (usually husbands or fathers) (Pratt and Hanson 1991, 245). The wives of workers, for example, are often considered vicarious members of the “working class.” Their intermittent, muted, or absent class militancy has been attributed to their socialization as unassertive “conservators” or as denizens of a private sphere with “backward” political and social concerns. As workers in the domestic economy, women have often been theorized as engaged in a nonclass process of “reproducing” the capitalist workforce-feeding, clothing, nurturing, cleaningperforming a socially necessary (if

hugely undervalued) function: the home is a key site of the day-today and generational reproduction of labour-power (which) is oriented towards fulfilling the needs of capitalist production (MacKenzie and Rose 1983, 159).

Many authors have characterized the home as a separate “sphere” of reproduction and consumption. Here domestic labor (largely performed by women) organizes the consumption of the commodities produced in a capitalist labor process. Women’s work in service to capitalism is performed under the governance of patriarchy, a system of rules and practices of gender domination. Certain feminists have attempted to redress the secondary status of the reproductive or patriarchal sphere, which seems ordained to serve capitalism just as many women serve men. Arguing against the tendency to subordinate patriarchal oppression

to class exploitation, these theorists have generated a “dual systems” approach that takes a variety of forms. In one form of dual systems theory, patriarchy is transported into the sphere of class. Capitalism and patriarchy are viewed as two systems of social relations that interact in every domain of social life; gender relations are thus “part of the ‘relations of production”’ (Connell 1987, 45), and patriarchy cannot be relegated to a separate sphere. In a second form of dual systems theory, class is transported into the sphere of patriarchy. The household is theorized as the locus of a patriarchal or domestic “mode of production” (e.g., Folbre 1987; Delphy 1984) that functions according to a logic distinct from that of the capitalist mode of production but that interacts with the latter to constitute the social whole. Most of these conceptualizations have

foundered on the difficulty of theorizing patriarchy as a system or social structure (Connell 1987, 46). If patriarchy is a mode of production, what are its laws of motion and how do they interact with those of capitalism? Such questions have proved quite intractable. Theorists have also been concerned about what may appear as an attempt to colonize the household as a domain of class. Given the history of feminist struggles against the totalizing ambitions of traditional Marxism, feminist analysts have tended to theorize patriarchy and gender domination as socially pervasive while giving class a more restricted domain (Connell 1987). It seems to us, however, that excluding class from the household has the effect of obscuring the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor (and the struggles over these class processes) that go

on in that particular social site. We would therefore like to renegotiate the relationship between class and the household, divorcing household class processes from the idea of social “systems” or structures. Our intention is not to displace or replace patriarchy and gender relations as categories for household analysis. Instead, we wish to add the dimension of exploitation or class. In our understanding, industrial social formations are the sites not just of capitalist class processes but of non-capitalist class processes as well. The household, then, is involved not only in capitalist reproduction but also in the reproduction of noncapitalist class processes such as the ancient class process of self-employment and “self-exploitation” (Gabriel 1990). More importantly for our purposes, it is an autonomous site of production in its own right in which various class processes are

enacted. And it has become an important zone of class struggle over the past 25 years. In industrial social formations, the household has traditionally been a locus of what we have called a feudal class process (Gibson 1992; Fraad et al. 1989), in which a woman produces surplus labor in the form of use values that considerably exceed what she would produce if she were living by herself. When her mate eats his meals, showers in a clean bathroom, and puts on ironed clothes, he is appropriating her labor in use-value form (this form of appropriation is what the term “feudal” designates). Throughout the course of industrial history, this feudal exploitation has seemed fair and appropriate because the man generally worked outside the household to procure the cash income that was viewed as the principal condition of existence of household maintenance. Even

The east side of Austin is home to a variety of people, young and old, all different in occupations and interests.

Katherine Hunt

Alana Mandel

Together they make the neighborhood what it is- and it defines them in turn.

when it did seem unfair (in cases, for example, where the woman worked outside the home or where it was recognized that women worked longer hours and that they had no vacations and were not allowed to retire), the lack of an alternative for women often kept them from struggling to transform their class positions. Familiar cultural presumptions about the natural or divine origins of women’s household role had a similar effect. During the past 25 years, however, women’s household exploitation has increasingly been seen as unfair and as something to be struggled over. This change has to do with many things, including the second wave of feminism and heightened feelings of equality and commensurability brought about by women’s greatly increased participation in waged work (not to mention the increased pressures on their time). For a variety of

reasons, then, some women now feel entitled to an equal domestic load and to a democratic decisionmaking process about the allocation of the various types of domestic work. In many households, the issue of household-based exploitation is on the table and the feudal class process is in crisis (Hochschild 1989; Fraad et al. 1989). Many traditional households have broken up and their members have reestablished themselves in ancient class processes, as “self-exploiting” performers and appropriators of domestic surplus labor. According to a study by Burden and Googins (1987), establishing an ancient household is definitely a way for some women to achieve a reduced work week. Married mothers in this study spent 85 hours per week on job and family responsibilities, while single mothers spent 75 hours per week on these tasks. Other households have instituted

communal class processes whereby all members perform surplus labor and jointly appropriate it, democratically allocating both work and the fruits of work (Kimball 1983). In these households, which are less likely to be structured around the priority of the maleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s career, struggles take place over how to challenge traditional gender roles that undermine communalism. Men, for example, may confront the loss of public and private status associated with being the higher wage earner as they opt for more flexible working hours that allow an equal role in child care and domestic labor. Women confront the mixed emotions associated with relinquishing the role of primary care-giver to children and quality controller over household cleanliness and atmosphere. The communal household is not without class struggle; indeed, the negotiation of work and space, both physical and personal,

is a constant of life. Clearly the historical difficulties of the feudal household and more recent problems with establishing communal households have contributed to the accelerated growth of ancient households where class and gender conflicts are resolved through the establishment of solo householding. In these households, there is no gender division of labor to negotiate and the adult householder is in sole charge of the production, appropriation, and distribution of her/his own surplus labor. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Restructuredâ&#x20AC;? households are often seen as the outcome (or casualties) of struggles against patriarchy and gender oppression. We argue that they are also the outcome of class struggles. Though they have not articulated their goals in the language of class, many women have become conscious of their exploitation in the feudal household as well as of their gender oppression in the

same domain (Hochschild 1989). Gendered class struggles over the performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor have contributed to the growth of households where communal class processes are in place (Kimball 1983) and to the more rapid rise of ancient households where class conflicts have been resolved through gender separation. While this new perspective on household restructuring will not create a better knowledge of the household in any general or absolute sense, it helps us to articulate and promote a communal ideal. It also helps to dispel the traditional vision of women as insensitive to or unconcerned about matters of class. Women’s “problems” vis-A-vis class are shown to be a discursive effect of a hegemonic narrative of capitalist development that excludes or peripheralizes a major arena of women’s class experience. Once that hegemonic narrative

is deconstructed and displaced, women seem no less prone to, or militant about, class struggles than men. It is just that their class struggles often take place in the household rather than the industrial site. According to our analysis, then, the restructuring and feminization of the workforce may not mean the decline of class politics but its (partial) relocation. It may also involve new interactions between class processes in the household and in the industrial sector. Below, we reexamine a familiar and much-discussed body of research on women industrial workers in Third World settings in order to illustrate the complex and contradictory intersection between capitalist and feudal exploitation.

