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THE C U T T I N G E D G E

A D E C A D E OF THE NEW U R B A N S O C I O L O G Y
S H A R O N ZUKIN

At the end of the 1960s, urban sociology presented a most curious appearance: a growing corpus of work that was all limbs and no head. While urban sociology shared the acephalous condition of almost all contemporary sociology because of the lack of a dominant paradigm its problems were due also to urban sociologists' realization that they had no subject matter which was, rightly speaking, "urban". Such direction as urban sociology had was implicitly determined by the needs of the industrial capitalist state for promoting urban growth and for regulating the resulting infrastructure. Despite the absence of a research agenda developed by either urban sociologists or government agencies, almost all empirical work was devoted to these problem areas under such rubrics as demographic change and social disorganization. Looking through widely-used textbooks, e.g., Hatt and Reiss's Cities andSociet.v (1957) or Gist and Fava's Urban Society (1964), it is impossible to find interpretations that either contradict state policy or offer alternative sets of assumptions on which policy should be based. Indeed, the congruence between urban research and state policy found early acceptance in Robert Park's programmatic essay "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment" (1916), particularly in Park's approving reference to studies on urban growth that were already under way under the aegis of the Bell Telephone Company and the Russell Sage Foundation. So, in general, for most of their history, urban sociologists seemed to serve the needs of the state much as industrial sociologists serviced capital. Essentially, urban sociologists took as their tasks tracking the movement of people, social and economic activity, and spatial forms in the process they called "urbanization," and finding the uniformities of behavior and belief they called "urbanism". Both the process of urbanization and the pattern of urbanism were considered universal, inexorable characteristics
Department q['Sociology. Brooklrn College at C U N K
9 1980 by Sharon Zukin

576 of social change or, at least, change which was inherently so rational that its desirability and thus its inevitability could not be questioned. This characterization of the urban subject laid the basis for certain commonly accepted conceptualizations. First, the patterns of movement and settlement the urban sociologists found (e.g., from countryside to city, from center city to outlying zones) assumed the status of givens. The apparent inviolability of these patterns inspired metaphors whose determinism was borrowed from either biology (Park and Burgess' metaphor of invasion and succession) or ecology (Otis Dudley Duncan's axiomatic formula of population, environment, technology, and social organization). The second major conceptualization equated the social, technological, and cultural changes of urbanization with the direction of modern history as a whole, so that urbanization became identified with "modernization". Third, when subjective factors were introduced into the analysis of urban concentrations and urban dispersions, they were conceptualized in terms of preferences and decision making. Thus changes in residential land use were generally ascribed to changes in taste and style, as well as to the pursuit of social status, and changes in industrial and commercial land use were viewed purely in terms of the rationality or efficiency of particular locations in relation to the needs of individual firms or specific economic functions. If land values rose or fell, or if tenements appeared on the former sites of mansions, then ecological theory and location theory became self-fulfilling prophecies, in which space seemed to reflect the characteristics of its inhabitants or its users. The fourth major conceptualization concerned the social and personal crises which seemed to occur with increased frequency in urban areas. The urban environment intensifies crisis, Park wrote in 1916, and from this standpoint it was logical to deduce social disruptions and personality disorders from a maladjustment to urban life. While economic factors (notably, competition) and technological change (as in "living by the clock") played a role in creating a stressful situation, the problem was described in terms of environment or human ecology rather than, say, social structure or mode of production. The final conceptualization is significant for the absence rather than the presence of a critical factor. Typically, urban sociologists ignored the role of the state in creating the urban infrastructure. When they did study state action in the forms of highway construction, slum clearance agencies, housing subsidies, and bans on racial segregation, they explained the state's role in terms of facilitating either human needs or supply and demand functions. How-

577 ever, there was no conceptualization of the relation between state, economy, and urban forms. After the mid-sixties ghetto riots in American cities and the 1968 student and worker insurgency in European cities, urban sociology experienced a practical reorientation which implicitly challenged the adequacy of these conceptualizations. State agencies increased their funding for urban studies, and they directed this research toward troublesome urban populations and the institutions that were supposed to contain them. Urbanologists thus took as their topics the criminal justice system, urban renewal, and welfare agencies. Some urban sociologists, working under direct c o n t r a c t from the state, studied the causes of the discrepancy between social policy and social order (e.g., the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders). But other urban sociologists expressed their antipathy to the state's aims or even some form of radicalism by choosing topics such as street gangs, street families, and street time that permitted them to identify with the urban lower class and even to admire their subjects' adaptiveness. Methodologically, this research choice represented both a regression to the formative, Chicago School period of urban sociology and an escape into another discipline, anthropology. However, botb regression and escapism signalled a classic avoidance of crisis. In urban sociology, a basic failure of conceptualization had led to almost total intellectual paralysis. Not only had urban sociologists failed to anticipate any of the urban crises of the sixties, but neither their "traditional" nor their "radical" research methodology provided a macro-level framework for explaining such crises. Furthermore, the research agenda itself had remained virtually unchanged over half a century. The outline of the field developed by P a r k in 1916 (geographical and ecological areas; work, occupational types, physical movement, spiritual restlessness, collective behavior; social institutions, politics, mass media; and "temperament," including both moral and mental types) is reproduced in the chapter headings of Hatt and Reiss's 1957 reader (culture; population distribution; history of urban forms; demography; social stratification; formal and informal institutions; and personality types). Understandably, the plurality of urban research topics diffused rather than concentrated intellectual efforts, which again impeded an overall understanding of the urban subject. Even so, between 1967 and 1970 there were stirrings from several directions which presaged a coherent reorientation of the field. First, in the

578 United States, some urban sociologists and urban economists were drawn beneath the overt confrontations of the 1960s to the underlying competition between social classes over urban resources: the struggle for "neighborhoods," for "community schools," for protection rather than harassment by state forces and state agencies. Urbanologists studied people resisting removal by urban renewal plans, incursion into their communities by space-hungry private institutions, and controls imposed by alien (non-local) bureaucracies. ~ While the specific issues of confrontation varied, there appeared to be a unifying concept of competition. The second stirring in the urban field was felt in England, where urbanologists had already developed a tradition of applied research in redressing an unequal distribution of resources. Thus when British sociologist John Rex referred to groups with unequal access to the housing market and, by extension, to most urban resources, he started using the Weberian concept of "housing classes"2 This concept caught on, preparing the way for a more critical urban sociology by generating more systematic research on the urban class system and the production of housing. The third, most coherent reconceptualization was attempted by the French. As outsiders to the Anglo-American empirical tradition, and as latecomers to urban sociology, they were more theoretical in their concern, more ambitious in their scope, and perhaps because they were relatively underutilized by the state more critical of the connections between urban questions, state power, and the structure of the economy as a whole. Influenced by Henri kefebvre's critique of urban society in terms of the social reproduction of industrial capitalism, and by Alain Touraine's distinction between different forms of social action and the different levels of analysis appropriate to each, the work of these urban sociologists also showed a heavy overlay of Louis Althusser's contributions to French marxist thought. So their work tended toward large-scale characterization, relating urban phenomena (especially changes in land use, or what the Chicago School used to call invasion and succession) to the dominant structures (particularly the economic structures of monopoly capital and the ideological structures of privatism and "high-rise" symbols of progress) of an advanced capitalist society. 3 All three approaches schematically, the French marxists', the British neo-Weberians', and the American radical empiricists' share a common project which intends to realign urban studies as a whole and has already influenced the work of an increasing number of younger scholars. In reaction to the diffuseness of the field, the new urban sociologists have made some attempt to criticize the lack of a specific "urban" subject and

