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Summary of Literature of City Matters
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Summary of all the literature (academic articles) of the course City Matters that is thought in the Master program Socio-Spaital Planning.
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City matters.Week 1: Introduction – planning as a distributive issue political
economy and justice matter!
Towards a ‘just’ sustainability? – Julian Angyeman.
A truly sustainable society is one where wider questions of social needs and welfare, and economic
opportunities are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting ecosystems.
The inseparability of environmental quality and human quality: it has become increasingly apparent
that the issue of environment quality is inextricably linked to that of human equality. If sustainability
is to become a process with the power to transform, as opposed to it current environmental,
stewardship or reform focus, justice and equity issues need to be incorporated in its very core. Our
present environmental orientation of sustainability is basically about tweaking our existing policies.
Transformative sustainability or just sustainability implies a paradigm shift that in turn requires that
sustainability takes on a redistributive function.
Ideas about a just, as opposed to a purely environmental, sustainability:
The New Environmental Paradigm: equity deficit?
Environmental justice paradigm: environmental justice is a framework for integrating class, race,
gender, environment and social justice concerns. It can be understood as a local, grassroots or
bottom-up community reaction to external threats to the health of the community that have been
shown to disproportionately affect people of colour and low-income neighbourhoods.
There are a lot of differences in the types of people that are involved in these different paradigms.
The differences between them are based primarily on the issues of race and class, justice and equity
and how these play out in term of services. There is however an emergent middle way that I call the
Just Sustainability Paradigm. Paradigm is an emerging discursive frame and paradigm. It can be seen
as being both flexible and contingent, composed of overlapping discourses that come from
recognition of the validity of a verity of issues, problems and overlapping discourses.
‘ The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and
equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of support ecosystems
An example of a non-profit organization working in the just sustainability paradigm is given: the
Urban Ecology. The program assists the need of the community while simultaneously promoting
ideas such as transit access, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and affordable infill housing to help
revitalize neighbourhoods with sustainability perspectives in mind. They also work together with
governments and community groups to promote more sustainable development patterns.
The just sustainability Paradigm foregrounds four, albeit related focal areas of concern that are not
all represented by either the green/new environmental paradigm or brown/environmental justice
paradigm:
Quality of Life;
Present and Future generations;
Justice and Equity;
Living within Ecosystem Limits.
,It is only through a just sustainability focus that the true potential of sustainability and sustainable
development will be realized.
Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. – Stein, S. M.
2. Planning Gentrification: What is happening to our cities? Why are they becoming so impossibly
expensive?
Gentrification is happening in many cities. Gentrification is the process by which capital is reinvested
in urban neighbourhoods, and poorer residents and their cultural products are displaced and
replaced by richer people and their preferred aesthetics and amenities. Some general features of
gentrification:
Low rents become higher.
The people of colour and immigrants who built up neglected neighbourhoods are recast as
outsiders in their own homes and expelled in favour of white newcomers.
The commercial fabric turns over and replaces itself.
Municipal investment follows real estate investment.
Gentrification requires ‘producers’: investors, developers, and landlords and ‘consumers: wealthier
homebuyers, renters and shoppers. The state helps produce these conditions: gentrification is also a
political process.
Why gentrification?
Due to changes in the economic sphere and globalization industry decamped from central cities in
search for lower wages, looser environmental standards and wide-open spaces in suburbs, rural
towns and international free trade zones.
We saw two federal programs: redlining and urban renewal. Urban renewal programs bulldozed
entire neighbourhoods to make way for central business district expansions and infrastructure
projects. The government through the home owner’s loan corporation (HOLC) determined the risk
bankers would take if giving a loan. The looked at: age of buildings, density of housing and the racial
composition of residents. They did not give loans to minority, they were shut out of the finance
system, many of their buildings declined and rents fell creating the perfect conditions for
gentrification.
During the fiscal crises and capital strikes gentrification presented an alternative way for cities to
continue redeveloping their housing stock and boosting land values without spending much money.
Over the time this model proved effective and more parties started to participate. Gentrification was
a spatial fix for capitalism’s urban crisis.
The economics of gentrification.
Gentrification cannot happen anywhere. Real estate speculators choose to invest in a particular
location because they identify a gap between the rents that land currently offers and the potential
future rents it might command if some action was taken (rents gap). They also identify places where
a property’s current use masks the potential income that property could generate if it were given
over to another activity (functional gap). And they potential value of their properties by selling rather
than renting them (value gap). Real estate developers and city planners learned how to identify these
gaps and encouraged speculators to close them.
This has given rise to a new peculiar form of gentrification. Rich neighbourhoods that never truly
experienced disinvestment have become super-gentrified.
,The politics of gentrification.