Women Industrial Workers in the Third World Perhaps nowhere in the restructuring debate has the

narrative of capitalist development taken a more mechanistic turn than in the discussion of the incorporation of women into the capitalist industrial workforce of the Third World. Many stories of the globalization of production and new international division of labor highlight the employment of cheap, docile, and compliant female wage labor in Asia and Latin America by industrial corporations eager to escape the expensive, organized, and predominantly male labor forces of the industrial capitalist world (Armstrong and McGee 1985; Frodbel et al. 1980). In the process of incorporating women into the working class of late capitalism, existing structures and ideologies of patriarchy operate to subordinate women to a new logic, that of capital accumulation.

center stage into the limelight of capitalist development. Their families, cultures, and governments all serve the cause of capital accumulation, constituting them as subjects who can be voraciously and unproblematically exploited. Not surprisingly, feminists have often refused to accept the tragic inevitability of this narrative. Recent feminist research has emphasized the dynamic and contested interaction of capitalist factory employment, households, the state, and â&#x20AC;&#x153;Third World women, supplanting the mechanistic narrative of womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subsumption to the logic of capital accumulation with multiple stories of contestation, complexity, and change (Elson and Pearson 1981; Pearson 1986; Ong 1987; Kondo 1990; Lim 1990; Cameron 1991).

In this story, Third World women make a dramatic appearance, plucked suddenly from the wings and thrust

Taken together, these stories highlight the differences among patriarchal cultures and among women in their experiences

Alana Mandel

of industrial capitalist employment, putting forward a vision of the dynamic and contradictory interactions between patriarchy and capitalism. They also bring to light women’s various strategies of resistance to patriarchal oppression and to capitalist exploitation. Appropriating some of these studies as sources, we would like to retell these women’s stories from the entry point of class, focusing on the complex interactions between class processes in the household and those in the industrial capitalist place of work. Participation of women in the fundamental capitalist class process of surplus value production and appropriation in global production sites has interacted in a variety of ways with their participation

in household-based class processes. For some women, involvement in capitalist exploitation has freed them from aspects of the exploitation associated with their class position in the household and has allowed them a position from which to struggle with and redefine traditional gender roles. Strauch (1984) writes, for example, of the abandonment by women factory workers from rural Chinese families in Malaysia and Hong Kong of the traditional patriarchal custom of living with their husbands’ families and their success in establishing independent households or moving conjugal families back to their childhood villages or homes. Through migration to urban employment, then, these women began a process that unsettled traditional class practices in which their surplus labor was destined to be appropriated by their husbands’ families. Under their new circumstances, they were expected to contribute labor to their natal

families if proximity allowed, but the degree of exploitation associated with these new transfers of laborthough not explicitly assessed by the researcher-was apparently much less than that experienced by the traditional daughter-inlaw, both because the transfer of surplus labor was not enforced by longstanding tradition and because of other householding options available to the women themselves. At the same time, the new possibility that daughters might stay home after marriage or might remit portions of their wages from afar has altered their subsumed class position in their family of birth, redirecting some of the surplus labor produced through the domestic and agricultural work of their parents away from sons and toward daughters. Daughters now stand a better chance of good nutrition and other forms of physical care as well as possibilities for education and training (Strauch

Brianna Kindell

1984, 74). In addition to the changed insertion of women into the traditional household, the emergence of factory employment has been associated with the rise of non-traditional class processes in certain households. Women are now often the only income earners in their households and may live on their own as single women or as single mothers whose husbands have abandoned the family or migrated in search of work (Cameron 1991; Heyzer 1989). With no male head of household present to appropriate their surplus labor, these women are engaged in the ancient class process of producing, appropriating, and distributing their own surplus labor. Their example, while still relatively

uncommon, may encourage other women to participate in household struggles for class transformation, leaving their husbands’ families or even their husbands to establish new households along ancient class lines. Communal households in which household members jointly produce and appropriate their surplus labor also may be emerging as one of the consequences of factory employment options for Third World women. Whereas the state is often theorized as promoting capital accumulation by “liberating women’s labour to capital” (Pearson 1986, 93 n.2), it is less often seen as overdetermining a class transition in the household. In Singapore, however, where there was a shortage of labor, women’s labor was seen as crucial for an exportoriented development strategy. As industrialization has progressed, the state has encouraged men to

play a greater role in child care and housework in order to make it possible for more women to work outside the home (Phongpaichit 1988). The Singaporean state can thus be seen not only as facilitating the extension of capitalist class processes but as fostering the development of communal class processes as well. Even in cases where the class nature of the traditional household is unchanged, women’s exploitation at home may stand in contradictory relation to their exploitation in the factory. Rather than merely constituting a woman as less militant and more exploitable in the capitalist workplace, the woman’s double day may also be a condition of her activism. In a certain Thai factory, for example, the women were not able to take advantage of management invitations to socialize after work. They developed a view of these social events as a “management

ploy” and were much less likely to be co-opted by management than were their male co-workers (Porpora et al. 1989). Over time, their suspicions of management developed into a more organized and ultimately successful struggle for improved working conditions. Ironically, then, for the married women at this factory, successfully changing their conditions of capitalist exploitation was an overdetermined and contradictory effect of their continued exploitation in a feudal class process at home (Cameron 1991, 22). As these brief examples illustrate, incorporation into the capitalist workforce has created, for many Third World women, a more complex social formation in which the contradictory interactions of different class processes have opened new points of intervention for progressive change. These women’s class experience is not simply one of subsumption to a

hegemonic capitalism. It is one of multiple class processes in the homes, in the fields, in the factories, and also in the marketplaces of developing countries. All of these social locations are sites of potential class transformation, and all of their conditions of existence are points of intervention in the processes of class.

Conclusion The notion of the “working class” as the collective subject of history can be seen as the effect of Marxist and nonMarxist discourses about the principal and defining role of industrial capitalism in structuring developed western social formations. These discourses of “capitalist development” have fostered a conception of society as structured by two major classes defined objectively by capitalist relations of production and subjectively by the political and cultural experience of industrial development.