579 the identification of all phenomena that are located in urban areas as "modern". Thus they are trying to raise urban sociology itself to the level of a scientific endeavor. They have also returned to reading Marx in order to clarify basic concepts. This situates the new urban sociology within an equally emergent political economy, which requires urban sociology to be a more interdisciplinary enterprise (with economics and, to some degree, political science) than it has been. Political economy has directed them toward inquiries about costs, prices, rents, taxes, wages; in short, toward the valuation process of capital itself. Finally, they have been critically re-evaluating the history of urbanization. Rather than merely document the successive emergence of urban forms (e.g., the change from the pre-industrial to the industrial city, or the reproduction of metropolitan urban forms in colonial and post-colonial capitals), their historical analysis focuses on the hegemony of urban forms within social formations and the hegemony of metropolitan culture within the world system as a whole; the rise and decline of particular cities; and the political, ideological, juridical, and economic significance of particular urban forms, especially in advanced capitalist societies. By tying together urbanization, the quest for profit and domination, and the state's attempts to moderate domestic conflict between social classes, the new urban sociology achieves a coherence the field had lacked since Weber typified "the city". However, implicit in this approach, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of economic value, class conflict, and culture, is the question of policy and practice. What will we do with this knowledge?
The Quest for a Subject

Like any crisis, the identity crisis of urban sociology has a long history. Twenty years ago, Gideon Sjoberg called attention to urban sociology's three fundamental problems: the failure to specify the meaning of key concepts, the failure to distinguish between different levels of analysis, and the failure to expand a limited, culture-bound view of urbanization into either a comparative approach or a general theory. Significantly, these issues seem to have plagued the field even in the balmy days of its first practitioners, for as Louis Wirth complained in his classic essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938), "It is only in so far as the sociologist has a clear conception of the city as a social entity and a workable theory of urbanism that he can hope to develop a unified body of reliable knowledge, which what passes as "urban sociology" is certainly not at the present time . . . . The miscellaneous assortment of disconnected information which has hitherto found its way into sociological treatises on the city may thus be sifted and incorporated into a coherent body of knowledge.

580 Incidentally, only by means of some such theory will the sociologist escape the futile practice of voicing in the name of sociological science a variety of often unsupportable judgments concerning such problems as poverty, housing, city-planning, sanitation, municipal administration, policing, marketing, transportation, and other technical issues. TM Neither Sjoberg nor Wirth, however, lost so much confidence in the viability of urban sociology that they questioned the very nature of its subject matter. By the end of the 1960s, the recognition of a common urban crisis in the richest countries, a complementary urban crisis in the poorest countries, and the intensified roles of banks, multinational corporations, and state intervention in both rich and poor countries, pushed some urban sociologists into the more comparative endeavor Sjoberg had sought. But this broadening of perspective also had a consequence Sjoberg may not have anticipated: the loss of meaning of what was specifically "urban". Obviously, "urban" had something to do with cities, but by the end of the 1960s cities represented both a site and a syndrome, a cause and a consequence, a breakdown in social relations and a reconstitution of a common culture. Even in a concrete historical process, such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, there was debate over the degree to which cities should be considered as a consequence, a determinant, or a catalyst of large-scale social change. Characterizing the role of cities in this process carried implications not only for historical judgment but also for evaluating future change. Similarly, the question arose whether cities - in the modern form they have spread across the world - are related more to a particular level of technology (industrialism) or to a specific mode of production (capitalism). Again, the analytic decision implied a certain political choice. But the very congruence, from 1500 to 1900, of urbanization, industrialization, and capitalist development raised the logical possibility that "urban" phenomena could be subsumed by either "technology" or "mode of production" and therefore deserved no study of their own. Empirically, if world-wide urbanization and "metropolitanization" covered the face of every society, then the study of cities p e r s e was superfluous. Methodologically, if cities merely reproduced the contradictions of a given social structure, then the study of cities was essentially identical with studying society as a whole. These troublesome questions were posed in Europe by sociologist Manuel Castells, who was audacious enough to ask, since the "urban" subject was both theoretically and scientifically so deficient, whether there was, indeed, an urban sociology. 5

581 Nevertheless, urban sociologists --- Castells not least a m o n g them - have continued to generate studies under this rubric. The most interesting studies, as Sjoberg might have foreseen, are historical and comparative, though most of the comparison remains implicit in the theoretical models behind the work rather than demonstrated in the work itself. So far, much of the new urban sociology has emerged in case studies of urbanization in the capitalist mode of production, which can be categorized by such subjects as urban planning in the interests of monopoly capital, the relative autonomy of the state, the production of housing as a means of regulating consumption, and urban social movements. Yet several of the case studies are conclusive in both their command of factual detail and their grasp of structural dynamics. In particular, Jean Lojkine's investigation of urban redevelopment in Paris from 1945 to 1972 graphically demonstrates the hidden conflicts between different thctions of capital, between some capitalists and the state, and between capital and labor. These underlie the overt agreements surrounding such issues as the growth of urban planning in the Paris region, the placement of a highspeed rail line (the RER) to service upper-middle-class suburbs and office centers rather than manual workers and factory districts, and the competition over the choice of a site for a high-status, high-rent, high-rise concentration of corporate headquarters that eliminated areas favored by older French firms (les Halles and the Vllle-lXe-arrondissement business districts) to the ultimate benefit of the multinational corporations that advocated new construction at La Defense. 6 Insofar as "urban" retains a specific content in this work, the term still has an unresolved dual identity: as the Iocali;alion of social forces and the conduit of capital and control. The implantation of La Defense, for example, illustrates this multi-dimensionality. Physically, the complex of buildings symbolizes the power of large corporations and the prestige attached to that sector of capital. The amount of capital spent in developing La Defense both productively, as investment in high-rent office space, and unpr0ductively, as payment for showpiece (albeit grotesque) architecture and design simultaneously enhances the profitability of an already lucrative economic sector and exemplifies the anti-social rationale of capitalist expenditures. Moreover, the concentration of development and investment in a single area draws resources which could be used in other projects or other parts of the urban infrastructure (mass transit, workers' housing, cultural facilities, etc.). Needless to say, the decisions which will be made in these corporate board rooms will have important consequences that reach across France and to other parts of the world along established lines of communication and control. In the case of La

