ucsc | Power structures at the city level are different from the national
power structure. They are not junior editions of the national corporate
community.
That's because local power structures are land-based growth
coalitions. They seek to intensify land use. They are opposed by the
neighborhoods they invade or pollute, and by environmentalists.
To the shock and dismay of land-based elites, the workers who poured
into the cities between 1870 and 1920 challenged elite rule through
Democratic Party machines and the Socialist Party. So the growth elites
created a "good government" ideology and a set of "reforms" that
literally changed the nature of local governments and took them out of
the reach of the upstarts.
The theory presented here explains all the key case studies of the past, including the most important ones, such as Atlanta and San Francisco, and the one that had the most impact, political scientist Robert A. Dahl's study of New Haven, which turns out to be wrong on almost every key point.
The city-level pluralists (who have now morphed into public-choice
theorists in some cases) have an inadequate theory of city power because
they rely on classical free-market economics, ignore the fact that
growth does not benefit everyone in the city, and downplay or ignore the
genuine conflicts that exist between growth elites and neighborhoods.
There is little or no concern with power in their theory.
Marxist theory fails at the local level because it does not take its
own distinction between "exchange value" and "use value" seriously,
focuses almost entirely on finance and industrial capital, treats
neighborhood as a residual category (merely a place to reproduce the
working class), and interprets every conflict as a "class conflict" even
though the primary battle in cities is between land-based growth
coalitions trying to increase "rents" and neighborhoods that are trying
to defend their use values.
