Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The “city as a growth machine” is a concept first put forward by sociologist Harvey Molotch in 1976 to describe how cities are not simply urbanized places where people live and work; city-place functions as means for local elites to accumulate capital. Molotch, writing with John Logan (1987), argues that places, specifically “land markets,” are created through processes of accumulation: powerful individuals and groups, potentially with otherwise divergent interests, coalesce to form “growth machines” and compete with other cities to attract capital investment. Similar to what marxist urbanists like Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre were proposing in the 1970s, Logan and Molotch claim that modern cities do not develop “organically” or even according to a free market rationale, rather they function as (environmentally destructive) “growth machines” at the service of elite accumulation (1987). Chambers of commerce (which Molotch notes are often mistakenly assumed to be a part of city government (1993, 34)), claim that urban (re)-development will combat unemployment, housing crises, and fiscal crises. However, Moltoch argues that this is not the case: jobs actually come from “rates of investment return, federal decisions affecting the money supply, and other factors having very little to do with local decision making” (Molotch 1976, 320; 1993, 32). The discourse of development masks attempts to retrench political-economic power.

Following the Hungarian social democratic thinker Karl Polanyi, Logan and Molotch support their thesis by arguing that land is not the product of labor, it is a natural “free gift” and that its supply is fixed (Polanyi (1944) calls this a “fictitious commodity”). Urban land markets are therefore “inherently monopolistic, providing owners, as a class, with complete control over the total commodity supply” (Logan and Molotch 1987, 23). They do not fluctuate as neoclassical theory would dictate, rather because there is a qualitative difference in similarly sized allotments, because certain spaces become more desirable. Real estate “is essentially second hand” and there is no correlation between new housing and lower costs, nor between high vacancies and lower rent levels (Turner 1977, 39 as cited by Logan and Molotch 1987, 25). At the same time, there is a certain geographic or “landed” determinism in the use of redevelopment to solve urban social issues. Supposedly “value-free” land-use policies mask rentierism, and boosterism conflates this with a civic pride (what is good for landholders is good for the community), ensuring investors that a given locality is a safe bet. Furthermore, the contemporary financial obsession with risk is highly political in the context of the growth coalition. In relying on the public sector to fund infrastructure (often directly through public-private partnerships), municipal governments also take on the lion’s share of financial risk. In sum, the growth machine can only function with the help of ideology (Molotch 1993, 33), and Logan and Molotch argue that investment in urban and transurban infrastructure is not only done for society or for national/regional economies, but as an elite accumulation strategy and always at a cost to other cities.

Historically speaking, the authors suggest that the growth machine was thus an unopposed, driving force for U.S. expansion across the continent. We might see cities in the American west as not only “springboards” for conquering indigenous lands, but as spatial tools for rentier elites to prosper. Even transportation infrastructure (canals, ports, and railroads) did not necessarily develop for the benefit of an integrated national economy, but at the behest of elites in various cities and to the detriment of others. For example, in 1914 boosters successfully lobbied for a canal near Houston which helped spur local development by connecting it to global trade through the Gulf of Mexico, permanently putting it at  an advantage over nearby Galveston (Logan and Molotch 1987, 56).

In keeping with Logan and Molotch’s understanding of the growth machine, Harvey also shows how a sense of zero-sum inter-urban competition and macroeconomic development are interrelated, especially during periods of economic and political crises (1989, 3-5). The neoliberal period of the late 1970s and 1980s was characterized by a shift from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism, where “even the most resolute and avantgarde municipal socialists could [find] themselves… playing the capitalist game and performing as agents of discipline” (5). The growth machine becomes the only means to urban prosperity, the economic rationale without alternatives. Harvey also proposes that this shift is the cause of a conceptual confusion in the scholarship about what a city is, a confusion between city [government] and urban [geography/society]. This is because urban entrepreneurialism implies a reflexive dialectic between urban political institutions and the built environment–they are directly related (6). Logan and Molotch’s analysis is therefore ultimately quite similar to David Harvey’s analysis of urban entrepreneurialism and his notion of “the urbanization of capital” (1989). City space has become a driving force for accumulation.

The growth machine concept is fairly simple and powerful in its applicability, but it has been challenged in constructive ways. In the 1990s, geographer Kevin Cox described both Logan and Molotch and Harvey’s analyses as the “new urban politics” (NUP) literature. Cox claimed that ‘the international hypermobility of capital’ NUP is concerned with lacks an empirical basis in many cases (1993, 433), and he suggested that firms tend to be more locally dependent than the literature presupposes. In other words, urban growth politics ought not to be reduced to a geography of tax breaks or cheap-labor pools. Furthermore, he noted that Logan and Molotch’s paradigm has a difficult task because it studies the potential for firms to move, not actual mobility (438). In fact, accumulation strategies often lead to the localization of capital (434), and city governments often shift their economic dependence to higher levels of government (states) rather than private capital (441). The reverse situation is therefore when growth coalitions arise, and any increase in political devolution since the 1990s would seem to corroborate Logan and Molotch’s argument. Where Logan and Molotch emphasize the role of capital (based on Southern California case studies), Cox implies that earlier urbanists were correct by emphasizing collective consumption and social reproduction in cities, and that dualities between economic and political, growth and anti-growth, and local and global explanations for urban development tend to break down (436-437). In Silicon Valley, for example, rising housing prices threaten to undermine capital’s ability to attract and sustain a skilled labor pool (439).

Finally, Cox identifies an overlap with literature on global cities that can help it theorize global-local relations more effectively, a line of thought developed by Delphine Ancien more recently (2011). The NUP might have been a particularly North American phenomenon, but has had growing global application in recent decades as American finance capital moves into global cities (Cox 1993, 446). Ancien (2011) explains that the NUP, especially where it emphasizes states’ urban growth strategies, helps us to better understand how the social relations within and between global cities require constant reproduction and thus political support, materially and discursively. For example, the UK government of the 1960s refused to devalue the pound in order to stimulate export industries; it was national policy to maintain London’s position as a financial service leader and thus the strength of the currency (2011, 2482), and the rest of the country (and its trading partners) bore the cost. Today, we therefore must study growth machines in tandem with globalizing cities and with greater attention to scale.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Class, Global City, Critical Political Economy, De/Reterritorialization, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Ancien, Delphine. “Global City Theory and the New Urban Politics Twenty Years On.” Urban Studies 48, no. 12 (2011): 2473–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098011411945.

Cox, Kevin. “The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical View.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11, no. 4 (1993): 433–48. https://doi.org/10.1068/d110433.

Harvey, David. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.1989.11879583.

Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Logan, John R., and Harvey Luskin Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press, 1987.

Molotch, Harvey. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/226311.

Molotch, Harvey. “The Political Economy of Growth Machines.” Journal of Urban Affairs 15, no. 1 (1993): 29–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.1993.tb00301.x.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.  Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001  [1944].

Turner, D.M. An Approach to Land Values. Geographical, 1977.