The discourse of class that has depicted class as the central social relation of contemporary societies is now contributing to its marginalization. Critics of Marxism proclaim the death of class, while Marxist theorists of contemporary capitalism proclaim working-class demobilization (see, for example, Soja 1989, 219). From our perspective, what has died or been demobilized is the fiction of the working class and its mission that was produced as part of a hegemonic conception of industrial capitalist development. As this conception has been deconstructed by criticism and by other historical processes (Graham 1991; 1992b) and as multiple social “centers” and contending forces have seized the historical stage, the working class has been peripheralized and demoted. Discursive moves to displace the economic essence of society have displaced as well its agents of transformation. Now the militaristic image of a massive

collectivity of workers all defined by a similar relation to industrial capital is part of a bygone social conception and a bygone politics of change (Gibson 1991, 78-79). Despite the waning theoretical and political fortunes of the “working class,” class itself is still a present and pervasive reality. Monolithic images of the “working class” associated with craft unionism and Fordist industries may no longer be recognized by social theorists or those who labor. They may not work to mobilize resistance and impulses toward social transformation or play a leading role on the stage of social theory. But class is not thereby diminished as a process that overdetermines social development and political change. Instead, the role of class as a social process is recast in different social and theoretical settings, ones in which new political opportunities may emerge.

For us, the question today is not whether class is a concept with continuing relevance, for processes of surplus labor production, appropriation, and distribution are still, and will always be, part of social existence. Our question is: how do our research and practice become more involved in processes of progressive class transformation? One step forward for us has been to theorize class as an overdetermined social process. Looking at social experience from the entry point of class, we can theorize the (infinite and contradictory) causes and consequences of different class processes in a wide variety of social sites. We can examine class processes as they contribute to the constitution of political subjects, asking how participation in one or

many processes of surplus labor pr o duc t ion /appr opr i at ion / distribution may add dimensions to the decentered and multiple selves that are always in some ways political (powerful) subjects (Kondo 1990). Our purpose here is not to create a “better” form of knowledge or one that will lead to a “better” politics of change. Rather, we are interested in producing a class knowledge that is one among many forms of knowledge and not a privileged instrument of social transformation. Just as geographers have argued that “geography matters” without trying to give priority to the geographic constituents of social life, we argue that class matters and that a new knowledge of class may contribute to a revitalized politics of class transformation.

Relocating Gentrification

Lo誰c Wacquant

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om Slater’s provocative article on ‘The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research’ is a timely wakeup call for scholars of class, space, and politics in the city. It points to a surprising twist and troublesome trend in recent studies of gentrification, whereby the takeover of workingclass districts by middle and upper class residents and activities is increasingly presented wholesale as a collective good if not boon. By focusing narrowly on the practices and aspirations of the gentrifiers through rose-tinted conceptual glasses, to the near-complete neglect of the fate of the occupants

Heather White

pushed aside and out by urban redevelopment, this scholarship parrots the reigning business and government rhetoric that equates the revamping of the neoliberal metropolis as the coming of a social eden of diversity, energy and opportunity. But Slater’s diagnosis of the facets and causes of what might be termed the gentriﬁcation of gentriﬁcation research after the close of the Fordist-Keynesian era does not go deep enough and, as a result, his plea for ‘reclaiming the term from those who have sugarcoated what was not so long ago “a dirty word” ’ (Slater, 2006: 737) risks falling short of its aim

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on both the scientific and the policy fronts. The shift from the acidic denunciation to the glib celebration of gentrification, the elision of the displacement of the established residents of the inner city of lower socioeconomic standing, the bland focus on ‘social mixing’ and euphemistic invocation on ‘residentialization’ are not isolated developments peculiar to the study of neighborhood upgrading. They partake of a broader pattern of invisibility of the working class in the public sphere and social inquiry over the past two decades. This literal and figurative effacing of the proletariat in the city is reinforced by the growing heteronomy of urban research, as the latter becomes ever more tightly tethered to the concerns and outlook of city rulers, and correspondingly unmoored from self-defined and self- propelled theoretical agendas. And both

tendencies in turn reveal, confirm and abet the shifting role of the state from provider of social support for lower-income populations to supplier of business services and amenities for middleand upper-class urbanites — chief among them the cleansing of the built environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment so as to make the city over into a pleasant site of and for bourgeois consumption (Wacquant, 2008). I take each of these issues in turn, with a view toward sharpening as well as amplifying Slater’s exhortation to critical reflexivity in gentrification research.

The Vanishing of the Working Class in the Public Sphere and Urban Research Any rigorous study of gentriﬁcation would seem ex deﬁnitionis to hold together the

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trajectories of the lower-class old timers and of the higherclass newcomers battling over the fate of the revamped district, since this class nexus forms the very heart of the phenomenon (Glass, 1964; Lees et al., 2007). Yet Slater reports that the social and spatial dislocations caused by neighborhood upgrading have virtually vanished from recent research, and he argues that ‘the reason why displacement itself got displaced ‘is essentially methodological’ (Slater, 2006: 748). But the physical absence of those dislodged from the neighborhood hardly explains why researchers do not widen their observational scope to capture their peregrinations through urban space or resort to different methodologies (such as tracking a panel of former inhabitants or drawing out extended life stories) to document the housing turbulence brewing at the bottom of the urban structure. Certainly, these

‘methodological’ obstacles did not stump the founding generation of gentrification scholars! The empirical evaporation of workingclass exiles from the literature on renovated urban quarters is not the result of defective research techniques: it mirrors the objective fragmentation of the industrial working class, in the historic incarnation in which we have known it during the long century (1870–1970) of industrialism climaxing with the conjoint maturation of the Fordist production regime and the Keynesian state, and its correlative marginalization in the political and intellectual fields. With deindustrialization and the shift to deregulated service employment, the spread of mass unemployment and work instability, and the universalization of schooling as means of access to even unskilled jobs, the unified and compact

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working class that occupied the front stage of history until the 1970s has shrivelled, splintered and dispersed. Together with lowlevel service employees, workers continue to compose a majority of the active population of most advanced countries (Marchand and Thélot, 1997; Wright, 1997),

scientiﬁc debate, as unions declined and left parties moved rightward. The educated middle classes and the knights of the ﬁnancial, cultural and technological sectors that drive neoliberal capitalism now occupy both the cultural and the electoral center; their views and aspirations dominate public

Brianna Kindell

but their morphology has been remade by deepening divisions of skills, employment status and reproduction strategy, as well as by spatial scattering. Many workingclass households have left public housing estates, entered tract housing, or migrated outside the city in search of cheaper lodging. More crucially, these morphological changes have been accompanied by collective demoralization and symbolic devaluation in civic and

discussion and orientate the actions of politicians and government alike. There are workers, to be sure, but the working class as such is unfashionable, inscrutable, unnoticed if not invisible. Instead of tracking the mechanisms and modalities of class decomposition and its spatial correlates with the zest with which they tackled class consolidation and conﬂict in an earlier era, to

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plumb how deproletarianization and casualization are moulding the emerging urban proletariat of the turn of the century, researchers have turned away from it. Accordingly, the classic studies of ‘traditional working-class neighborhoods’ dissected by Topalov (2003) have disappeared, to be replaced by

Taub, 2006), and another dozen on immigration, violence and the underground economy (Bourgois, 1995; Lepoutre, 2005; Smith, 2005; Venkatesh, 2006). At the foot of the metropolitan order, the language of class has been supplanted by

Miranda Petrosky

inquiries into ethnicity and segregation, on the one hand, and urban poverty and street crime on the other. For every book on a lower-class district focusing on social structure and everyday life among workers (such as Schwartz, 1990, and Kefalas, 2003), there are a dozen centering on racial isolation, ethnic tension and cultural succession (e.g. Hartigan, 1999; Small, 2004; Sharman, 2006; Wilson and

the tropes of the ‘underclass’ in the United States and ‘exclusion’ in Western Europe wherever working-class neighborhoods have undergone involution, and by the theme of ‘regeneration’ and ‘renaissance’ in those areas taken over by higher classes migrating back into the dualizing city. When gentriﬁcation researchers ignore the tribulations of working-class residents displaced by rising rents, shrinking housing options, and

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state policies supporting business development and middle-class settlement, they are only following the general pattern of class blindness by urban researchers even as class inequalities sharpen before their very eyes.

