David Fasenfest

Community Politics and Urban Redevelopment: Poletown, Detroit, and General Motors

Faced with the imminent loss of its industrial base, Detroit undertook the Central Industrial Park Project to prepare a site for a proposed General Motors assembly plant. By recalculating the benefits and costs involved in that project, this article raises questions concerning the appropriateness of using benefit cost analysis as the sole determinant of local redevelopment policy, and offers a framework for understanding community power in the light of the experiences of Detroit. Rejecting pluralist and reformist notions of community power that focus on who directly benefits, this article suggests that the locus of community power rests with those factions in the community that succeed in maximizing their potential for future gain. Furthermore, any examination of community power at any given moment must also include an analysis of past outcomes. The range of possible outcomes in the present is constrained by the nature of past confrontations between factions within the community.

A Typology of Suburban Economic Development Policy Orientations

This article explores variations in economic development goals and orientations among suburban governments and the impact of these on economic development programs. The research was conducted among suburban officials in the Chicago Metropolitan area who responded to a survey in 1987. The results of the survey show that suburbs can be divided into five types based upon their economic development policies: aggressive, regulatory, cooperative, retentive, and reactive. These general policy orientations were found to affect the specific city government staffing, planning, activities, fiscal programs, and regulation related to economic development in the community.

An Anatomy of Change and Transition: The Automobile Industry of Southeast Michigan

At one time Southeastern Michigan was characterized by a rapid decline in manufacturing jobs and was labeled a typical rust-belt region over-dependent upon one sector of industrial production. By the end of this century in almost twenty years the region has become a center of high-tech activity, an area of increasing employment in manufacturing, and an example of a revitalized and restructured industry. The root of this transformation is found in the way the industry was restructured in order to confront its problems and, among other things, in the way it increasingly relied on a more flexible structure of engineering and production led in part by smaller and independent businesses. But this transformation has also meant a significant change in the kinds of work performed and the skill sets needed, and the need to revise how workers are to receive education and training to ensure a workforce able to address the workplace of the future.

Critical Perspectives on Local Development Policy Evaluation

Local economic development policies and programs should integrate the reality that values are inherent in the design and conduct of any evaluation. This article outlines the content of several attempts in the subsequent articles in this issue to define alternative strategies and methodologies for evaluation. Some of these articles provide concrete examples of such methods; others offer parameters for and considerations on new methodologies and factors that should be included. Taken as a whole, this collection of articles represents a first stab at seeking an answer to the question, What are the benefits to the public of programs funded by public funds?

Emergency Management in Michigan: Race, Class and the Limits of Liberal Democracy

What is it about Michigan and water? Michigan, the Great Lakes state, a state with 3288 miles of coastline, a state within which there are almost 63,000 lakes of all sizes, with 98 lakes over 1000 acres and 10 lakes over 10,000 acres (for reference, that is over 15 sq. mi. or 40 sq. km), a state that is bordered on three sides by Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan and Huron) and very close to a fourth (Erie), a state arguably with an abundant source of free water, perhaps the most of any state and perhaps many countries. And yet, its residents suffer over access to water, over the availability of clean drinking water on demand. Access to water may well be the most important challenge facing the globe, to the clean and safe water required to sustain life. We are made up of water (estimates range from 50 to 75% of our bodies, depending on age, gender, weight, height and fitness level), and access to safe water is critical. We use it to drink, cook, bathe, and a host of other activities we often take for granted. And yet, due to a range of environmental problems and the spread of global poverty, we face serious challenges. ‘In a world of unprecedented wealth, almost 2 million children die each year for want of a glass of clean water and adequate sanitation’ (Watkins, 2006: abstract). ‘As human populations continue to grow, regional conflicts over water, ecological degradation, and human illness and death are becoming more frequent and serious’ (Gleick, 1998: 571). Given the abundance of water in Michigan, one could not be faulted for assuming this is one place where these concerns are, at worst, far into the future. Yet, Michigan has become the proving ground for neoliberal expansion and the taking of critically important social resources for private gain. For some time now, concerns have been raised by conservationists and citizen groups who question the appropriation of ground water by bottling it and selling it as spring water. Nestlé Waters North America has wells in Michigan that draw water (some argue by drilling under the Great Lakes), bottling about 700,000 gallons a day at its Ice Mountain facility, and more in its operations in Guelph, Ontario. ‘The question is whether bottling water from the aquifers that feed the lakes, the largest repository of fresh water on Earth, should be seen as ordinary human consumption, commercial production, or export of a treasured natural resource’ (Lydersen, 2008). And this activity goes on unabated. A recent study published by Green Lifestyles.org (Truman, 2015) finds that:

Government, governing, and governance

Government: the office, authority or function of governing. Governing: having control or rule over oneself. Governance: the activity of governing. Accordingly, governance is a set of decisions and processes made to reflect social expectations through the management or leadership of the government (by extension, under liberal democratic ideals, the will of ‘the people’ as they rule themselves). There are many issues implicit in this set of relationships whose core revolves around the notion of citizenship as this defines the body politic over which claims of self-rule apply. In the most general sense we have the difference between a liberal democratic view that the government (state) serves citizens who have a natural claim on services as a benefit and right of citizenship on the one hand, and on the other the counter enlightenment view often associated with fascism: that the citizen must serve the state and has no rights other than those granted by the state. In what may be called the American model citizenship is a broadly endowed set of rights representing potential claims for benefits, as defined by the state. The result is that in the USA what constitutes a valid claim of citizens is contested, and then the question of who qualifies to have claims met is debated. This offers us an opportunity to understand a number of pressing issues hotly contested: what is the proper role of government, who should have the right to make claims, how exclusionary or inclusionary we should be as a society, how are rights defined and defended, to name but a few. The current socio-political manifestation of these issues is struggles over immigration policy (and the recent reactionary policies passed in Arizona), the Tea Party Movement (if such a thing exists ‐ perhaps more properly, a right-wing populism mixed with aggressive libertarian views), the ongoing debates over health care reform, and election finance reform (the last speaking to the issue of whose voice is loudest, and by implication who is a citizen protected by these generic rights imparted in the American model). Add to this mix the BP ecological, social and political disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and oddly we have an opportunity to critically reflect on government and governing. Let us consider these separately. A recent US Supreme Court ruling found that corporations have the same legal rights as other ‘individuals’, and campaign finance laws

