Kevin R. Cox

From Localised Social Structures to Localities as Agents

The paper is an attempt to clarify the concept of locality for further research by investigating two common meanings of locality: locality as localised social structure and locality as agent. The first is developed through linking local dependence to territorial forms of the division of labour; to enable this a new concept, ‘the scale division of labour’, is introduced. This concept describes what roles in the social division of labour exist at different scales, and hence of what social relations the localised social structure consists. The locality as agent concept is developed from the idea of locally dependent actors with interests in the same locality forming an alliance, acting together to develop and implement strategies to further their interests. This avoids spatial fetishism because locality was first defined not in physical terms, but as localised social structure.

Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development

The study of urban politics in the US is now dominated by issues of local economic development. These are situated analytically with respect to a more global space economy. This is the New Urban Politics. The central logic of the New Urban Politics is one of cities or communities competing for mobile capital. This competition supposedly has adverse distributional consequences for those living in cities or communities. Three areas of critical contention are focused on: the identity of the competing agents; the concept of firm competition underpinning the central idea of mobile capitals; and the distributional consequences of the competition for those capitals. Serious problems in abstraction and in the concept of capital adopted in this literature are identified.

Housing Tenure and Neighborhood Activism

In the literature on neighborhood activism, common hypotheses are that home ownership is a major explanatory variable, and that this is due to a concern for the home as an investment. The first hypothesis is validated but the second is not. Rather, the greater activism of homeowners when confronted by problems in the neighborhood stems in all likelihood from transaction cost barriers to relocation. Concern for the home as an investment, on the other hand, has little to do with the emergence of neighborhood problems and seems to be mainly a function of length of residence.

Urban development, collective consumption and the politics of metropolitan fragmentation

Abstract The territorial partition of the metropolis is a theme central to discussions of urban problems in the US. Metropolitan political fragmentation per se is far from understood, however. Theories of metropolitan political fragmentation have tended to emphasize interests in consumption to the neglect of matters of production. Moreover, the role of state managers tends to be marginalized in such theories. This paper situates an actual politics of metropolitan fragmentation in relation to the two dominant discourses of contemporary urban theory: the politics of local economic development and the politics of collective consumption. Consideration is paid to pressures for territorial organization emanating from coalitional forces that span the state-civil society boundary. These conceptual themes are examined concretely through a detailed study of post-war patterns of territorial organization in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio. While integration of the metropolitan area in terms of the provision of water and sewerage for local economic development projects has been a project of the metropolitan growth coalitions and the city of Columbus, that integration has only been possible to the extent that interests in collective consumption or, more specifically, in education, have been politically neutralized.

Territoriality, politics and the ‘urban’

Abstract While a central category in the human sciences, including political geography, the urban is for the most part a curiously unexamined one. Using the very different arguments of Saunders and Harvey as its point of departure this paper examines the defensibility of a specifically urban politics. Saunders had argued against and Harvey in favor. Harvey’s approach has the merit of being anchored by a carefully thought out understanding of the relation between society and space. But wile this means, qua Saunders, that politics is necessarily about space, it does not mean that there is a necessarily urban politics. Interests in space are rarely in the specifically urban. Some may find it convenient to elaborate arguments that assume that there is something called the urban and that it corresponds to the causally significant. In some national contexts, like the US, these arguments may appear more plausible than elsewhere. But for the most part the structures of socio-spatial relations in which people and firms have interests can only be reduced to the urban with difficulty.

The Spatial Components of Urban Voting Response Surfaces

tion to a body of substantive case studies than for their contribution to theory, much remains to be done. This paper attempts to fill part of this gap in existing urban-oriented geographic research. The effort is made to provide both a general overview of the processes producing the geographical configuration of the urban voting response surface and the spatial components making up that surface, and to provide a more detailed examination of one of those components, the so-called neighborhood effect. Specifically, four objectives are pursued: (1) to provide a brief though critical review of the existing literature on the spatial structure of urban voting response surfaces, (2) to develop a conceptual model of the forces producing such surfaces on the basis of this review, (3) to present a method of modeling different components of the voting response surface, and (4) to inquire into the city-wide forces affecting the significance of those different components.

Locality and community: Some conceptual issues

Abstract Locality studies opened up important new avenues of research but also provoked as yet unanswered questions. One of these concerns is precisely the specificity of locality as distinct from its generic formation by larger social forces. Local social structures, the territorialization of politics and the appeal of “community” are elements explored in seeking to pin down the nature of local specificity.

Competition and Cooperation in Mediating the Global: The Case of Local Economic Development

The broad concern of this paper is the development of modes of cooperation in competitive contexts. The concrete vehicle for examining this is local economic development policy in the United States, in particular the projects of inward investment that have been its primary expression. This foregrounds the character of social organization as necessarily spatial organization: organization in this case for mediating inward investment. The paper shows how the socio-spatial contexts of agents result in problems of social integration and how they influence the particular forms of cooperative structure adopted in order to solve those problems.

Residential Relocation and Political Behavior: Conceptual Model and Empirical Tests

A conceptual model of the effects of residential relocation of voters upon their voting behavior is elaborated; in this model relocation is related directly to instability of voting preferences, susceptibility to short-term influences and to the weakness of a neighborhood or contextual effect. The interaction ef fects of voluntary organization affiliation and political involvement are also discussed. A number of hypotheses are derived from the conceptual model and tested with a nonparametric measure of association on the basis of survey data from Columbus, Ohio. It is found that the major hypotheses are sustained though the data on the interaction effects of involvement are more ambi guous.

Residential mobility, neighborhood activism and neighborhood problems☆

Abstract A common idea in urban studies is that of a trade-off between relocation and locally based political activism as alternative means of coping with residential stress. This idea is evaluated empirically and then treated critically as an expression of more fundamental, less readily apparent social relations. To evaluate the degree to which relocation and neighborhood activism are substitutable strategies, simple behavioral models are tested with survey data for Columbus, Ohio. From this it appears that housing tenure plays a strategic role in the trade-off: in the presence of neighborhood problems owners are much more likely to be activists than renters: renters, on the other hand, are much more likely to express an intention to move than are owners. The explanation probably lies in the differential transaction costs owners and renters confront on relocation. One criticism of behavioral models is their spatial and temporal boundedness. This can be taken care of by the insertion of contextual variables. Nevertheless this leaves open the questions of precisely why those contexts and precisely why those individual interests in terms of which people respond to those contexts. Failure to ask those questions betrays a particular epistemological position, that of subject-object separation, which blinds the investigator to the socio-historic character of individuals and social contexts and, indeed, of his/her own conceptions of individual and society. An alternative epistemological position is therefore outlined in which the subject-object and hence the investigator-investigated and individual-society dichotomies are collapsed. Individuals are now individuals only by virtue of the social relations in which they stand to each other. The deciphering of those relations makes plausible the view of conflicts over neighborhood issues as underlain by the pursuit of class interests. The important question now becomes: why do residents pursue essentially individualistic strategies such as relocation or neighborhood coalition rather than class strategies?