The Growing Heteronomy of Urban Inquiry The break-up of the industrial working class is not the only cause for its virtual vanishing from social inquiry and for the reincarnation of its established territories in the ﬁgures of the ‘ethnic ghetto’ and the defamed district of vice and violence (Wacquant, 2007). Another major factor at play here is the growing subservience of urban research to the concerns, categories and moods of policy and opinion-makers. Twenty odd years ago, inquiries into class and culture in the city were stamped by the battles of the theoretical schools

vying for intellectual dominance: human ecology, Marxism, Weberian political economy and an insurgent culturalist current fed by identity theories, feminism and postmodernism (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Hayden, 1986; Walton, 1990). But in the new climate of political disenchantment and state withdrawal spawned by the concurrent collapse of the Soviet Union and rising hegemony of neoliberalism, intellectual radicalism receded and then seceded from reality. The ‘false promises of Marxism’ and ‘mirage of the cultural turn’ — to borrow the words of Michael Storper (2001) — left a gaping theoretical void, which was quickly ﬁlled by the prosaic attractions of conducting research on topical issues and the press of ﬁnding funding. Nowadays, urban research is guided primarily by the priorities of state managers and the worries of the mainstream media. A panorama of recent

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sociological investigations into ‘The texture of hardship’ in the American metropolis opens on this note: The decade that spans 1995–2005 saw many new avenues of research develop among qualitative sociologists interested in poverty. Welfare reform, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996, turned attention to the world of low-wage work as it began to dawn on journalists and researchers alike that poverty was as much, if not more, a matter of inadequate earnings as it was a consequence of welfare dependency. Employers emerged as actors whose expectations, normative orientations, and cultural distance from the low-wage world play a powerful role in the sorting of job seekers into success stories and excluded failures. Researchers gave renewed attention to patterns of family formation among the poor (Newman and Massengill, 2006: 423).

‘Welfare reform turned attention’: this capsule speaks volumes about how political

developments and the funding bandwagons they create drive the intellectual agenda. In the 1980s, the ‘underclass’ had come to monopolize the attention of American researchers by seducing ﬁrst philanthropic foundations and then journalists and policymakers with its loathsome moral and racial connotations (Katz, 1989). After 1996, it was summarily dismissed overnight from the scholarly stage without remonstration to make room for studies of the valiant lowwage earners making the transition from ‘welfare to work’, the families that support them, the employers that rush or balk at hiring them, and the bureaucrats who supervise their career (contrast, for instance, Jencks and Peterson, 1991 with Hays, 2003). In the European Union, Brussel’s Targeted SocioEconomic Program on Exclusion and Integration similarly drew researchers away from the study of mass unemployment and its spatial impact toward the new bureaucratic

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The changes facing the East Side are substantial, and not all of them are at the behest of the people who live there.

Miranda Petrosky

The struggle for compromise is inevitable, and will only make the neighborhood and its people stronger in the end.

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business elites, they walk in good company: theirs is only an acute case of the common malady of heteronomy that afﬂicts with growing virulence large sectors of social research in general and urban research in particular.

problematic of ‘exclusion’ and ‘integration’. In France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, political tensions around postcolonial immigration and the deterioration of public housing have fueled a wave of studies and policy evaluation programmes on ‘neighborhood mixing’, ‘communitybuilding’ and crime-ﬁghting centered on working-class neighborhoods, but studiously avoiding the socioeconomic underpinnings of urban degradation, in keeping with the design of politicians to deploy territory, ethnicity and insecurity as screens to obscure the desocialization of wage labor and its impact on the life strategies and spaces of the emerging proletariat (Wacquant, 2006).

It is revealing that the 26-volume International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Science edited by Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes (2004) does not contain an entry on ‘gentriﬁcation’. The term appears as a subtheme under the entries ‘neighborhood revitalization and community development’ and ‘neighborhood’, where one reads:

So when gentriﬁcation researchers offer rosy accounts of neighborhood ‘renewal’ as an ‘urban solution’ to the ills of sociospatial decay, in lockstep with the views of government and

Within the group of public–individual partnerships, the most salient phenomenon is gentriﬁcation, the entrance of upper middle-class residents into low-income neighborhoods, usually in the vicinity of vibrant central business districts of cities. In spite of the frequently found and often

The State as Home-Maker and Street-Cleansing Agency

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denounced consequence of displacement of poor veteran residents, gentriﬁcation processes have been encouraged by city councils in Europe and America, especially through enabling regulations and tax deductions. Another process in this group is housing and neighborhood upgrading by incumbent residents. Local people invest their own resources in improving their living environment, and often manage to receive at least some assistance from voluntary and public bodies. Last but not least is neighborhood upgrading by immigrants . . . What is common to the three processes is that they usually start as spontaneous private investments, which later receive some support from local public agencies. Together they are changing parts of our old cities and neighborhoods (Carmon, 2004: 10493).

I cite this article, not only because it conﬁrms Slater’s main thesis, but because, while it mentions the role of public agencies, it vastly underestimates its timing, scope and effects. It is high time students of

gentrification recognize that the primary engine behind the (re) allocation of people, resources and institutions in the city is the state. Slater (2006: 746–7) lists among the causes of the eviction of critical perspectives on gentrification ‘the resilience of theoretical squabbles’ that have stalled and sterilized debate. But the ritualized opposition between Neil Smith’s economic explanation and David Ley’s culturalist take that Slater recapitulates as the dominant theoretical trope of gentrification research is problematic for what it leaves out: politics, policy and the state. The ‘rent-gap thesis’ favored by neoMarxist analysts, the ‘cultural distinction’ approach adopted by neo-Weberian or postmodernist scholars (who invoke the phraseology of Bourdieu just as quickly as they disregard his theoretical principles), and the globalization thesis inspired

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by Saskia Sassen all leave out the crucial role of the state in producing not only space but the space of consumers and producers of housing. Logan and Molotch (1987) were right to insist that place is not a regular commodity but a battleground between use and exchange value. But they did not go far enough in their speciﬁcation of the parameters of that battle and, in keeping with the national US common sense, they grossly underestimated the weight of Leviathan in it. Pierre Bourdieu ([2000] 2005: 30–1) has shown in The Social Structures of the Economy that housing is