582 D6fense, because the land was relatively unoccupied, the development did not displace many tenants. However, urban redevelopment projects similar to La D6fense frequently displace lower-class tenants by higherstatus and higher-rent uses. That relates the development area to both strategies of social control and sites of class conflict. Each of the two meanings of the urban subject - as the localization of social forces and the conduit of capital and control has inspired a particular "wing" of the new urban sociology. While one of these wings can loosely be identified with the French marxist urban sociologists, the other, with some exceptions, has been more popular among Americans. (Although the British neo-Weberians have been actively publishing their research and continuing to ask interesting questions, they have not had the theoretical impact of either the French or the Americans.) In any case, the American studies in the new urban sociology are fewer in number than the French, only implicitly rather than explicitly marxist, and less cohesive as a school of thought. Defining urban as localization, the French studies often concentrate on the question of how space is used in the process of social reproduction. So, for example, they are interested in the everyday mechanisms of urban segregation (of social classes, of mental and manual work, even of men and women), the perpetuation of unequal access to the benefits of an expanding urban infrastructure, and the links between individuals' political ideology and that part of everyday life determined by habitation. On the other hand, Americans probably tend toward seeing cities as conduits of capital investment and labor discipline. They are concerned ,with the growth and decline of particular urban areas, locational shifts of economic enterprises and population, and the role of construction and real estate in the economy. Methodologically, too, the two approaches differ. The French studies have often chosen an analysis which considers the city as a system of social action, but the American studies view the city as it functions within a larger system. Of course, these approaches are influenced by what urban sociologists observe in their respective societies. For the Americans, this includes the presence of many large metropolitan agglomerations, marked changes in the pattern of regional dominance, an institutional history of urban (and suburban) autonomy in certain spheres of action, and the recent succession of urban and fiscal crises. For their part, the French must deal with a highly centralized, Paris-dominated economy, society, and culture; state-capitalized implantations of new regional centers; a more systematic penetration by international capital; and, due to national rather than local financing of social welfare expenditures, the

583 absence of those contradictions which take the form of municipal fiscal 9 crisis. Despite these differences, the growing number of new urban sociology studies in France, the United States, Britain, Germany, and Australia attests to a common core. 7 Perhaps the most basic contribution of the new urban sociology has been to discard as valid subjects those linchpins of classical economics and sociology intrinsic economic values and subjective social actors9 They have been replaced by underlying structures and dynamic, often contradictory, processes. So, in general, the work of the new urban sociologists indicates that studying urban society means studying how cities reinforce, mediate, and articulate the contradictions of particular modes of production, most particularly those of the capitalist mode of production. As Castells suggests, "urbanism" really denotes the culture of industrial capitalism and "urbanization" signifies the integration of all remote regions into the capitalist world system. ~ To me, this approach also implies that the trajectory of both urbanism and urbanization is inextricably interwoven with the history of the United States as core country and as model. Although the new urban sociology still represents a minority of the field, the approach has a certain dynamism which derives from several sources. It enjoys the seriousness, the purposefulness, and the cachet of social critique. Also, it is linked to both empirical research which has produced respected and important findings (e.g., Piven and Cloward's work on the welfare system and on poor people's movements) and theoretical breakthroughs in other fields (e.g., the study of"history from below" and of the state in political economy). Thus the new urban sociology is part of a unified intellectual world-view. The vast improvement this implies can be felt strongly in teaching courses in urban sociology, urban economy, or the inner city. Such courses often reflected the disorganization of the field and the litany of despair inherent in an approach which concentrates on the "social problems" of poverty, ghetto culture, and social pathology. Instead, the new urban sociology focuses on linkages and structures that are readily related to empirical observations of urban blight, the flight of capital, redlining (i.e., the discriminatory mortgage policies of banks), government subsidies, and the dual labor market.

The Emerging Paradigm

Within this problematic of highly interrelated parts, two general approaches can be distinguished: that of urban sociologist Manuel Castells and that of economic geographer David Harvey. Both are histor-

584 ical materialists. For Castells, the four "elements of urban structure" production, consumption, exchange, and institutions are determined by the reproduction of the means of production and the reproduction of the labor force in any given social formation; for Harvey, the "urban process under capitalism" is created through the interaction of capital accumulation and class struggle. 9 While Castells is more eclectic in his sources and his data, ranging in his empirical work from France to Latin America and in his interpretations to every existing type of social formation, Harvey is more judicious and more exact, concentrating on American society and on economic data. Castells' inclusiveness tends to diffuse his framework into definitions and categories whose unification rests on structuralist premises. Harvey's narrower focus produces a more functionalist marxist approach which demonstrates, rather than assumes, connections between trends and structures. They differ, too, in emphasis. Castells - and the studies that he has inspired in both France and the United States tends toward treating the city in terms of the problems of social reproduction; Harvey focuses on the city's role in the production of capital. Just as Harvey emphasizes investment flows, mediating financial institutions, and credit mechanisms, so Castells is drawn to the urban segregation of social classes and the rise of grass-roots political movements. While Castells' work has become influential in the United States, Harvey's analysis has not been so widely diffused in Europe. One reason for this may be Castells' greater productivity, particularly in terms of books rather than .articles, or his peripatetic proselytizing through frequent teaching assignments in America. Then, again, Castells' approach may be in vogue because of its Althusserian framework or its devotion to confrontation politics and "contestatory" social movements, which recalls the street battles of the late sixties and resonates with the "advocacy" planning and "advocacy" architecture of the seventies. If Americans have shown greater receptivity to Castells, then perhaps Europeans, especially the French, show greater insularity vis-~.-vis Harvey. On the one hand, the particular economic structures and financial arrangements with which Harvey deals are specific to the United States. On the other hand, some of the French urban sociologists may be less than willing to entertain alternative theoretical frameworks. As part of the French mode of analysis, Castells' approach accords great significance to political intervention and political class struggle. He recognizes the increasing primacy of the state because it represents a strategic actor (through urban planning), a set of important processes (politics) for the interplay of social forces, and an institutional power

585 center, and he sees every urban social movement as an exercise in taking state power. He emphasizes the relative autonomy of the state. In the state's contemporary susceptibility to pressure by new social movements, Castells infers a basic commitment to provide social goods in a way which is ultimately unprofitable to big capitalist interests. (Here he differs from his colleague Lojkine, who attributes more rather than less influence to the hegemonic class of monopoly capitalists in shaping state intervention.) For his part, Harvey is not oblivious to either the effectiveness of organized resistance to capitalist strategies which forces an anti-capital state intervention or the utility of political action as a strategy to maximize the interests of low-income consumers in the housing market. ~~ Yet he is most interested in the state's role in facilitating investment opportunities (e.g., through banking and monetary policy as well as mortgage guarantees) in order to save capitalists from the unproductive consequences of their own actions. Typical of the difference between Harvey and Castells is their treatment of the current urban crisis. Both agree that the crisis has deeper roots namely, in the structural crises of the capitalist system. But while Harvey sees this as a crisis in capital accumulation, Castells explains it as a crisis in consumption. Harvey links the flow of investments out of urbanized areas in general, and out of the older industrial cities in particular, with cycles of overaccumulation, when so much capital is invested in a certain economic sector that it fails to satisfy the capitalists' requirements for productive investment. At that point, when the invested capital is no longer "productive" for its investors, it must be devalued. Thus the economic value of the built-up urban infrastructure declines, and capital seeks new investment opportunities elsewhere. However, as Harvey points out, the urban infrastructure retains a certain physical and cultural value despite capital devaluation. Thus this capital may be used again, in the future, as a basis for accumulation. In the meantime, as capital seeking its level - of profit - flows out of one sector or city into another, it causes a more rapid devaluation of the old capital which remains in the previous infrastructure and it impels a rush to invest in the new areas. So capital accumulation is responsible for the uneven urban development between, say, the rise of the Sunbelt cities and the decline of the industrial Northeast, or the different patterns of urbanization in developed and underdeveloped countries. In contrast to Harvey's analysis, Castells explains the current situation in terms of social and political factors. In his view, the urban crisis is generated by the state's failure to manage a crisis of collective consumption.

