For this week in thesis, we are looking at our thesis topics through the lenses of various theoretical frameworks. These conceptual models of how things work organize people’s thinking on a particular issue.
Garrett Hardin proposed the notion of the Tragedy of the Commons, wherein individuals pursuing their own self interest create noxious collective outcomes, inefficiently over-extracting common pool resources and creating a host of environmental problems. This is typically applied to problems of direct resource extraction, but may be stretched to apply to a host of urban issues. Suburban expansion, for instance, may be seen as the exploitation of a common pool resource—greenfields at the metropolitan edge. Continued growth, however, devalorizes these areas by removing one of the major attractions of suburbia—the proximity to unurbanized land. Likewise, a subset of gentrification may be interpreted as a Tragedy of the Commons by viewing housing in neighborhoods themselves as a common pool resource. This applies to the influential model of artists/creatives acting as “pioneers” in disinvested urban neighborhoods, thereby increasing its attractiveness to new middle/upper class denizens and eventually resulting in rent increases that force out even those first gentrifiers. The tragedy would thus lie in the depletion of neighborhood vitality with the overconsumption of its housing.
Another framework which may be applied to cities is that of contemporary environmentalism, which emphasizes anti-apocalyptic and anti-essentialist understandings of environmental issues alongside an acceptance of technology as a necessary, but by no means sufficient, tool for dealing with the challenges of the anthropocene. The main applicable insight here is that of the multi-faceted nature of gentrification—we must resist the impulse to attempt to boil it down to one singular or preeminent driver. This is a useful concept to keep in mind even as I develop a thesis seeking to prioritize, quantify, and explain the role of transit in gentrification. Dialectical materialism provides another framework for potentially analyzing my thesis topic. It draws us towards a consideration of how the material reality of cities themselves create or influence gentrification mindsets and realities. Much popular discourse on gentrification (e.g. The Great Inversion or The Creative Class) takes an idealistic approach to gentrification and urban change, foregrounding a posited endogenous change in ideas to explain the “return to the city.” With dialectic materialism, we can see how the structure of the city embodies contradictions which are dynamically resolved. This resolution produces new socioeconomic relations and their associated ideologies.
David Harvey described neoliberalism as a theory, a practice, and a class project. The theory consists of the notion that human well-being is best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms, with the state merely setting up and maintaining the free market framework (establishment/protection of private property rights, enforcement of contract law, signing free trade agreements). This theory has had direct bearing on city policy, justifying the dismantling of public housing and underlying the turn towards public-private partnerships to fund infrastructural initiatives. We must keep in mind that the practice of neoliberalism, however, has frequently departed from the supposed ideal of minimal state intervention in its pursuit of the class project of neoliberalism. Hackworth (2006) draws attention to how neoliberalism in first-world cities has entailed, in addition to the aforementioned aspects of pulling back the social guarantees of the Keynesian state, active municipal polices to encourage downtown redevelopment.
Global City theory, first advanced by Saskia Sassan, identifies a set of cities as global command centers. These cities play a vital role as nodes mediating interstate capital and information flows, thereby territorializing global dynamics and processes. As such, globalization has led to the enhanced importance of global cities, the locus in which the abstract becomes the concrete. Concomitant with this global centralization of capital is the local agglomeration of corporate functions and the capitalist elite within cities. This local agglomeration is typically identified with the the traditional city core, yet it may additionally take on a more polycentric form in areas with a less well-defined center and an adequate grid of transportation services. Considering the dependency of capital on constant mobility, transportation at every scale plays a critical role in shaping the geography of global cities. For cities striving to become global, transportation expansions are often a key strategy employed to boost the city’s standing and shape it to be pleasing in the eyes of business. The other side of global city theory is that of the prioritization of the consumption habits of a global elite. Sharon Zukin tackles this aspect directly, characterizing gentrification as the remaking of the core of global cities to cater to these tastes, in terms of housing and amenities.
Neil Smith’s theory of the rent gap is central to many explanations of gentrification. Smith defines it as a difference between capitalized and potential rents, opened up through historic disinvestment in central neighborhoods. This wrinkle in the distribution of metropolitan land values creates the opportunity for profitable revalorization (i.e. gentrification). Targeted investments are used to spark a series of changes resulting in the reassertion of underlying value, as determined by geographic proximity to business centers. An often overlooked aspect of this theory is its basis in Marxian political economy—disinvestment and subsequent reinvestment is not a happenstance occurrence, but rather reflects the crisis tendencies of capitalism and the falling profitability of a mode of accumulation over time. Smith’s model of the rent gap mostly relegated transportation to a modest role in determining potential ground rents, yet I think this model can easily be opened up to incorporate transit as a mode of revalorization.
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