Zac Elbel

‘the product of a double social construction, to which the state contributes crucially’, by shaping the universe of builders and sellers via ﬁscal, banking and regulatory policies, on the economic side, and by moulding the dispositions and capabilities of house buyers (including the propensity to rent or buy), on the social side. This double state structuring of the housing ‘market’ is then trebled by the political steering of urban and regional planning, however weak its agencies may be. For, as Tedd Gurr and Desmond King (1987: 4) reminded us two decades ago, ‘those who hold and use state power can allow the fate of cities to be determined mainly in the private economy, but that is a matter of public choice rather than iron necessity.’ The weight of the central and local state is all the more decisive in lower-class neighborhoods, insofar as workers and the poor are most dependent

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on public provision to access social rented housing (Harloe, 1995). But the role of the state in gentrification hardly stops at building and distributing housing or shaping the pool of home buyers: it extends to the gamut of policies that impact urban living, from infrastructure maintenance to schooling and transportation, to the provision of cultural amenities and policing. Without the campaigns of aggressive policing of the streets fostered by the rolling out of the penal state in and around neighborhoods of relegation over the past decade (Herbert, 2006; Wacquant, 2008), the middle classes could not have moved into the inner city and gentrification would not have grown beyond the sprinkling of ‘islands of revitalization within seas of decay’ (Carmon, 2004: 10493). More generally, the historic shift from the Keynesian state of the 1950s to the neo-Darwinist state of the fin de siècle, practicing economic

liberalism at the top and punitive paternalism at the bottom, entails a sea change in the political framing of neighborhood upgrading. Here the literature on gentriﬁcation surveyed by Slater reproduces for those districts the general tendency of public policy to invisibilize the urban poor, either by dispersing them (as with the demolition and deconcentration of public housing) or by containing them in reserved spaces (stigmatized districts of perdition and the expanding prison system to which they are preferentially linked).

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Conclusion To build better models of the changing nexus of class and space in the city, we need to do much more than renew the critical spirit that animated the pioneers of gentriﬁcation research out of a feeling of intellectual loyalty and reverence for their political engagement: we need to relocate gentriﬁcation in a broader and sturdier analytic framework. First, we must revive and revise class analysis to capture the (de) formation of the postindustrial proletariat and inscribe the evolution of ‘revitalized districts’ within the overall structures of social and urban space and their linked makeovers. Second, we must better resist the seductions of the prefabricated problematics of policy and advance research

agendas sporting greater separation from the imperatives of city rulers and carrying a higher theoretical payload. And, third, we must give pride of place to the state as generator of sociospatial inequality in the dualizing metropolis. For, much like the fate of neighborhoods of relegation that fester at the bottom of the system of places that compose the metropolis (Wacquant, 2007: 283–4), the trajectory of gentriﬁed districts in the twenty-ﬁrst century is economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined. It behoves us, then, to restore the primacy of the political in our efforts to analytically dissect and practically redirect the social transformation of the neoliberal city.

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The Global Gentrification of Nothing Jonathan Jackson

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Ryan Mead

Gerald Llorence

entrification was originally a process that was confined to just a few cities in North America and Western Europe. Now this process of gentrification, which is capital and affluent populations flowing to low-income and working class city quarters often resulting in displacement for the original inhabitants, is not only spreading to more and more cities in North America and Europe but increasingly to cities on every continent such as Singapore, Cape Town and Moscow. In the first stage, gentrifiers typically belonged to the creative

class. They were trend setters such as artists or musicians who possessed the cultural capital necessary to make a neighborhood thrive but were able to tolerate many of the disadvantages of blighted areas such as crime, poor schools and a lack of amenities that many members of the middle and professional classes would not want to experience. In the current stage, gentrifiers typically belong to the transnational capitalist class, or elite members of the international division of labor who possess a high degree of liquidity who can move around the globe with increasing ease. For global

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elites, hardly any borders exist (Bauman 1998). In this paper, I will focus on the latest era gentrification has entered since 1990. In this phase I argue gentrification has become a global process which increasingly takes place in cities in North America and Western Europe as well as other parts of the world, which corporate and state actors mainly drive, thereby transforming more and more urban spaces from something to nothing. In this era of global gentrification, cities have become increasingly influenced by the neoliberal policies which have characterized much of economic globalization. In this new stage cities thrive based on their ability to attract knowledge-based industries such as finance and medicine, thereby strengthening their position as a key node in the global international division

of labor. To attract key businesses and elites, cities have often adopted gentrification as a global urban strategy in order to meet the needs of the transnational capitalist class (Smith 2002; Sklair 2002). Consequently, meeting the needs of this class means using gentrification as an instrument to facilitate the creation of more and more forms of nothing for this group to consume and inhabit. The term gentrification was originally coined by the urban sociologist Ruth Glass. Glass, a Marxist and refugee of Nazi Germany, defined gentrification as: One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages – two rooms up and two down – have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise

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in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again. Nowadays, many of these houses are being subdivided into costly flats or “houselets” (in terms of the new real estate snob jargon). The current social status and value of such dwellings are frequently in inverse relation to their status, and in any case enormously inflated by comparison with previous levels in their neighborhoods. Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the social character of the district is changed. (Glass 1964: xviii-xix)

Waves of Gentrification Since Glass first observed gentrification in the 1960s it has moved through three different waves. These waves of gentrification reflect changes in government philosophy, economic conditions and the rising influence of globalization. In the first wave gentrification was scattered in a few cities in the north eastern part

of the United States and Western Europe (Lees et al. 2008). It was not a process that was widespread like we see today. As the private sector saw investment in rundown city quarters as too risky, governments provided most funding in this stage. States saw such investments as a chance to redevelop inner-city cores which had largely declined due to money flowing out to suburban areas. In this stage gentrifiers are known as “pioneers” and tend to be trend setters rather than professional elites (Lees et al. 2008). The second wave began in the mid to late 1970s. During a downturn from the recession in 1973, many property values took a downward slide in many neighborhoods in cities such as New York. Seeing the opportunity to reap future profits, many investors stepped in and bought large tracts of land in these areas. According to

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Loretta Lees, this new corporate involvement showed that the process had become ‘anchored,’ meaning that gentrification had merged into the wider economic and cultural processes of the time (2008). Investments in cultural projects were designed to spur regeneration in neighborhoods by

et al. 2008). The entrepreneurial approach emphasized cultural markers to stir development. This philosophy led to projects such as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or New York’s South Street Seaport (Lees et al. 2008). While gentrification was still mainly concentrated in global cities like New York and

Ryan Mead

changing its image and thereby encouraging new flows of real estate development supported by banking capital (Lees et al 2008). This was reflective of a broader shift in government philosophy from a Keynesian ‘urban managerialism’ which sought to promote the general welfare to a neoliberal ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ which focused on promoting economic development, of which urban renewal would play a key part (Lees