586 Because monopoly capitalists have been largely successful in getting the state to assume the costs of social reproduction, the state becomes the focus of demands for improved access to collective resources in the forms of goods, services, and welfare benefits. Although municipal governments are less and less able to pay for this collective consumption, they bear the brunt of increasingly disruptive demands and they become more and more involved in a permanent role of state intervention. But the state suffers from certain limitations. There are limits imposed, on the one hand, by the big capitalists and, on the other, by state employees to the economic resources the state can make available to pay for its social expenditures, and there are also limits to the legitimacy both sides accord the state so long as it can appear as the "neutral" guarantor of rights and privileges. In short, in Castells' explanation, the state is committed to a degree of intervention whose economic and political costs it cannot afford. Because, as we might insert into Castells' formulation, the city is the weakest link in the capitalist world system, as well as in national economic and political structures, the shortfall takes the form of an urban crisis.~ The difference between these two approaches may be not only a matter of Harvey's and Castells' professional training, but also a result of their prior reading and research. For Harvey, the formative influence seems to have been his earlier research on Baltimore housing markets; for Castells, it was his appropriation, at the beginning of his professional career, of Belgian economist J. Rbmy's concept of collective consumption. ~2 Again, the ensuing conceptualizations also reflect different national experiences. When Harvey studied lower-income ethnic and racial groups who were trying to buy into or maintain their positions in a particular urban submarket of owner-occupied houses, he had to come to grips primarily with private institutions of finance capital and only secondarily with the state. ~3 Castells, faced with the direct role of the French government in creating a new regional center like Dunkerque and the political (though only occasionally successful) mobilization of working-class residents of various quarters of Paris who were displaced by urban renewal, necessarily emphasized the state and social movements. ~4 Nevertheless, these approaches raise certain problems that must be resolved before either of them achieves the sort of general theory toward which they both aspire. One problem concerns the nature of the dynamic underlying the urban process. Both implicitly and explicitly, Castells can claim to be attentive to this problem: implicitly, in terms of his adopting a certain model of the relation of social forces, and explicitly, by examining how space is

587 constantly being changed by this shifting relation. His very insistence on urban social movements as an updated proletarian agent of social change would seem to imply a theory of the urbanization process. Yet his subject conceals the lack of a dynamic. First, despite the axiomatic recognition among all the new urban sociologists that space is neither neutral nor nothingness but a manipulable social relation, Castells' approach tends to simplify space as a reflection - as a means of reproducing existing social forces. Second, in Castells' account of the four elements of urban structure, production, consumption, exchange, and institutions all reflect the dynamic of the capitalist system as a whole rather than produce their own dynamic. Third, Castells treats such a basic production sector as construction and the whole area of real estate as part of "the housing question" and therefore as a problem of consumption. ~5 While this is compatible with the rest of his work (e.g., his explanation of the urban crisis), it does not recognize the active role of construction and real estate in producing economic change and particular urban social formations. J6 All in all, Castells' approach borrows its sense of development from events outside the urban subject. Harvey's approach is theoretically underdeveloped in comparison to Castells', possibly over-emphatic in regard to finance capital, and generally inclined toward reductionism. ~7 However, it has the merit of offering a historical dynamic inherent in his conception of the urban subject. In particular, Harvey evokes the subject of a "built environment" organically related to the cyclical and secular crises of the capitalist economy. This concept, which Harvey defines as the "vast man-made resource system a reservoir of fixed and immobile capital assets to be used in all phases of commodity production and in final consumption, ''~ more actively links urbanization with the dynamics of control over nature, accumulation, competition, and social control than does Castells' conceptualization of the social environment. Harvey understands capitalism's demonic urge to build and rebuild, and how important each new construction is as a promoter of investment and production. Under capitalism there is, then, a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time. The temporal and geographical ebb and flow of investment in the built environment can be understood only in terms of such a process. ~9 Because the built environment both expands and expends capital, it is by

588 definition a fluid and necessary part of the modern world system. In addition to the question of an urban dynamic, there are also problems involved in emphasizing the potential for causing structural social change of urban social movements. First, these movements cannot be proclaimed "contestatory" by definition, as Castells conceives of them. They are frequently not class conscious, the sine q u a n o n of revolutionary social agents in the marxist framework. (Harvey thinks that class-conscious urban social movements may be less typical of American society, where collective action is based on either competitive individualism or community action.) Indeed, urban social movements often pit one non-hegemonicclass against another, so that, far from "class struggle," they act out "internecine conflicts" and protect the "monopoly rents" that one or another lower-class faction enjoys (from its ownership of a desirable albeit inexpensive kind of urban real estate, like single-family houses in stable working-class neighborhoods near the center of the city). 20 Moreover, when urban social movements do attack parts of the dominant capitalist structure, they generally fail even when they are not forcefully suppressed. 2j Such movements may also have the unanticipated effect of reinforcing the very logic of the capitalist system they are attacking. I n the course of my own research on real estate development in Manhattan, l have found examples of two such unanticipated consequences. In both, an urban social movement enjoyed initial success in either establishing or retaining control over a certain type of housing in one case, owner-occupied "brownstone" townhouses and, in the other, manufacturing lofts that artists were able to convert into combined living and working quarters in the face of opposition by large capitalist interests and the indifference of the statetoany other interests. 1n both cases, the initial success led to a long-term increase in property values in the given housing sub-markets. These areas were then selectively redeveloped so as to out-price and over-tax the original residents who had initiated the social movements. 22 Alternatively, if we may consider the popular vote in California in favor of Proposition 13 (1978), which reduced property taxes, as an expression of petty capitalist (as opposed to big capitalist) interests, then even that non-revolutionary but nonetheless non-hegemonic social movement benefited the group of large corporate property-owners far more than it benefited small property-owners. A third problem with the emphasis on contestatory social movements is that dominant groups and social movements do not wax and wane in a perfectly reciprocal relationship; they can gain strength simultaneously. Finally, the emphasis on urban social movements carries the danger of

589 reductionism, of reducing our understanding of class struggle to a conflict over space, even though that space may signify control over certain institutions, or access to certain resources, or, ultimately, control over the collectivity itself. In the short run, the outcome of contestatory social movements may affect what is to be built or what is not to be built in a very small part of the built environment; in the long run, the outcome may affect some redistribution of social resources or some redirection of ideological or political controls. However, it is difficult to imagine that urban social movements formed in the sphere of consumption could play a determining role in restructuring the logic of the capitalist urban system. 23 It would be wrong to overstate the differences between Castells' and Harvey's approaches to urbanization. But it is too easy despite the known correspondences between production and consumption, or accumulation and social control to dismiss their divergence and call them complementary. Certainly, both Castells and Harvey have established the point that urban space is produced deliberately in response to the needs of capital. It may be monopolized by some dominant groups and "liberated" from the possession of non-dominant groups, but as opposed to the conceptualization of the Chicago School urban space never occurs as either a natural or a spontaneous creation. Both Harvey and Castells also discuss the unequal benefits which accrue to hegemonic classes through their manipulation of urban space and urban infrastructure. Again in contrast to the Chicago School and its successors, who were not oblivious to differences in land values and in the physical attractiveness of different areas of the city inhabited by different social classes, Castells and Harvey criticize these inequities, relate them to the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist state, and analyze the dynamic by which such distinctions are continually reproduced. Furthermore, their work demonstrates that the very process of locational choice varies from upper class to lower class, and from monopoly capitalists to competitive capitalists. 24 Both Castells and Harvey are also concerned with the ideological control (the "colonization of consciousness") as well as the control of consumption urbanization permits capitalists to exercisegrosso modo over the work force, 25Obviously, thecity is not only an environment built by and for capital accumulation, but it is also an environment that sustains social reproduction. In both senses the city is, indeed, a "structured environment'. 26

