A Global Solution to Local Urban Crises?Comparing Discourses on Business Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Hamburg

Abstract

This paper presents findings from research on the globalization of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). Across a wide range of urban contexts, Business Improvement Districts are presented as prime strategies for resolving what is framed as an urban crisis and a crisis of urban public space. Building on a discourse analytical approach and on recent debates on mobile policies, I argue for a place sensitive approach that starts from the local and takes local trajectories seriously, but at the same time engages in comparative research. The case studies from Hamburg and Cape Town focus on public discourses in the early years of the implementation of BIDs in the respective contexts. After presenting brief descriptions of these discourses and the rationalization within different urban and national contexts, I highlight the links the discourses on BIDs establish, with notions of international best practices and international showcases; the way BIDs reframe notions of public space; and the way BIDs are constituted as the legitimate voice of the local common good. [Key words: comparative urbanism, discourse analysis, business improvement districts, urban policy mobilities].

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 6th International Conference of the Research Network “Private Urban Governance & Gated Communities“ in Istanbul in September 2011. I would like to thank Randy Lippert and Setha Low for organizing the session on “Exploring Governance Regimes: Condominiums, Cooperatives, Business Improvement Districts, and Other Private Governance Forms” and the participants for the fruitful discussion. In addition, I would like to thank Georg Glasze, Christian Schwedes, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

²Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

³And again the focus was on a relatively small number of BIDs such as Grand Central, Bryant Park, Times Square, Union Square, and Downtown. For some of the conflicts surrounding the expansion of BIDs in Manhattan in the 1990s, see Katz (2001) and Zukin (2010). For the perspective of BID advocates, see publications from the rightwing Manhattan Institute (MacDonald, 1996; Kelling, 2009).

⁴Such as Town Centre Management in the UK or Quartiersmanagement (neighborhood management) and Standortgemeinschaften (local business associations) in Germany. 4

⁵In South Africa, for example, the BID needs to be run by a non-profit, whereas in other countries the BID may be managed by private corporations.

⁶In fact it is frequently the case that the city is providing better and more reliable services to BID areas, as the BID has the resources and the voice to hold the city accountable for delivering its duties.

⁷Interview with Paul Levy, Philadelphia 13.04.2010.

⁸With respect to Business Improvement Districts, the work of Lorlene Hoyt (2006, 2008) would be an approach that follows this line of thought.

⁹Or articulations, as Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. 105) call them.

¹⁰Interview with a BID Manager from Cape Town, February 2011.

¹¹In Johannesburg the idea to create a BID-like scheme dates back to the early 1990s and the late years of Apart- heid. Richard Bradley, BID manager from Washington, D.C., introduced the idea at a conference in Johannesburg in 1991, and in 1996 a study tour of politicians and property owners sponsored by USAID visited the United States. But due to conflicts and frictions that accompanied the transformation of the political and urban system, it took some years to pass the legal framework. CID advocates in Cape Town often claim Cape Town was first, as the actual bylaw and the first legal CID were established in Cape Town roughly one month earlier than in Johannesburg.

¹²Primarily represented by the leading Cap Town newspapers Cape Times, Business Day, and Cape Argus.

¹³The notion that property owners, i.e., those who finance BIDs, could be more interested in property values and profits than in clean and safe streets per se is relatively absent from public discourse but features very prominently in debates among BID advocates, where BID levies are rationalized by being in the property owner's own best interest.

¹⁴Primarily represented by the Hamburger Abendblatt and local editions of some national newspapers such as Die Welt between 2003 and 2007.

¹⁵The scale of discourses on urban decay, a crisis of the inner cities, and blight (Weber, 2002; Beauregard, 2003; Macek, 2006) has never been matched in Europe, where white flight and capital flight from the city have been much more modest, and where a quite different tax base for local governments prevented similar devaluations.

¹⁶The neoliberal party FDP, for example, has opposed BIDs in a number of cases, although not in Hamburg.

¹⁷The average BID in Manhattan has an annual budget of $4.2 million, compared to $560,000 in Cape Town and $280,000 in Hamburg.