London, the process starts to appear in smaller cities as well. Resistance to gentrification began to emerge in this stage, however, as many of the original inhabitants in these neighborhoods were displaced. For example, riots took place in the New York’s Tompkins Square in the Lower East Side, as working-class residents fought back against gentrification (Lees et al. 2008). Replacing these workingclass inhabitants were employers

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and managers in government and large companies. An example of this new kind of gentrifier is Tony Blair, who moved into the Barnsbury part of London in the 1980s (Lees et al. 2008). As the first wave of gentrification transitioned to its

entire neighborhoods and the public-private partnerships that started in the 1980s proliferated, as large-scale capital and governments become more aggressive rather than laissez-faire in furthering this process (Lees et al. 2008). In the 2000s gentrification has continued to expand along the

Alana Mandel

second wave following a recession in the 1970s, the third wave also happened after a recession in the early 1990s restrained much of the capital streaming into gentrifying neighborhoods. Starting in the mid-1990s, gentrification continued in many neighborhoods where it started and spread to areas further from the city-center, as neighborhoods already gentrified reached a saturation point (Lees et al. 2008). Developers revamped

same lines. Some scholars refer to this period as the “fourth wave” but I see it as structurally the same process as in the 1990s but on a more intense level (Lees et al. 2008). It increasingly favors the wealthy and a “tight integration of local gentrification with national and global capital markets,” making it much more a global process rather than the sporadic movement it was when Ruth Glass first recognized the phenomenon back in the 1960s.

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Examples of global gentrification can be found in surprising parts of the world. For example, the Bo-Kaap neighborhood of Cape Town, South Africa has seen redevelopment and a rise of real estate values due to government led gentrification (vocfm.co.za). State and local governments have played a key role in the gentrification of citycenter neighborhoods in Cape Town, redeveloping areas such as Bo-Kaap and the central business district with new build and office conversions (Vosser and Kotze). As in many gentrified neighborhoods, Bo-Kaap’s original residents, largely poor and Muslim, are being displaced, meaning those that gave the area its unique and appealing character are forced to move elsewhere (vocfm. co.za). While gentrification has struck places in South Africa, one can also see the state encouraging this policy in the former Soviet Union. For example, Moscow’s

Ostozhenka neighborhood has undergone a face-lift in recent years. Much of the original housing stock was regarded as in a “state of disrepair” after years of neglect under Communism. To improve the neighborhood of Ostozhenka the government decided to demolish many of these buildings in disrepair. Many of the new residents moving in are foreign business people, media elites and diplomats (Badyina and Golubchikov 2005). Many original residents have been displaced, moved elsewhere by the government or given compensation to find new housing (Badyina and Golubchikov 2005). Thousands of miles away from Moscow and Cape Town, one can find gentrification occurring in the Southeast Asian metropolis of Singapore. Long a destination for global finance and trade, the Singaporean government has sought to revamp its waterfront area to

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attract members of the professional elite (T.C. Wong 2006). In order to improve its status as a key global city, the Singaporean government hopes new development along its Marina South waterfront will bring jobs and companies from the information/knowledge-based sectors of the economy (T.C. Wong 2005).

Theories of Gentrification Social and urban studies theorists developed two main ways of explaining gentrification. One side emphasizes the consumption process while the other stresses production. Under both areas are a myriad of explanations revolving around either consumption or production processes. While both perspectives have merit in explaining why gentrification occurs, they are insufficient without also looking at the flows of economic globalization which have altered the urban landscape.

Consumption-side theory argues that socio-cultural characteristics and motives matter most in understanding gentrification. This perspective focuses on the production of gentrifiers and looks at what draws them to city centers. Among its proponents are David Ley and Chris Hamnett, who sought to understand gentrification within the context of postindustrialism. As they study gentrification in light of postindustrialism, Daniel Bell’s ‘postindustrial thesis’ influences them heavily. This thesis states that the economy has shifted from a focus in manufacturing to service. (Bell 1973) This change in the social structure results in the rise of a new “knowledge class” comprised of technical, professional and managerial workers. (Bell 1973) According to Ley, gentrification is a result of these changes in the occupational and industrial structure of cities (Lees et al. 2008). Cities grounded

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Miranda Petrosky

But regardless of the outcome, the heart of the East Side will always stay with the people that made it what it is today.

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Change is an intimidating reality to cope with; some view it positively while others see it as a detriment to their community.

Miranda Petrosky

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in the service and knowledge-based economy has created professional employment in the city center. Additionally, this new class of professionals desires to live in the city near their work. Thus, postindustrial cities have led to a new middle class of professionals with an inclination for city living. Production-side theory tends to emphasize wider structures such as states and capital over individual gentrifiers in explaining the driving forces behind gentrification. One production perspective is Neil Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rent-gap thesis. The rent gap is the difference between the current price of land or rent and the potential price if the properties on the land are used better. According to Smith, a large gap, such as the one which existed in many cities in North America in the 1970s, attracts investment from developers who see the opportunity to reap large returns.

Both production-side and consumption-side theories explain more when viewed within the context of economic globalization and neoliberalism. Processes of economic globalization after 1990 are largely coupled with the rise of neoliberalism. This globalization has often sought to break down barriers to trade and development so that capital can flow freely through deregulated markets. Thus, capital has become weightless (Bauman 2000). With an emphasis on capital accumulation, economic globalization has led to increased commercialization, labormarket flexibility, privatization, financification and McDonaldization. As Sassen argues, the increased liquidity of goods and services has created an international division of labor. (Sassen 2004) In this world of fast moving capital, cities have become key nodes in crossborder networks such as finance and telecommunications and have to compete in order to attract elite

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transnational firms and individuals operating along these global flows (Sassen 2004). Gentrification is therefore localized neoliberalism. As Jason Hackworth argues, gentrification is part of a larger social and economic restructuring due to increased neoliberalization (Hackworth 2007). The transnational capitalist class has risen in concert with the rise of economic globalization and neoliberalism. This class, originally conceived by Leslie Sklair, is comprised of four fractionscorporate, state, technocrat and consumerist (Sklair 2002). The corporate fraction is largely composed of executives and local affiliates. These are the “supergentrifiers” that sit on boards of Fortune 500 companies who can live completely shielded and gated off from their urban surroundings. The state fraction consists of bureaucrats and politicians for both state governments and inter-

state organizations. They work for organization like the UN, NATO or the EU. The technocrat fraction consists of “globalizing professionals” and is one of the most prevalent gentrifying groups. The consumerist fraction entails professionals in merchant and media, working for multinational corporations like Disney or NewsCorp and their various media outlets. According to Sklair, many of these members of the transnational capitalist class “consider themselves citizens of the world as well as their places of birth; and they tend to share similar lifestyles, particularly patterns of luxury goods and services.” (2002: 98) They share similar interests and seek to further their interests in a variety of contexts, be they global, national or local. This transnational capitalist class would be Zygmunt Bauman’s tourists, who are liberated from “territorially confined units of political and cultural power” and “travel through