With manufacturing leaving cities, real estate and finance became the remaining major urban power
bloc and the key to rebuilding local economies. For local government it became important to have
coalitions with real estate capital and the service and building trading unions. Early gentrification was
boon to politicians who dealt with shrinking budgets and an unwillingness to take on serious
problems of entrenched poverty and structural racism. To their relief, the face of early gentrification
was a group of middle class mostly white liberals looking to add value to the city’s building stock.
Planners for gentrification.
Planner want to keep business booming and get land and property rights back up as soon as they fall.
They have developed a wide range of mechanisms to do so. Local property tax cuts are one of these,
they lure and retain real estate investment. Critics call this geobribery.
Planners have also undertaken steps to surrender public ownership of land and buildings. Causing
large privatization of housing. Cities give away these properties, while simultaneously demolishing
much if not all of their public housing. They also get rid of rent controls. Causing the perfect
conditions for gentrification.
Planners have increasingly used zoning to facilitate gentrification. Zoning shifts responsibilities to a
local level, while control over policies is held at higher government scales. Cities are then responsible
for solving their own housing crises but the federal government restricts their abilities to build public
housing and sates often preclude them from enacting rent controls. Both up zoning (which increased
building density) and downzoning (which limits it) has tremendous impact on both land and property
values.
However, rezoning does not equal gentrification. In the right circumstances it can be used to slow or
even prevent gentrification.
Sometimes planners’ channels invest in already gentrified areas, other times in currently gentrifying
areas and sometimes in areas that are not yet undergoing gentrification in order to attract real estate
capital.
The police force is contributing to gentrification with aggressive methods they clear the terrain for
future investment and make wealthier households more comfortable with the idea of living among
poorer people.
Justifying gentrification.
Planners recognize that gentrification present both moral and economic problems for their city. They
attest to the importance of balanced growth, inclusion and increased opportunity; in practice,
however, most planners facilitate uneven development and measure their progress against rising
land values.
Highest and best-use: turns land use planning into real estate appraisal, positioning that the
best use for any piece of land is that which derives the greatest value at the lowest cost and
allows building to actualize their full potential rent.
Value recapture: planners justify trying to lift land values by value recapture, using tools that
reclaim some social benefit from publicly generated private profits.
Unlocking the competitive advantage of the inner city: working class neighbourhoods are
seen as underexploited markets that represent major opportunities for national retailers.
Luring the creative class: the creative class has high-end consumption habits and is often
present in neighbourhoods were gentrification happens.
, Liveability: liveability is used by planners do describe every urban nicety except the two most
closely aligned with people’s ability to live – the prices of labour and shelter. The term
‘liveable’ is used as substitute for ‘gentrified’.
Jane Jacobs calls for an alternative version of economic development in which social preservation is
as coveted as landmark preservation and liveability is actually measured by people’s ability to live in
a place. Other researchers claimed that gentrification was already a positive force for cities and their
residents.
Most planners resigned to the idea that gentrification is a necessary outcome of urban change. From
this standpoint, working place displacement is the price a city has to pay for improvements to
neighbourhood schools, parks, streets and housing.
These narratives: highest and best value, value recapture, competitive advantage, liveability
and neighbourhoods effects, represent some of the most potent ways planners legitimate
displacement. Gentrification is the outcome of good city planning.
Coercing Compliance.
Beyond self-justification, planners are compelled by external forces to reshape their cities for
investment. By directing flows of money into and out of places and projects, banks and investors act
as capitalists’ own private planners.
A city that rejects gentrification planning is taking a significant financial risk. By choice or by force,
planners use gentrification to create the physical environments for capital to thrive. The endgame is
a city controlled by bankers and developer, run like a corporation, designed as a luxury product and
planned by the finance sector.
5. Unmaking the Real Estate State: What more can we imagine? What is to be done?
The real estate state is a historical and political construct: it was formed by historical factors, and it
can be unmade by political movements. There are planners to take a stand against gentrification.
How to do so, remains elusive. There is no vision of what is a good city however it is clear what is
wrong today: planning is too entwined with real estate; gentrification is displacing current residents,
precluding future migrants and killing the city’s core.
Urban social movements can take the lead in diagnosing the problems with capitalist city planning,
organizing for immediate state action to address them and imagining alternatives for a liberated
society.
Policies.
There are policies that could address some of the problems of planning in the real estate state. There
are some current policies that if altered would produce dramatically different results. For example if
inclusionary zoning was only used in rich white enclaves and never in neighbourhoods at risk of
gentrification, its results would be notably different: forcing the wealthy to integrate, rather than
gentrifying the city and calling it process. We can demand that the privileges embedded in rich
places’ plans are redistributed.
Existing preservation tools could be expanded to protect working class environments from
encroaching predatory development, preserve the class character of public and subsidized housing
and ensure that any future development not only matches a planned community’s aesthetic patterns
but also its income mixes.
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