Robert W. Lake

Negotiating local autonomy

Abstract The political apathy of the late 20th century is being offset by a counter-movement seeking to replace technocratic + political decision making with localized citizen activism. The objective of this movement is to expand the scope of local autonomy, defined here as the capacity of localities to control the social construction of place. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques, increasingly used in public policy decision making and implementation, offer the normative potential for expanded local empowerment through validation of alternative value structures and modes of discourse. If ADR reduces the salience of rational-technical discourse in public policy making, then adoption of ADR should contribute to local enfranchisement, producing greater local control over the construction of place and augmenting the expression of local autonomy. As evidenced in the case of negotiation with local communities over the siting of hazardous waste facilities, the empowering potential of ADR has been subverted in the process of its implementation by the state. To explain the failure of ADR to empower localities in practice, I identify a series of structural barriers to local autonomy embedded in the states negotiation process. Contrary to ADRs theoretical inclusivity and normative embrace of parallel discourses, these structural barriers undermine local autonomy by reasserting the dominance of rational-technical discourse in the policy-making process. The states success in controlling negotiations to maintain pliable communities, however, is short-lived. When understood as a continuing and constitutive relation between the local and the non-local, local autonomy that is blocked by truncated negotiations finds expression through other means.

Bring back big government

Despite widespread claims of its demise, the national state is the scale of the state institution best able to marshal the political, discursive and material resources necessary to achieve goals of social justice, defined as a decrease in income inequality, at local, national and global scales. The appearance of the withering away of the state is deceptive, since it is the state itself that is enacting the distribution of functions that some observers interpret as a reduction in state power. The arguments for a return of big government are both strategic and tactical. Strategically, central government has been responsible for every major social policy advance in the United States in the twentieth century. Tactically, the institutions comprising decentralized governance, including local governments, non-profit foundations and community-based organizations, are inadequate to the task. The role of big government in pursuit of social justice entails discursive and regulatory functions, each in turn suggesting an attendant political project for academics and activists. What is at stake is not a quantitative redistribution of state power but a qualitative redirection of the purposes to which that power is applied. Uncritical insistence on the end of the nation state may create a self-defeating self-fulfilling prophecy that conceals important opportunities for political realignment. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

NEEDED: GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH ON URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

According to United Nations projections, six billion of the worlds nine billion people in the year 2050 will live in cities, a tripling of the urban population over current levels in just two generations. Urbanization at this unprecedented scale poses simultaneous challenges of social and economic destitution and massive environmental degradation. These twin perils, in turn, have prompted calls from myriad quarters for research and action promoting urban sustainability. Geographers, however, and urban and economic geographers in particular, appear loathe to take up the challenge. This reticence may be explained, in part, by the fact that sustainability is a chaotic concept plagued by multiple definitions corresponding more often to political interests than to substantive considerations. It is further explained as the legacy of sub-disciplinary compartmentalization, such that geographers working in any of the multiple specializations encompassed by sustainability—scholars of first-world cities, of third-world urbanization, of environmental or ecological processes, or political ecology—rarely encounter one another and even less frequently find opportunities for the synthetic, cross-disciplinary analysis implicated in an understanding of urban sustainability. But accelerating urbanization and its potentially cataclysmic consequences continue apace, neither deflected nor deterred by our disciplinary paralysis. The replication and expansion of unsustainable forms and practices of production, consumption, and reproduction continue even as geographers allow external debates to define and curtail our disciplinary agendas. Yet geography, with its shared traditions of society-space and

THE FINANCIALIZATION OF URBAN POLICY IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

URBAN POLICY IN CONTEXT It is customary to ascribe responsibility to a sitting president for the policy enactments rolled out during that president’s term in office. To do so, however, neglects the effect on policy of historical context and path-dependency. Assigning ownership of policy to the president in office at the moment of its enactment presumes that each chief executive starts with a clean slate, unaffected by the flywheel of history. The Obama administration’s urban policies, no less than those of prior administrations, owe much of their character and methods to decisions and events that predated his ascendance to office. And as with most previous presidents, the predominant influence has been the subordination of urban and social policy to the needs of the economy. When James Carville famously announced “It’s the economy, stupid” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he was certainly right — but for very wrong reasons. He wasn’t wrong because he overstated the importance of the economy on the election outcome, but because he understated the extent to which economic imperatives dominate all other considerations on the presidential agenda. Focusing on the political consequences of economic recession and recovery looked like a good election strategy in 1992, but it missed the forest for the trees. It ignored the subordination of social and urban policy to economic policy—what Jessop calls the “ecological dominance of the economy” (Jessop, 2002, p. 24)—that had been developing since the oil shocks and global economic crisis of the 1970s, accelerated under Ronald Reagan’s draconian budget cuts during the 1980s, and took unquestioned predominance over every aspect of government policy with the structural economic crisis that awaited Barack Obama in January 2009.

Racial Transition and Black Homeownership in American Suburbs

Home ownership has traditionally served as an efficient wealth generating mechanism for the American middle class. Recent data indicating an increase in the metropolitan area black population living in the suburbs raise two questions: is black suburbanization equivalent to home ownership, and does black suburban homeownership lead to equity accumulation and the generation of wealth? These questions are addressed through analysis of a national sample of suburban housing units surveyed in 1974, and again in 1975, as part of the Census Bureaus Annual Housing Survey. As of the mid-1970s, black suburbanization has not been entirely synonymous with homeownership nor has homeownership automatically served the wealth generating function for blacks that it has provided for earlier suburbanizing aspirants to the middle class.

Legitimation Conflicts: The Politics of Hazardous Waste Siting Law.

The meaning of law resides not in the statute but in its interpreter. The mode of interpretation used by a particular agency of the state in a particular instance varies from interpretation based on abstract principles to interpretation guided by local contingency. These modes of interpretation are associated with conflicting and mutually exclusive forms of state legitimation. Law and regulation as written, adjudicated, and implemented provide a text that can be read as an indicator of how, and in whose favor, the conflicting legitimation needs of different levels of government have been resolved in particular instances. We illustrate this conceptualization of law with regard to federal-state-local conflict over hazardous waste facility siting. The particular form that hazardous waste law takes in particular places represents the political resolution of conflict among different agencies of the state responding to competing sources of legitimation.

Who says? Authority, voice, and authorship in narratives of planning research

Recent developments in communicative planning theory and participatory research methods emphasize collaboration between researcher and research subject in the process of knowledge production. We ask how the ideal of collaboration that is integral to the process of data collection extends to the authorial phase of planning narratives and we identify ethical, pragmatic, and substantive justifications for collaborative authorship. The multidisciplinary literature on the city reveals a variety of approaches to authorship including empathetic evocation, selective deployment, dialogic collaboration, and uninterpreted transcription. More successful collaboration might require the avoidance of abstraction, an emphasis on contextualization and intersubjectivity, and a reimagining of social science from inquiry to conversation.

Aging Suburbs and Black Homeownership

The 30 years since rapid post-World War II suburban residential development began have seen an in creasing diversification in the characteristics of the suburbs. The principal dimensions of diversification include the age of housing, age of the population, and distance from the central city. Since suburbanization proceeded outward from the central city, the signs of this aging process are most pronounced in the inner suburbs, with densities and an aging population. As first-round suburbanites progress through the life cycle, their housing preferences can be expected to change, resulting in a large supply of older housing on the market. The primary source of demand for these units in the inner suburbs appears to be the upwardly mobile black middle class seeking to leave the central city. While black suburbanization is in creasing in some localities, however, black demand appears to be below the level expected based on income. In suburban home purchase, the availability of equity associated with previ ous homeownership may be a better index of buying power than current income. Historical limitations on black home ownership thus continue to limit black suburban home purchases. Public policy initiatives are needed to counteract these trends, facilitate middle class black migration, and contribute to the viability of the inner suburbs.

Methods and moral inquiry

Despite a consistent and pervasive concern with analytic method, geography and the social sciences in general lack an adequately developed method of moral inquiry. When researchers working across a variety of political and ideological perspectives, for example, equally embraced the analytical turn in mid-twentieth century geography, the considerable disagreements among them rested not on methodological but on political and moral grounds. But while all the protagonists in this debate presented themselves as moral actors, their moral judgments were exogenous to their analytical methods, and none of those methods provide a usable way to evaluate their respective moral claims. The legacy of positivism and its debates is to make us believe that the challenge we face is to become better methodologists, leaving unresolved the problem of how to become better moral agents, a question raised by John Dewey nearly a century ago. Rephrasing the question in this way encourages us to stop thinking of the moral question as a search for means to achieving desired outcomes, instead elevating moral inquiry as an end in itself. Such a shift changes the problem from knowing and representing the world so as to point toward moral outcomes and instead expands our ability to produce moral knowledge. If our challenge is not about making moral judgments but rather about pursuing moral inquiry, what is needed is a method of moral inquiry, one that Dewey located in science understood not as an analytic method but as democratic practice.

The Fair Housing Act in a Discriminatory Market The Persisting Dilemma

Abstract The Fair Housing Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 provides an important remedy for the individual homeseeker encountering overt racial discrimination in the housing market. However, it is insufficient in scope, assumptions, and ameliorative approach to counter systemic bias in housing market information channels. Data from a survey of 1,004 suburban New Jersey homebuyers indicate that unequal access to market information raises search costs for black homebuyers while reducing equity accumulation upon resale. An affirmative policy initiative is required to encourage development of an unbiased institutional structure for disseminating market information.