An Implicit Paradigm
The paradigm emerging in Castells' and Harvey's work considers urbani-

590 zation within the theoretical framework of the capitalist mode of production, but it has not yet produced a new, general urban theory. ~7 To some degree, this is due to hypothetical relations which must still be documented (e.g., the investment channels between industrial capital and real estate Harvey's analysis suggests). Yet to some degree, also, the new urban sociologists have not systematically drawn the inferences of their 6wn work, especially the historical studies. They are looking for the connections between cities and a theory of the capitalist state and the capitalist economy. Concepts like the relative autonomy of the state, monopoly and finance capital, overaccumulation, and social reproduction are only parts of the whole they are trying to construct. They have been particularly struck by the qualitative change between two historical urban forms: the pre-industrial, early capitalist city and the modern industrial city. While the earlier cities could be described as concentrations (of activities and of people) or modes (of exchange), the modern cities are different. With the emergence of industrial capitalism, cities become part of a capitalist logic and the capitalist world system. They become active agents in both economic and social reproduction (by fostering, subsidizing, or relocating sites of production and labor reserves); they become the necessary links in a world-wide chain (through the hegemony of the city over the countryside, the industrial center over the commercial town, the metropolitan over the Third World capital). What this view suggests, in short, is an ontological break between the early city and the modern city. Because only the modern city is typical of "urbanization," the classical Weberian type must be falsified. Instead of being autonomous, as Weber pictured the emerging bourgeois city, modern cities are subordinate to a larger system; instead of acting as facilitators of trade, as Weber emphasized, cities actually affect the productivity of capital itself. While the ontological break makes it easier to see the fallacy of the classical view, the caesura is somewhat misplaced. By emphasizing the modern city of industrial capitalism, the new urban sociology's typification of the city's role in capitalist urbanization obscures the roots of this process in pre-industrial capitalism. So the new urban sociologists fall into the same error they criticize; that is, by failing to make the analytic distinction between urbanism, industrialism, and capitalism. At least industrialism can be separated out from the analysis of the urban subject, for four major elements of capitalist urbanization can be traced back to the mercantile or commercial city of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: I ) the city's active role in capital accumulation; 2) the city's actuali-

591 zation of a supply of cheap labor; 3) the permeation of local by national levels in both economy and polity; and 4) coordination by an urban matrix of switches in investment strategy which relate production and consumption in fundamentally new ways. Together, these elements comprise an implicit paradigm of capitalist urbanization which reverses the Weberian emphasis on autonomy, exchange, and the merchant class; expresses the concerns of the new urban sociology; and specifies, without reifying, an "urban" subject. The first element, which concerns capital accumulation, originates in the simultaneous development of capitalist urbanization and the nation state in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In earlier periods of local sovereignty, the virtue of cities over the countryside was that they concentrated population and activity in an efficient and a militarily defensible community. But for the nation-state, the city was advantageous because it provided an accessible, verifiable, and controllable source of income. Moreover, in contrast to rural land, the city even in days of r e n t e s drew capital into a generalized investment structure instead of dispersing it in the seigneurial expenditure patterns of the countryside. Partly, the emergence of this urban investment structure resulted from the decline of the self-sufficient production of the manors (or, in America, from the destruction of the household mode of production), and its replacement by the interdependency of urbanization, which required an increasingly complex set of financial relations to mediate both production and consumption. Partly, too, the city's ability to counteract the tendency for rural landholdings to absorb investment in unproductive or relatively unproductive ways satisfied the fiscal needs of both the mercantile classes and certain parts of the old aristocracy. The city's role in capital accumulation also intensified the commercialization of agriculture in the surrounding countryside by providing markets, products, and outlets for both population and rural surplus capital. But the crucial point is that a capitalist investment structure existed i n n u c e in the commercial city alongside prior economic structures related to trade and to feudal land relations. Eater, the industrial city of the nineteenth century raised the stakes of capital accumulation, magnified the technical possibilities for such accumulation, and concentrated the process in new spatial forms like the factory town and the factory district. The very literalness of these forms as the site of capital accumulation beside the more subtle embryonic patterns of the earlier commercial city - has tended to detract attention from the historical connections between urban real estate and the genesis of capitalism.

592 Today, we are certainly aware of the inter-regional and international movements of capital which make cities the building blocks of accumulation and disaccumulation on a large scale. 2s But even within the city, hierarchies of capital investment develop which are typically different from non-urban social formations. The urban forms of investment are differentiated according to the type and profitability, roughly speaking, of the investment. In place of the farm as a unit of both production and consumption, the city has productive units (factories) and units of consumption (homes). The city's extension into the suburbs maintains and accentuates this division. Furthermore, social classes are integrated into the system of capital investment in different ways, which vary with the amount of capital available for investment and, consequently, with the amount of potential profit. Historically, working-class people have invested their savings in the once-in-a-lifetime purchase of an owner-occupied house; members of the petty bourgeoisie have invested in rental units for lower-income groups ("tenements"); and monopoly capitalists have "developed" huge blocks of land for the highest rentals (especially office buildings and shopping centers). 29 These different patterns of investment are not only determined by the amount of capital available to each class and fraction, but they are also reinforced by financing arrangements through financial institutions and the state. 30 Because the lower groups on the investment hierarchy gain less of a profit than a use-value from their investment (i.e., they are less likely than higher social classes to sell their homes, or to buy and sell real estate, and so to realize a profit), 3~ their capital is more or less drawn into the investment structure as forced savings for accumulation by financial institutions. The development of these urban investment hierarchies is predicated on a paradigm of growth that calls our attention to several important processes. First, it connects urbanization with the dynamic of the capitalist economy: the expansion of capital, the building and rebuilding of physical structures, and the state's ability to finance its increasing social expenditures. Second, the paradigm of growth suggests the economic and ideological significance of indebtedness. On an aggregate as well as on an individual level, the willingness to assume debt depends on the persistence of a growth economy, and, once debt is assumed, it acts as a powerful force of ideological integration into the capitalist society. Simply, on the economic level, people find it rational to become debtors if they can depend on the calculation that, at some point in the future, they will have more capital at their disposal (e.g., from higher wages or from a return on the investment that they are borrowing capital to make) than they have now. A growth economy makes it reasonable to assume

593 that this expectation will be justified. On the social psychological, political, and ideological levels, people who borrow money to buy a home or to invest in real estate develop a stake in the system of private ownership and a set of property-owners' interests. They work and save to repay their debt, they watch state expenditures of property-tax revenues with an eagle eye, and they identify their social security with the rise or decline of property values, thus becoming part of a certain defense of the social order.32 Third, the growth paradigm indicates the coincidence of interests between the state and dominant economic groups. Not only does the state promote investment in growth to help finance its budgets, but it also promotes an alliance on the basis of growth between otherwise antithetical social groups that hope to profit from growth or the consequences of growth (e.g., between bankers, investors in municipal bonds, municipal employees, and building-trades unions). 33 This furthers domestic ideological dbtente, and it restricts political conflict to the defense of respective terrains. So municipal employees defend their jobs, working-class homeowners defend their neighborhoods, landlords and developers defend their prerogatives vis-f_-vis building codes and "market" rents, and the monopoly capitalists defend their large development projects, which provide jobs defended by the construction workers. In the ensuing clashes of interests, the state mediates between the groups contesting a particular terrain. This process illustrates the state's relative autonomy, particularly since city government must woo lower-class residents because of their numbers in the popular vote, satisfy competitive capitalists because of their traditional role in supporting both the local tax base and the base of local political organization (through the "machine" and the clubhouse), and also serve the development needs of big capitalists, who guarantee the region's image and investment viability. So the state's mediation between these groups is not marked by neutrality so much as by the realization that the resources of each group can be mobilized by the adroit management of claims and pay-offs, to the state's own benefit. Once a particular terrain is awarded to a social group, the state guarantees the financing of further investment in this area for that group's benefit. The second element of capitalist urbanization is much easier to describe because the processes of creating and maintaining a labor force are so visible. In general, as each city enters the world-wide urbanization process, it concentrates within its borders an expanding supply of initially cheap and unorganized labor. Most of these workers migrate from the