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life by their heart’s desire and pick their destinations according to the joys they offer” (1998: 3, 86). Among these issues, I argue that this class pushes for gentrification within the local context so that they can inhabit more urban spaces and engage in a lifestyle filled with goods and services that characterize a global but elite way of life, which consequently increases forms of nothing in these spaces. As more cities around the world possess these places of luxury consumption, this class can exert further pressure to change more urban landscapes to contain features which fit their interests. Of course, differences exist between the Global North and South in how they employ gentrification as a global urban strategy, mainly because the Global South has simultaneously expanded its manufacturing base as well as high-tech sectors that have moved there due to offshoring

(Smith 2002; Lees et al. 2008). Thus, cities in the Global South are shaped both by industrialism and postindustrialism, and the ways in which gentrification changes the spatial surroundings and divides people along lines of stratification will be slightly different than in the Global North. According to Lees, “In the Global North, this urban strategy involves an innovative race to create attractive, novel, and interesting –but also safe and sanitized—play-grounds for the wealthy residents and visitors who work for (or receive interest and dividends from) the institutions of global capital.” (2008: 166) While the two regions differ, this does not change the original thesis of this paper that gentrification has become more state driven and increasingly transforms urban spaces from something to nothing.

The Globalization of Nothing In Ritzer’s work The Globalization of Nothing, something

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is that which is indigenously conceived, indigenously controlled, and rich in distinctive content, while nothing is that which is centrally conceived, centrally controlled, and lacking in distinctive content (Ritzer 2004a). The term ‘nothing’ is not meant to have a positive or negative connotation or convey that nothing is undesirable while something is a desirable form. According to Ritzer, nothing has five main characteristics: generic and interchangeable, lack of local ties, time-free, disenchanted and dehumanized (Ritzer 2004a). On the other hand the five characteristics something possesses are uniqueness, local geographic ties, specificity to the times, enchantment and humanization (Ritzer 2004a). In a world where globalization is becoming an increasingly important force, nothing becomes increasingly prevalent as

well. As Manuella Castella states, the world is increasingly characterized by “spaces of flows” instead of “spaces of places” (Ritzer 2004a). As a result, these areas also tend to lack the stability necessary to develop substance (Ritzer 2004a). When considering these ideas with respect to the transnational capitalist class it would logically follow that this group inhabitants gentrified spaces of nothing because they are highly liquid and constantly moving along these global spaces of flows. When one is constantly moving there is less stability and therefore less of a reason to build or inhabit something of substance. While something and nothing each have five characteristics, there are also four types of nothing: non-places, nonthings, non-persons, non-services and four types of something: places, things, persons and services (Ritzer 2004a). This analysis will tend to concentrate on non-places,

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although there are numerous examples of gentrification aiding in the creation of non- thing s, nonservices and non-persons as well. In the context of gentrification, an example of a non-place would be a corporate real-estate company. It is centrally

between tenants and a corporate real-estate company. Following the application of nothing within the world of real estate, an example of a non-thing would be an apartment lease. An apartment lease by Southern Management Company, a real-

Miranda Petrosky

controlled and conceived and generally lacks distinctive content. A counter-example would be a housing cooperative that owns a property in a neighborhood or community. The decisions a small, local cooperative makes are not dictated by higher authority figures which aim to standardize decisionmaking. Additionally, the relations between owners of a cooperative and tenants are more likely to vary and not follow a script than

estate firm, is unlikely to vary greatly among its many properties, except for a few minor details and differences in state laws. The leases are likely to follow a more standardized format in order to save time and limit the autonomy of leasing agents. On the other hand a thing would be a personal rental agreement made between a local landlord and an individual renter. The lease was not centrally conceived or controlled and is likely

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to vary from rental agreements by other landlords because the format has not been standardized. After non-places and non-things are non-persons. An example would be a real estate agent for a centrally conceived and controlled company. Such workers

creativity to produce something rich in distinctive content. Although the examples thus far have used real estate this does not mean that gentrification is not related to forms of nothing outside housing. For example, a Chipotle (burrito fast-food restaurant) that springs up on the bottom floor of a mixed-

Zac Elbel

follow standard procedures and scripts when handling customers. Of course, some variation exists in interaction but they must generally follow guidelines set down by the central administration of the company. A person, however, would be an architect who personally designs someone a house or condominium. An architect designing a custom home has a great degree of autonomy and control and is expected to utilize

use development in a gentrifying neighborhood would have all four types of nothing. Being centrally conceived, centrally controlled (McDonalds had a majority share in Chipotle until 2006) and lacking in distinctive content it is a nonplace (rockymountainnews.com). The employees are likely to be non-persons giving non-service to customers buying non-things (e.g. Coca-Cola soda, factory made salsa, etc.)

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As Ritzer admits, it is hard to tease out the difference between a non-service and a nonperson, as a non-person is most likely to administer non-service (Ritzer 2004a). Within the example of real-estate, a real-estate agent that is a non-person will most likely deliver non-service, as there is great control over a real estate agent by a centralized organization. An example of a service would be a custom-built row home. Such a service is not centrally conceived or controlled and possesses uniqueness since it does not follow a standard model. The something-nothing continuum is not complete, however, without looking at the grobal-glocal continuum as well. According to Ritzer, grobalization “focuses on the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on

various geographic areas” (2004a: 73). Terms associated with grobalization are homogeneity and uniformity. Grobalization is characterized by a world becoming increasingly similar. As the grobal is accompanied by “imperialistic ambitions,” it is not surprising that capitalism, Americanization and McDonaldization are forces which are highly interrelated with it. In contrast to the grobal the idea of glocalization is associated with heterogeneity and hybridity. It focuses on a world becoming increasingly pluralistic as opposed to increasingly similar and highlights diversity, independence and creolization (Ritzer 2004a). Roland Robertson, the creator of the term glocal, along with other scholars such as Appadurai and Pieterse, stress the integration of the local and global (Ritzer 2004a). Instead of global hegemonic forces imposing themselves on individuals they see creativity and agency.

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Both grobalization and glocalization have merit and while the terms seem mutually exclusive, it does not mean that both processes cannot be occurring simultaneously. This is why I analyze global gentrification along a grobalglocal continuum. As seen in Figure 1, the globalization of gentrification has four ideal types and while quadrant 4 is most emphasized in this analysis, it does not mean that many interrelationships between something-nothing and grobalglocal do not exist. Some forms of some thing have not increased because many gentrified areas are more strongly tied to global flows and narratives than local areas. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Phenomena that are found at or near the some thing end of the continuum are likely to have strong spatial ties to local geographic areas, while those at the nothing end of the spectrum have few, if any, such spatial ties.â&#x20AC;? (Ritzer 2007: 46) Thus, the globalization of

nothing tends to be largely directed toward the grobalization of nothing, meaning that gentrification largely grobalizes nothing. This does not mean, however, that gentrification does not engender other processes and movements as well. As seen in Figure 1, local coffee shops and gourmet restaurants often set up business in gentrified neighborhoods. Next to the big box stores and luxury condos may be a local vegan bakery or upscale restaurant that grants a large degree of autonomy for their chefs to be creative. While these forms of grobal and glocal some thing arise within a gentrified context, they tend to be overshadowed by grobal forms of nothing.

