A Spirit of Urban Capitalism: Market Cities, People Cities, and Cultural Justifications

A Spirit of Urban Capitalism: Market Cities, People Cities, and Cultural Justifications Kevin T. Smiley, The University at Buffalo* Michael Oluf Emerson, North Park University Urban Research & Practice DOI:10.1080/17535069.2018.1559351 *Corresponding author. Mailing Address: Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo, Park Hall 430, Buffalo, NY 14228. E-mail address: [email protected]. Phone: 713-453-9292. 1 A Spirit of Urban Capitalism: Market Cities, People Cities, and Cultural Justifications Abstract Diverse urban theories discuss how economic processes shape conceptions of a city, but less research focuses on how pragmatic situations of urban life contribute to the characterisation of cities. We argue that pragmatic justifications reify socially constructed meanings of cities by creating a “spirit of urban capitalism.” This framework conceives of two spirits: the market city, which aligns with neoliberal assumptions, and the people city, which foregrounds a resident- focused model. Using case studies of Copenhagen and Houston, we showcase how these conceptions of cities are justified by elites and residents, and thereby build empirical scaffolding connecting urban economies and cultures. Key Words: Max Weber; Urban Planning; Urban Sociology; Copenhagen, Denmark; Houston, Texas, USA; Market Cities and People Cities 2 A Spirit of Urban Capitalism: Market Cities, People Cities, and Cultural Justifications Introduction Studies of cities primarily have investigated the ecology and political economy of cities showing that the city itself – not just a sum of its neighborhoods nor a global network – is a place in which social action is conditioned, capitalist enterprise is engineered, and government can have decisive influence (Harvey 1973; Logan and Molotch 2007; Scott and Storper 2015). This conception of the city often begins and ends with the economy, and is focused on how elites and other power brokers carry out their goals, particularly to maintain a neoliberal and growth- centered city (Logan and Molotch 2007; Harvey 2012). Although there is a rich tradition of investigating critiques of cities (e.g. Fainstein 2010), studies focus less on the ways in which a more diverse group of urban residents support (rather than oppose) the capitalist model characteristic of many postindustrial cities. Across the research on urban political economy, it is unclear how a conception of the city operates in relation to culture, especially from across the spectrum of sociopolitical power, and how that in turn might connect to urban capitalism. Our primary goal in this article is to theorise how cultural justifications from a wide range of city residents provide meaning-making structures that not only make sense of the capitalist order for diverse populations in cities, but also reestablish its primacy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Additionally, while these structures underwrite much of urban life, they also orient critiques to the local configuration of capitalism. More broadly, this article seeks to provide a sense of the conception of a city, one that centers cultural meanings in relation to economic processes. We aver that the cultural has a cumulative character in cities, what we term, extending Weber and Boltanski’s work on culture and economy (Weber 3 2002; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), the “spirit of urban capitalism.” The importance of identifying the spirit of urban capitalism is to understand how culture and economy intertwine in the city by underwriting social structures and cultural justifications that guide action in the city. Moreover, we argue that the spirit of urban capitalism is diverging in postindustrial cities, and we identify two types with which to measure these dynamics: the market city and the people city. Each of these types justifies the local capitalist order, and structures future action in a given city. The spirit of capitalism is the product of a recursive process that operates via a feedback loop between economy and culture through justifications grounded in material arrangements (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). In these ways, the spirit of urban capitalism can be analysed through the discursive commitments and institutional arrangements that illustrate the relationship between the two. Market cities are deeply imbued with a neoliberal agenda, while people cities have a fragile balance between exchange values and use values. We discuss these theoretical offerings by analyzing two cities that approximate these types: Copenhagen, Denmark as a people city, and Houston, Texas, USA as a market city (see also Author Cite A). Conceptions of the City In neo-Marxist urban theory, urban processes themselves are the products