594 countryside, "pushed" out b y cash crop farming and a rising level of agricultural mechanization. They are also "pulled" into cities by the disparity between (high) urban and (low) rural wages. Living in concentrations around urban factories, these workers comprise a pool of labor which can easily be mobilized and controlled. To some degree, in the early stages of industrialization, urban migrants maintain their rural ties, which keeps them from becoming totally dependent on the city for their survival. (An urban labor force made up largely of immigrants rather than migrants, as in the US, or of migrants from landless families or regions engaged in subsistence farming, suggests lower resistance to the imposition of urban control.) The urban workers also develop their own associational resources and forms of entertainment, which make up an oppositional culture a working-class culture or an urban sub-culture that sustains resistance to labor discipline. Nevertheless, this oppositional culture requires leeway, social and cultural space, as well as a portion of the agricultural surplus, in order to survive. The world-wide scale of urbanization and the rising stakes of capital accumulation in the city destroy this leeway. In the countryside, farmland is urbanized and agricultural production is industrialized; in the city, oppositional cultures are permeated by some urban institutions (such as compulsory public education and early versions of mass entertainment) and controlled by others (the police, political parties, and welfare agencies). 34 The third element of capitalist urbanization refers to the lack of urban autonomy. Although this reverses the classical understanding of cities as autonomous units, the history of urbanization shows a constant relation between urban growth and national markets and national states. The direction of this dependency varies (e.g., Paris after 1789 imposed a national market on France, London a century earlier grew in response to the demands of a national market, eighteenth century American cities like Boston and Philadelphia were eventually subordinated to the national market that early nineteenth century cities like Chicago imposed), but the relation is constant. Moreover, in economic and political terms, the viability of the nation state in its earliest phases depended on this aspect of urbanization. On the one hand, the state had to manage more and more directly the means of collective consumption. The "politics of hunger" which controlled and assured the urban food supply leads from the seventeenth century European state to the welfare state of the twentieth century. 35 On the other hand, the growth of the early capitalist city which contributed to the wealth of the nation state - required its integration into regional and national markets. 36 Early state intervention in the city's politics often benefited the lower social classes, while intervention

595 to enhance the city's position in regional and national markets generally benefited the urban upper classes. Particular arrangements for regularizing this intervention, and the resulting "relative autonomy of the city," developed somewhat differently in different nation states, American federalism, for example, was unique in several ways. It made the institutional structure of the state easily permeable (without political conflicts, for the most part, tantamount to revolution or civil war) by successive dominant types of capitalists (merchants, manufacturers, and financial institutions). Also, the powers and responsibilities of local units created a "fragmented" system in which underprivileged urban social classes contended for a localized set of resources while privileged classes were able to buttress their enclaves in politically and juridically autonomous suburbs. In Australia, to take another example, the institutional structures of federalism made it easier for large, especially rural, capitalists to block the sort of comprehensive planning which might benefit the lower classes concentrated in urban areas. 37 The fourth element of capitalist urbanization refers to the centrality of cities not only as loci of decision-making, communication, or accumulation processes, but as setting a matrix for the transformation of investment strategies. Indeed, the very word "matrix" conveys the critical understanding of the city's relation to a mode of production the new urban studies affirm. Methodologically, the term suggests a structuralist view of the city, not as an historical accretion of physical structures and population, but as a logical construct organizing the basic economic, political, and ideological structures of a given mode of production. 3s Empirically, "matrix" implies a multi-dimensional view of each urban structure as it impinges on every aspect of social life. In this sense, we could "transcribe" Rockefeller Center as part of the urban matrix (as I described the significance of La Dbfense earlier in this essay). Obviously, important decisions on investment strategy are made in the offices located in Rockefeller Center. But that space also represents an important real estate investment, which channeled funds from one economic sector to another; enabled the Rockefellers to derive final, windfall profits from their secret ownership of a subway line (by locating the office complex adjacent to Sixth Avenue); demonstrated the viability of this type of urban development; linked industrial and financial capitalists with speculative builders; and generated high rentals and higher land values in that part of town. Construction of Rockefeller Center also employed large numbers of architects and workers, at low wages, during

596 the height of the Depression. Technologically, Rockefeller Center represented the highest contemporary achievements in architecture, construction, artisanry, and artistry. Finally, the ideological structures of industrial capitalism were symbolized by the esthetics of Rockefeller Center's exterior and interior decoration. An interesting example concerns the large and important mural supposed to have been painted by Diego Rivera. The Rockefellers accepted Rivera's depiction of heroic workers in the mural, but they drew the line when he painted in the head of Lenin. They asked him not to complete the work, they covered the mural, and they eventually demolished it. Another example of an urban matrix which both prepares for and symbolizes capitalist development concerns the neighborhood of Gros-Caillou in Paris, which underwent a complete "morphological" (topographical, demographic, and commercial) transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century? 9 But the point is that the city as a whole, rather than any particular neighborhood or center, acts as a matrix for investment strategy. Generally, switches in investment are either sectoral (involving the switch from one economic sector to another) or geographical (involving inter-regional switches). In a discussion of American economic history, Michel Aglietta indicates that a massive switch from one type of investment strategy to another leads to a transition within the process of capitalist development. For example, the switch from extensive capital accumulation (investment in production, by building up heavy industry) to intensive accumulation (investment in controlled consumption) accompanied the American rise to a high level of industrialization by the end of the nineteenth century. The strategic shift in investment was both facilitated and symbolized by the development of the industrial city. 4~ If we follow shifts in investment from the 1850s to the present, we find two which have had massive consequences for the economic and social systems. First, we find a conclusive shift to large-scale industrial production and the final phase-out of small manufacturers and household production. This led to the building of the American industrial city and the rebuilding of industrial districts in older commercial cities between the late 1850s and the 1890s. From 1890 to the 1930s, we find a second shift. Not only was there a shift in investment (pace Harvey) "from urban infrastructure (plant, utilities, transport facilities) to producers' durables in the production sphere [but there was also] a parallel shift from urban infrastructure (housing, transport facilities, community facilities, and the like) to consumers' durables (automobilies, household equipment, and the like) in the consumption sphere." Facilitating and symbolizing this shift, cities were transformed from centers of production to centers of consumption. 4j Again, the pro-

