Urban geography: urban growth machine

Urban growth machine is an influential thesis of urban politics that suggests the objective of growth unites otherwise pluralistic interests in relation to a city. The thesis is situated within a broader theory about the commodification of place, where place is understood to be socially and economically valued land. Its key premise is that coalitions of actors and organizations (i.e. growth machines), all sharing an interest in local growth and its effects on land values, compete with growth machines elsewhere for scarce mobile capital investment, while simultaneously attempting to gain the tacit support of local publics for such urban growth. Following an introductory overview, this entry discusses the urban growth machine in two main parts. The first part sets out the key concepts underlying the growth machine thesis: use value, exchange value and place; place entrepreneurs; growth machines and their allies; competing for mobile capital; and promoting growth as a public good. The second part identifies core issues and debates in relation to the thesis (particularly those made by human geographers), including critiques of: the property focus; the human agency focus; difficulties with international comparison; the conceptualization of local dependency and scale; and the relationship of political projects with local feeling

Urban growth machine

Urban growth machine is an influential thesis of urban politics that suggests the objective of growth unites otherwise pluralistic interests in relation to a city. The thesis is situated within a broader theory about the commodification of place, where place is understood to be socially and economically valued land. Its key premise is that coalitions of actors and organizations (i.e. growth machines), all sharing an interest in local growth and its effects on land values, compete with growth machines elsewhere for scarce mobile capital investment, while simultaneously attempting to gain the tacit support of local publics for such urban growth. Following an introductory overview, this entry discusses the urban growth machine in two main parts. The first part sets out the key concepts underlying the growth machine thesis: use value, exchange value and place; place entrepreneurs; growth machines and their allies; competing for mobile capital; and promoting growth as a public good. The second part identifies core issues and debates in relation to the thesis (particularly those made by human geographers), including critiques of: the property focus; the human agency focus; difficulties with international comparison; the conceptualization of local dependency and scale; and the relationship of political projects with local feeling

Urban Growth

Urban growth refers to the process of growth and decline of economic agglomerations. The pattern of concentration of economic activity, and its evolution, has been found to be an important determinant, and in some cases the result, of urbanization, the structure of cities, the organization of economic activity, and national economic growth. The size distribution of cities is the result of the patterns of urbanization, which result in city growth and city creation. The evolution of the size distribution of cities is in turn closely linked to national economic growth.

Municipal Property Acquisition Patterns in a Shrinking City: Evidence for the Persistence of an Urban Growth Paradigm in Buffalo, NY

The purpose of this article is to examine municipal property acquisition patterns in shrinking cities. We use data from the City of Buffalo’s municipal property auction records to analyze the spatial distribution of properties offered for sale in its annual tax foreclosure auction. In addition to these data, we examine demolition and building permit records. Our analysis suggests that cities like Buffalo follow strategies based on an urban growth paradigm when responding to abandonment. This paradigm operates under the assumption that growth is a constant and urban development is only limited by fiscal constraints, underdeveloped systems of urban governance, environmental degradation, and resistance by anti-growth coalitions. We recommend that planners in shrinking cities de-emphasize growth based planning and focus on rightsizing strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that growth is not a constant. Consequently, urban revitalization is concentrated in a smaller urban footprint

Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average productivity gap is above (below) average. However, the implementation of this policy requires coordination at the system level. A tax on city creation does not raise welfare if development taxes are set decentrally by competitive urban developers, nor does correction of these taxes raise welfare if a tax on city creation is unavailable. In the resulting constrained optimal allocation, urban development is subsidized in all cities. The quantitative significance of these findings is explored in an application of our model.

How important to India's poor is the urban - rural composition of growth?

Views differ on how much India's poor have shared in the growth and contraction in the country's average standard of living since independence. Some have argued that the rural growth that accompanied the green revolution in the 1970s and 1980s brought few gains to the poor in the rural sector, while others have viewed agricultural growth as the key to rural poverty reduction. Views have also differed on how much urban growth has benefited the poor. The authors used 33 household surveys spanning 1951-1991 to examine the relative importance to India's poor of both urban and rural consumption growth. Among other things, they tested for spillover effects between sectors: does urban growth have the same effects on the rural distribution of consumption as rural growth has on urban distribution? Urban growth reduced poverty, but adverse distribution effects within the urban sector reduced the gains to the urban poor, and urban growth had no significant effect on rural distribution. Rural growth was distribution-neutral within the rural sector and so brought sizable absolute gains to the rural poor. Rural growth also had pro-poor distributional effects on urban poverty. Identifying the nature of these intra- and inter-sectoral effects reinforces the importance of rural growth to national poverty reduction. Future progress in fighting poverty in India will depend on both the rate of rural economic growth and the country's success in switching to a more pro-poor process of growth.Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Assessment,Rural Poverty Reduction,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers

Urban Structure and Growth

Most economic activity occurs in cities. This creates a tension between local increasing returns, implied by the existence of cities, and aggregate constant returns, implied by balanced growth. To address this tension, we develop a theory of economic growth in an urban environment. We show that the urban structure is the margin that eliminates local increasing returns to yield constant returns to scale in the aggregate, which is sufficient to deliver balanced growth. In a multi-sector economy with specific factors and productivity shocks, the same mechanism leads to a city size distribution that is well described by a power distribution with coefficient one: Zipf's Law. Under certain assumptions our theory produces Zipf's Law exactly. More generally, it produces the systematic deviations from Zipf's Law observed in the data, including the under-representation of small cities and the absence of very large ones. In general, the model identifies the standard deviation of industry productivity shocks as the key parameter determining dispersion in the city size distribution. We present evidence that the relationship between the dispersion of city sizes and the variance of productivity shocks is consistent with the data.