Examples of Gentrification In order to better understand the globalization of gentrification one should look at a few examples in light of the grobalglocal and some thing-nothing continuum. While several forces are

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Katherine Hunt

at work simultaneously, this paper mainly focuses on whether or not nothing is increasing in the urban landscape via global gentrification. To better understand this we will turn now to Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and Columbia Heights in Washington DC. Potsdamer Platz was once the heart and soul of Berlin. Prior to World War II it was a worldwide symbol of cosmopolitanism. Establishments such as the Grand Hotel Bellevue and CafĂŠ Josty, where renowned artists and writers spent time, made it one of the most popular sites in Europe.

Before World War II it was a place that was indigenously controlled, indigenously conceived and rich in distinctive content. In the final year of World War II almost every building in the vicinity was destroyed from bombs and artillery. Some businesses sprang up in the aftermath but they were short-lived. When East Germany erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 it became a giant no manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land, with the exception of a few tourist shops running along the wall in the West, which can be seen as an example of the glocalization of nothing. Although it became an infamous cold war site and a key dividing line between East and West Berlin, all buildings were demolished. Thus, it became literally nothing, as well as devoid of any independent control and substantive content. After reunification, the Berlin Senate divided the square up and sold different parts to

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commercial investors-Daimler Benz, Sony, Beisheim. Since the cost of redevelop was so high, only large companies could afford the cost of construction, thereby pricing out local businesses (Retail Week 1999). Looking at Potsdamer Platz in terms of the five characteristics of nothing and something, it falls mainly within the nothing part of the continuum. The majority of the businesses in the square is centrally conceived and lack local ties. The Sony Center, Ritz Carlton, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the Hyatt are just some of the businesses that occupy the square and lack local ties. On the other hand there are some local or distinctive organizations- the Berliner Philharmonic, the library of Berlin, and the National Gallery of Art. Additionally, original pieces of the Berlin Wall are on display at Potsdamer Platz, which are part of the local culture and identity.

Heather White

Although the city hired renowned architects to design new spaces in Potsdamer Platz, much of the architecture has been criticized for appearing too commercial and artificial, or lacking distinctive content in other words (Allen 2006). The architecture alone does not contribute to the generic qualities of the area. Many of the stores are centrally controlled and conceived and lack substantive content. For example, at the center of the Daimler-Benz section is the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Arkaden,â&#x20AC;? which is a giant shopping mall with stores such as Marc Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Polo and McDonalds (w w w.potsdamer-platz-arkaden.

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de). As mentioned, the fact that much of Potsdamer Platz is filled with nothing does not mean they are not some spaces of some thing. While 70,000 tourists stroll through what Ritzer would refer to as â&#x20AC;&#x153;cathedrals of consumption,â&#x20AC;? one can also attend a play at the theatre or go to Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s International Film Festival (www.potsdamer-platz.de; Ritzer 2004b). As many of the sites are non-places selling non-things and giving non-service, much of the area can be characterized by a sense of dehumanization, disenchantment and time-lessness. Most of the services in non-places like H&M and Starbucks have to follow scripts and centralized guidelines and most of the goods sold are largely devoid of distinctive substance, thereby lacking much of the enchantment, unpredictability and uniqueness of places, services and things.

While Potsdamer Platz represents the urban renewal of a major commercial and transportation hub, the global gentrification of nothing also affects housing stock. One such example is a new mixed-use development in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington DC known as Highland Park. Highland Park is a centrally controlled and conceived luxury apartment complex in the center of Columbia Heights. It is owned by Bozzuto Management, a company with over 31,000 residents in over 100 communities (bozutto.com). The company has apartments not only in Washington DC but Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. While the site is centrally controlled and conceived it also lacks local ties and is relatively devoid of uniqueness. The

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architecture is not tied to the surroundings and does not fit in with the historical landscape of Columbia Heights, which largely consists of row homes in various architectural styles as Federal, Queen Anne and Second Empire. Many of the appliances which they boast to offer residences are also centrally controlled and conceived and lacking distinctive content, as they are made by General Electric (highlandparkdc.com). As this is a mixed-use development, the bottom floor is filled with retail shops and offices such as Potbelly and Five Guys which are also centrally conceived and controlled nonplaces. Across the street is a new shopping complex called â&#x20AC;&#x153;DC USA,â&#x20AC;? filled with big box stores such as Target, Marshalls and Staples (www.shopdcusa.com). Dehumanization characterizes much of the area as many of these non-places sell non- thing s and the workers (non-people) offer non-service. Furthermore, the

area is filled with time-lessness and disenchantment. Many of the new non-places, such as Ruby Tuesday and IHOP, lack historical ties and cannot be easily tied to a given time period. As this area largely consists of non-people, non-service, non-things, and nonplaces it tends to lack uniqueness and distinctive substance and will therefore probably not enchant those inhabiting or visiting the neighborhood. However, the area also contains places as well and forms of something which have sometimes benefited from gentrification. For example, Highland Park offers personalized service such as concierge and a front desk. Additionally, Highland Park is part of Tivoli square, named after the landmark Tivoli theatre, a Hispanic theatre locally owned by a non- profit called GALA, or Grupo de Artistas Latino Americano (galatheatre.org). This

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place existed long before Highland Park or the other non-places were built in an effort to revitalize the neighborhood. However, Tivoli theatre has benefited from gentrification and enjoyed a renaissance. As the area began to decline in the 1970s, the theatre closed and was boarded up. Thus, the proliferation of grobal nothing helped restore a form of glocal something. Had Tivoli not existed prior to redevelopment, a non-place such as an AMC movie theatre would probably occupy the land.

Conclusion As globalization has transformed spatial scales around the world, gentrification has emerged as an urban strategy in the face of new national and international competition and the increasing multidirectional flows of people, goods, services and information. People, states and other organizations build

structures and erect barriers to either accelerate or impede these flows and transplanetary processes (Ritzer 2010a). While starting as a minor trend in a few cities in advanced industrialized countries, gentrification has now become a global structure used to shape the urban landscape. This structure creates spheres that attract and serve the transnational capitalist class, thereby further increasing their liquidity while displacing sometimes members of the working class who are more solid. While gentrification has gone through several different phases since Ruth Glass first wrote about the phenomenon, its most recent manifestations are an important force in the globalization of nothing, as the ambitions of the transnational capitalist class and governments which seek their inhabitance and capital redesign the urban landscape and impose grobal forms on the city, resulting in more and more nothing.