597 cess of capitalist urbanization varies from country to country. While the decline of investment in older urban infrastructure and the decentralization of industrial production can he traced back in America to the turn of the century, this process of de-urbanization has begun only recently in Japan. We must remember that these massive shifts in investment strategy imply the interconnectedness of all parts of the capitalist urbanization process. There can be no such shift without a choice among alternatives. So we have the uneven development of particular cities and the emphasis on particular kinds of production and particular kinds of consumption. Similarly, each of these shifts bears certain consequences which unify decisions over production and decisions over consumption, or strategies of capital accumulation and disaccumulation and strategies of labor and consumer discipline. Just as the industrial city provided a matrix of factory production, proletarianization, and booms and busts in urban real estate, so it also included in this matrix low-cost, owner-occupied housing and public rental housing, lts successor, the corporate city, set a matrix of office work, consumption, and suburbanization, which generated a massive assumption of debt to pay for an increasingly individualized system of habitation and transportation. From this highly schematic rendering of four major elements that should shape a general urban theory, it is obvious that switches in investment strategy, the relation between local and national levels in both economy and polity, the city's role in concentrating a supply of labor, and its possibilities for capital accumulation are interconnected. Furthermore, these elements were first expressed before industrialization, in the early capitalist city and the rise of the nation state. Yet it is the industrial city which, like the factory, accentuated social divisions and facilitated social control. "It was not just a matter of numbers," Raymond Williams writes of the industrial cities, "these were cities built as places of work: physically in their domination by the mills and engines, with the smoke blackening the buildings and effluents blackening the rivers; socially in their organization of homes ~ 'housing' - around the places of work, so that the dominant relation was always there. "4: To characterize people living in an urbanized world, in either cities or suburbs, is to refer to habitations in which work, pleasure, and leisure are all utilized, satisfied, and manipulated by the same set of techniques. Far from early urban sociology's concentration on the freedom and deviance cities supposedly foster, it is now appropriate to include the city in the study of social control or the "economy of power. ''43 Yet the city, because of its materiality, is different

598 from micrological models of control such as the prison, the clinic, the school, and even the home. In a somewhat orderly way the city situates and perpetuates - locates and pays for the entire mode of control as well as each exercise of power. For the present, this seems to be the significance of the urban subject.

Final Questions
The advantages of the new urban studies are obvious: their critical focus, their connection with political economy, their extension of social class analysis, Harvey's orientation to the built environment, Castells' application of dependency theory to urbanization, and the historical research they make possible. However, aside from the criticisms I have introduced in particular sections of this essay, a few general problems remain. There is a question of the type of knowledge toward which the new urban sociology may be heading. Where, indeed, after their initial investigative impact, can these studies lead? Many of the current French studies of space in the framework of social reproduction are repetitive. Like ethnomethodology, it is questionable whether they can produce any new knowledge. A second problem concerns the possible magnification of class interests, the tendency to see class struggle and hegemony where other interests and heterogeneity may really be more important. This is related to a curious reversal of the Chicago School's fallacy. Just as the early urban sociologists treated some urban social groups as maladjusted, so some of the new urban sociologists view these groups as heroic resisters or embryonic revolutionaries rebels in an urban paradise, an anti-capitalist conscience. To put it mildly, this may be a mistaken appraisal. Another problem that remains unresolved is whether, after the demystification of urbanization and urbanism, there is still an urban culture or an urban myth which is not merely determined by either capital or technology. Europeans such as Henri Lefebvre and Alexander Mitscherlich write convincingly of such an urbanism, This should be incorporated in the new urban sociology. This in turn raises the question, yet again, of urban sociology's distinctiveness as a field of study. Is it the study of social structures and the relations linked to these structures, as all urban sociologists (back to Louis Wirth) imply, or is it the study of a certain subjectivity (urbanism), or is it the congeries of problems, observations, and case studies characterized by a research site (the urban area or the urbanized world) that has lost its distinctiveness? Finally, 1 return to the question 1 raised toward the beginning of this

599 essay the relation between policy and practice. On the one hand, the attraction to grass-roots movements as a means of "contesting" the rule of capital (Castells) suggests a knee-jerk advocacy of every neighborhood battle, every tenants' strike, every local cause to maintain the s t a t u s q u o (which is, itself, the consequence of previous battles and impositions). On the other hand, there is still no macro-level model of an alternative to capitalist urbanization and its defeats of certain interests. The few new articles that discuss socialist urbanization (urbanization in the existing socialist societies) tend toward uncritical or even romantic appreciation of formal rules, drawing-board plans, and "revolutionary" ambiance (depending on whether the discussion centers on Shanghai, M oscow, or Havana). The opposition to capitalist urbanization the new urban sociologists imply does not deal with the likely realities of urban planning notably, the exigencies of private investment and local politics and the determination of what a victory in this area will really involve. The twists and turns of the current South Bronx plan in New York, for example, illustrate the distance that remains between practice and theory. Yet the new urban sociologists have gotten to the root of the present urban crisis in capital itself. At no previous time has urban sociology had such revolutionary implications.

NOTES
I. See, for example, Matthew Edel, "Urban Renewal and Land Use Conflicts," Review qf Radical Political Economics ( 1971), pp, 76 89; Susan Fainstein and Norman Fainstein, eds., The View From Below (Little, Brown, 1972); Chester Hartman, et al., Yerha Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco (Glide Publications, 1974); Herbert Gans, People and Plans (Basic Books, 1968). The archetypal alliance between urban sociology and community-based advocacy was begun around 1950 in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, organized around the issue of racial integration by the Hyde Park-Kenwood community association. See Peter Rossi and Robert Dentler, The Politics o/' Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings (Free Press, 1961). J. Rex and R. Moore, Race. Community and Con/lict (Oxford University Press, 1967); J. Rex, "The Concept of Housing Class and the Sociology of Race Relations," Race (1971), pp. 293 301;ef. Colin Bell, "On Housing Classes," Australian and New Zealand Journal qf Sociology 13 (1977), pp. 36-40. See the empirical research on urban renewal in France in the series "La Recherche urbaine" published by Mouton (Paris and The Hague) between 1972 and 1974, and C. G. Pickvance, ed., Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (Tavistock, 1976). Gideon Sjoberg, "Comparative Urban Sociology," in Robert K, Merton, et al., eds., Sociology Today, vol. 2 (Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 339 56; Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., eds., Cities and Society, rev. ed. (Free Press. 1957), pp. 62-3. Manuel Castells, "Is there an urban sociology?" in Pickvance, ed., Urban Socio/og.r. pp. 33-59, and "Theory and ideology in urban sociology," ibid, pp. 60 84. Jean Lojkine, La Politiqueurbainedans larg'gionparLs'ienne 1945 1972(Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972). It is neither feasible nor desirable to catalogue here the various studies which enter into the new urban sociology or the new urban political economy, but the references cited provide directions to the literature.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