Gender and Class Formation: Female Clerical Workers

Marxist categories, emphasizing class relations, essentially ignore the ways in which gender relations shape class struggle and class formation of women workers. Accounts of class formation use indicators such as unionization and strike activity as a yardstick of class capacities, thus denying the particular conditions women workers face under a dual system of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. Women are a significant percent of the total work force and an increasing percent of the total unionized work force. Yet women work in occupations which have been regularly viewed as nontraditional arenas for unionization. Our analysis looks at the labor process and gender domination as mechanisms of control within the workplace. We argue that an understanding of the differential forms of womens struggles should consider how capital structure and labor markets affect organizational capacities of women workers, and how the degree of gender domination corresponding to technically and nontechnically controlled workplaces shape the organizational form of resistance taken by female workers.

Planning for development: An assessment of the economic development district planning process

This article contributes to the economic development evaluation literature by providing a comprehensive process evaluation of a significant federal economic development planning program, the Economic Development Administrations funding of planning processes for Economic Development Districts (EDDs). This program represents one of the largest and oldest continuing federal grants designed to foster planning efforts. The evaluation concludes that the overall quality of the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) process and resulting plans appears high, that EDDs focus on activities central to national goals, and that most stakeholders consider such activities effective in increasing cooperation and communication within the region. However, EDDs have not been completely successful in ensuring that CEDS committees fully represent their communities, policies outlined in the CEDS do not appear to match needs and goals as closely as would be desired, and the larger community tends to be unaware of valuable EDD activities.

Neoliberalism, Globalization and the Capitalist World Order

We often forget how fast things change; for example, my father was born at a time when a wagon ride to the major city center 50 miles away took half a day and by the time he died almost a century later he could travel across a major ocean and traverse a continent in the same time. Those of us old enough to recall having to literally cut and paste together edits on our work know that the “cut” and “paste” features on most word processing software is a reference that most undergraduates cannot understand in their literal sense. My teenage son recently saw a rotary phone in a communication museum and pondered how you make a call, and it is only recently that he has become comfortable with telling time on an analog watch (who knows what he makes of old war films with “bandits at four o’clock” ‐ is that a reference to some appointment or anticipation?). In much the same way we get wrapped up in current debates and discussions over globalization, the internationalization of production, and the spread of capitalism as it penetrates all corners of the globe. Empires were built on commerce and there is no need to review the history of societies developing the fastest and safest means to bring goods to market ‐ whether it was the building of roads and garrisons to ensure the flow of goods toRome,guardingthetraderoutesacrossAsia,ordevelopingfasterandmoreefficientmeans of transportation over water. Early European empires grew out of trade and conquests, and early stages of capitalist development were inexorably tied to increasing global markets (primarily for the raw materials that fed the engines of production, and to some smaller extent as the outlet for the goods produced).The ability to utilize transportation, whether the land trade routes across Europe and between Europe and Asia, the inland waterways of northern and central Europe, or conquering the oceans to link continents, all contributed to the growth of great commercial empires. We need not repeat here the lessons of global processes so ably detailed in grand works of epic (and epochal) proportion by scholars like Braudel (1992a [1979], 1992b [1979], 1992c[1979])andWallerstein(1974,1980,1989).Itisenoughtopointoutthatsomeform

The Glocal Crisis and the Politics of Change

The term ‘glocal’ seems to have originated in business circles, often attributed to the Japanese business practice of expanding global enterprise by focusing on local conditions. Of late it also comes to mean how local actors can organize activities in the locality to counter the effects of globalization on economic and social vitality. Some may worry that glocalization runs the risk of generalizing the global into the local to defuse local cultural differences, and indeed the increased migration flows between more and less developed countries, the ever expanding internationalization and standardization of consumption, and the uniformity of cultural symbols that threatens local variation and undermines the intergeneration transmission of social practices and norms are a threat. That is, as global capital tries to appropriate local differences in the quest for sales the consequence is a bleeding and blending of those differences into international products. But glocal also evokes oppositional politics, the politics of local first by recognizing that in the middle of this globalizing process the locality can assert itself. It means advocating for the consumption of locally produced food to support farmers in the area over crops shipped half-way around the world. It means looking at the local content of production in the goods we purchase, especially those that have a small ecological footprint and promote sustainability. It means simply drinking coffee at the locally owned and operated coffee house and passing on the many outlets of corporate coffee purveyors that seem to pop up everywhere. Implicit in this effort is a desire to retain local character as well as support local economies to withstand the vagaries of global standardization. Ritzer warns us of the process of standardized reduction in quality of all things in our economic and social world when he points out that ‘McDonaldization ... is the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.’ (1993: 1) The cultural challenge is well summed up by looking at an innovative art project out of Canada which tries to tackle the ubiquity of images and to form unique and (as their name implies) locally focused representations of the collectivity out of individual visions.