of the flow of capital, and the commodification of labor (Castells 1977; Harvey 1973; Lefebvre 1991). Cities are the sites of the agglomeration of surplus capital, those profits extracted from labor that extend beyond those paid back out to workers (Harvey 1973; Harvey 1978). Researchers in the global cities tradition foreground the economy by finding that even as borders and states seemingly matter less, cities are all-important nodes of the global economy (Sassen 1991). This research on the dynamics of urban capitalism incorporated critiques of its overly structural focus by more closely acknowledging how actors, especially elites, underwrite 4 localised configurations of capital (Nylund 2001). Logan and Molotch (2007) highlight an exchange values/use values dialectic for urban land, arguing that commodified land in cities is subject to ongoing contestations that typically favor the extraction of profit over the everyday uses of residents. This conceptual turn integrates place entrepreneurs and residents alongside the economic processes undergirding the city (Logan, Whaley and Crowder 1997). They also detail that the zeal for profits was itself contained in a discursive frame and material goal – growth – that was encouraged by a growth machine, a coalition of economic, political, and social elites. In this way, the cultural talk supporting the city became a site of urban and sociological research. Place theory and research on the intrinsic logic of cities further re-orients the critiques of structural theories of urban capitalism by integrating themes outside that of the economy (Borer 2006). Specifically, place theories foreground how geographic locales are imbued with meaning and value, sometimes termed “place character” or “place tradition” (Author Cite B; Brown- Saracino 2015; Kaufman and Kaliner 2011; Molotch, Freudenberg and Paulsen 2000; Paulsen, 2004), and what has theoretical antecedents in the “cumulative texture” of cities (Suttles 1984). Place tradition draws on the idea of path dependence and structuration as the temporal sequence of events structures future action in a given place at the same time that actors have agency within this structured context (Giddens 1991). A related, but different, perspective on these topics relates to urban pride, or what Bell and de-Shalit (2011: 2, 4) term “civicism” that underwrite a “spirit of the city.” In this perspective, the civicism of a given city is unique and peculiar to that city, the strength of the city ethos varies from one city to the next, and this ethos (similar to place tradition) structures action in the city. Taken together, these perspectives link the city’s economy, politics, and urban form so that they “combine and endure…encouraging and discouraging different patterns of action” (Paulsen 2004: 245). In this way, place theory, in addition to work on 5 civicism, considers not just the material processes at play, but also those of history, institutions, and actors. These concepts about place can be connected to the “intrinsic logic of cities” (or eigenlogik) that suggests how a given city uniquely produces knowledge that governs action (Barbehön and Münch 2016a; Barbehön and Münch 2016b; Barbehön et al. 2016; Berking 2012; Gehring and Großmann 2014; Löw 2012: 304; Zimmermann 2012). The eigenlogik framework explicitly draws on culture, that is, on the ways in which city dwellers construct meaning and knowledge that orient them to the processes around them. Although unlike place theory in its emphasis on culture, the physical elements of the city – from a harbour to local architecture to spatial inequalities across neighborhoods – similarly combine as material arrangements that both influence and are influenced by locally patterns of custom and culture (Berking 2012; Löw 2012). The effect of these intertwined dynamics is to construct “a constellation of specific coherent stocks of knowledge and forms of expressions” that sponsor local city life (Löw 2012: 210). In all, the work on eigenlogik illustrates the cultural work operating in urban life. Using place theory and research on the intrinsic logic of cities as a point of departure (Berking 2012; Löw 2012; Molotch, Freudenberg, and Paulsen 2000; Paulsen 2004), the present research seeks to engage and extend these research agendas in three ways. First, and relating more to place theory, this research seeks to take up an explicit theory of culture by employing theory on pragmatic justifications. This corresponds closely to this study’s key objective of better integrating culture and economy in cities, and doing so specifically by showcasing how the economic trajectories of place are understood, justified, and sustained by elites and residents. It similarly builds on the path dependency perspective in place theory by emphasizing

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