600
8. 9. See Castells, "Theory and ideology," pp. 65 70 and The Urban Question (Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 9 19, 75 85. This s u m m a r y follows Castells, Urban Question and a talk he gave at the Division of Urban Planning, Columbia University, December 1977; David Harvey, "The Urban Process Under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis," International Journal ~[' Urban and Regional Research (1978), pp. 101 31 and Social Justice and the Cit.v (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). David Harvey, "Labor, Capital, and Class Struggle around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist Societies," Polities and Soeiet.v (1976), pp. 265 95. Harvey's discussion of the position of low-income consumers in the housing market in Sot'ial Justice and the Cit~', ch. 2, is a quasi-marginalist formulation for which he has, indeed, been criticized, e.g., Simon Clarke and Norman Ginsburg, "The Political Economy of Housing," Kapitalistate (1976), pp. 72 3. This view, from his talk at Columbia, apparently revises Urban Question, pt. 5, in which Castells emphasizes social disorder and social movements. Harvey's analysis is taken from "The Urban Process Under Capitalism." See also Richard Child Hill, "Fiscal Collapse and Political Struggle in Decaying Central Cities in the United States," in William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers, eds., Marxism and the Metropolis (Oxford University Press, 1978). James O'Connor's The Fiscal Crisis g['the State (St. Martin's, 1973) has been influential in developing a c o m m o n framework a m o n g political economists and urban sociologists. Castells, "Is there an urban sociology'?" pp. 52 4. David Harvey, "The Political Economy of Urbanization in Advanced Capitalist Societies: The Case of the United States," in Gary Geppert and Harold M. Rose, eds., The Social Economy o[" Cities, Sage Urban Affairs Annual Review 9 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1975), pp. 140 ff; D. Harvey and L. Chatterjee, "Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space by Financial and Governmental Institutions," Antipode (1974), pp. 22 36. Manuel Castells and Francis Godard, Monopolville: I'entreprise, I'g'tat, I'urbain (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1974); Castells, Luttes urbaines (Paris: Masp6ro, 1973); Castells, et al., Crise du Iogement et mouvements sociaux: Enqu~te sur la r~gion parissienne (Paris and The Hague: M o uton, 1977); Castells, Urban Question. ch. 14. Cf. the emphasis on movements from below, i.e., the peasants, in some of the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, e.g., Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," New Lelt Review (1977), pp. 25.92. Castells, Urban Question, pp. 145 69. In fact, there has been some spirited theoretical discussion about the role of real estate as either "finance capital" or "property capital" within the capitalist economy and about the distinctions between various categories of urban rent that can be made by extending Marx's analysis of rent for farmland (monopoly rent, absolute rent, and two types of differential rent). F. Al~luier, "Contribution 5. l'6tude de la rente fonci6re sur les terrains urbains," Espaees et soci~tiks 2 (1971), pp. 75 87; Matthew Edel, "Marx's Theory of Rent: Urban Applications," Kapitalistate (1976), pp. 100 124; Harvey, Social Justice and the Cit.v, ch. 5; Franqois Lamarche, "Property development and the economic foundations of the urban question," in Pickvance, ed., Urban Sociology, pp. 85-118; Christian Topalov, Capital et propriktO Joneikre: Contribution it I'ktude des politiques.[bncikres urbaines (Paris; Centre de sociologie urbaine, 1973). See, for example, "The Urban Process Under Capitalism" and Social Justice a n d the City, ch. 6. "The l%litical Economy of Urbanization," p. 120. "The Urban Process Under Capitalism," p. 124. Harvey, "Labor, Capital, and Class Struggle," pp. 291 2; see also Bell, "On Housing Classes," p. 38. Joe Sekul, "The Birth of a Movement: A Study of the Formation of C.O.P.S. in San Antonio, Texas," unpublished paper, University of Texas (1978). Thanks for information to C o m m u n i t y Board 2 (Manhattan) and former chairman Rachele Wall. Harvey ("The Urban Process Under Capitalism," p. 129) finds that, in the 10ng run, accumulation cycles remain unaffected by these types of social movements, even when they are violent. See Harvey, Social Justice and the City, ch. 2 and 5; Castells, Sociologie de I'espace industriel (Paris: Anthropos, 1975); also Lojkine, Politique urbaine clans la rbgion parisienne and Francis Godard, et al., La Rbnovation urbaine ~ Paris: Structure urbaine et logique de classe (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Harvey, "Labor, Capital, and Class Struggle" and Castells, Urban Question, pp. 145 ff. Patrick O'Donnell, "Industrial Capitalism and the Rise of Modern American Cities," Kapitalistate (1977), 91 128.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

601

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

This was the topic of a session, "Methods of International Comparison of Urban Politics," of the Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development, IX World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala, 1978. See, for example, David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins, "Contemporary Dimensions of Uneven Urban Development: A Research Report," paper presented to ibid. Brian Elliott and David McCrone, "Urban Development and Social Structure," paper presented to ihid; Topalov, Capital et propri~t~/~mciere; Harvey, "Labor. Capital, and Class Struggle"; Clarke and Ginsburg, "Political Economy of Housing," pp. 75 9; Robert Fitch, "Planning New York," in Roger E. Alcaly and David Mermelstein, eds., The Fiscal Crisis ~)/'American Cities (Vintage, 1977), pp. 246 84. Harvey, "The Political Economy of Urbanization"; David Thorns, "Problems in the Development of a Comparative Sociological Theory of Urbanization," paper presented to IX World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala. 1978; Martin Boddy, "Political Economy of Housing: Mortgage-Financed Owner-Occupation in Britain," Antipode (1976), pp. 15 23; cf, Christian Topalov, Les Promoteurs immohiliers: Contribution a I'analyse de la production capitaliste du Iogement en France (Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1974). Topalov, Capital et proprikt~" /~)ncii're. Harvey, "The Political Economy of Urbanization," pp. 131 ff.; Michael E. Stone, "Housing, Mortgage Lending, and the Contradictions of Capitalism." in Tabb and Sawers, pp. 179-207. See Harvey Molotch, "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place," American Journal o/Sociologr(1976), pp. 309 32; John H. Mollenkopf, "The Postwar Politics of Urban Development," in Tabb and Sawers, pp. 117 52. See, for example, O'Donnetl, "Industrial Capitalism"; Gareth Stedman Jones, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900; Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class," Journal o['Soeial History(1974), pp. 460 509. Charles Tilly, "Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe," in Tilly, ed,, The Formation ~[" National States in Western Europe (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 380 455. E . A . Wrigley, "A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650 1750," Past and Present (1967), pp. 44 70. See Margit Mayer and Margaret A. Fay, "The Formation of the American NationState," Kapitalistate (1977), pp. 39 90; Hill, "Fiscal Collapse"; Frances Fox Piven, "The Urban Crisis: Who Got What and Why," in Alcaly and Mermelstein, eds., Fiscal Crisis, pp. 132 44; Ann R. Markuscn, "Class and Urban Social Expenditure: A Marxist Theory of Metropolitan Government," in Tabb and Sawers, pp. 90 111; Leonie Sandercock, Cities/or Sale: Property, Polities, and Urban Planning in Australia (Heinemann, 1976). Cf. Castells on Althusser's explication of Marx's use of "'capitalism" ("as a particular type of matrix . , ."). "Theory and ideology," p. 67 n. Information on the Rockefellers' connection with the subway from Robert Fitch. O. Zunz, "Etude d'un processus d'urbanisation: Le quartier du Gros-Caillou ~ Paris," Annales. ILS. C. 25 (1970), pp. 1024 65. "Phases of US Capitalist Expansion," New Le[? Review (1978), pp. 17 28. Harvey, "The Urban Process Under Capitalism," pp. 122 3. The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 220. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish." The Birth o['the Prison (Pantheon, 1977); articles on the Fiat and Volvo factories, among other articles, in Lotus International: Quarterly Architectural Review (Milan) 12 (1976); Robert M. Rakoff, "Ideology in Everyday Life: The Meaning of the House," Politics and Society (1977), pp. 85-104. On the pre-industrial origins of the urban spatial matrix as a means of social control, see Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia." Design and Capitalist Development (MIT Press, 1976).

Theory and Socieo' 9 (1980) 575-60 I Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands