The three articles of this special feature in Urban Geography examine how market rationality is deployed and resisted as a dominant framework for planning and making urban space. Planning involves taking purposeful action to shape urban space and deploys policies, plans, and other tools in pursuit of specific ends. The logic that links those means and ends can be understood as a rationality. Contestations arise when competing rationalities differ in their specification of goals and the means to achieve them. The three case studies and a concluding postscript comprising this special feature explore the direct and material implications of divergent planning rationalities for the production of urban space.
One pervasive form of rationality, called market rationality in what follows, links means and ends through economic rationales (Flyvbjerg, Citation1998; Mitchell, Citation2002; Weber, Citation2011). Market rationality is organized around economic goals of investment return, growth, and profitability and deploys economic tools such as land development, tax increment financing, and congestion pricing to meet those goals. As the papers in this special feature demonstrate, for planners tasked with making policies that shape urban space, market rationality has become a pervasive framework for addressing urban problems. Despite its predominance in shaping urban plans, however, market rationality is confronted at each moment of its application with competing rationalities that assert latent or active pressures to account for and produce alternative goals such as equity, fairness, aesthetic enjoyment, or environmental sustainability. How these competing rationalities are adjudicated in practice to produce specific urban outcomes is the focus of this special feature.
In the case studies presented here, city planners and other officials in New York and Chicago gave market rationality precedence over other modes of thinking about urban places and the needs of urban residents. They subsidized private real estate investment to address downtown development problems, assigned costs to drivers in order to reduce traffic congestion and enhance regional mobility, and grounded redevelopment plans on the profitability of hotel and luxury housing development. In each of these cases, achieving economic efficiency, profitability, or competitiveness became the default rationale for the reorganization of socio-spatial relationships. And the pervasiveness of market rationality was far from purely intellectual. Market rationality is located both in the cognitive processes of individuals who plan and in aspects of their social and material world. It resides not only in the minds of actors, but also in the relationships that bind individuals together, the tools of analysis through which urban space is understood, and the orthodoxy of urban policy knowledge. Market rationality inheres in professional education and training and is further reinforced by the institutional position of planners. It is bolstered by powerful actors like the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Partnership for New York, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation. It is also engrained in basic planning technologies and methods including those used to analyze traffic flows, justify corporate tax subsidies, and evaluate the feasibility of alternative development scenarios.
Yet despite its ideological, material, and institutional dominance in the practice of urban planning, market rationality does not go unchallenged in the politics of urban place-making. Juan Rivero’s (this issue) examination of a protracted conflict over the redevelopment of Coney Island builds on a place-making literature that emphasizes how symbolic meaning informs the material practices that shape urban space (Greenberg, Citation2008; Zukin et al., Citation1998). He argues that conflicting urban imaginaries can be understood as debates between conflicting rationalities: one prioritizing marketability and another prioritizing “experiential rationality that values sensual encounters with the world” (Rivero, this issue). In Rivero’s analysis, these rationalities are not inherently incompatible but rather reflect opportunities for negotiation in which values may be suppressed, created, or transformed. Political contestation is the arena within which such negotiation proceeds.
Drawing on Max Weber’s classic discussion of rationality (Kalberg, Citation1980; Weber, Citation1968) and contemporary elaborations of this work by Albrechts (Citation1991) and Flyvbjerg (Citation1998), Ben Teresa (this issue) examines the spatial distribution of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) in Chicago to situate value-conflicts within the framework of competing rationalities. In considering the spatially uneven application of market rationality evidenced by the distribution of TIFs in Chicago, he argues that neoliberalization is “the process of increasing the role of market rationality as a governing mechanism or ideal” that limits planners to working within its terms and inhibits their participation in value-based choices.
In the third contribution to this special feature, John West examines the construction and deployment of market rationality in the debate over congestion pricing in New York City, drawing on literature from actor-network theory (Latour, Citation2005) and from material semiotics (i.e. the study of co-creation of meaning by human and nonhuman actors (Law & Mol, Citation2008)). He argues that rationalities are “particular kinds of durable actor networks” that are both stable and susceptible to change. In this case, making market rationality enabled discussions about the equitable and fair distributions of mobility across the region.
In each of these cases and drawing on diverse literatures, the authors shed light on the bases of market rationality and its others, illuminating the contested terrain where questions of public equity are raised for deliberation. These analyses reveal that despite its pervasiveness, the orthodoxy of market thinking does not go unchallenged. It is confronted with its others and forced to reckon with competing concerns. In the cases examined here, planners tasked with creating TIF districts in Chicago were concerned with the spatial distribution of the benefits and burdens of subsidies and fought to insert a consideration of spatial equity within the dominant market framework. Transportation planners and politicians in New York City debated between goals of regional equity and economic efficiency when employing pricing mechanisms via restructured tolls as a means to reduce traffic congestion in central Manhattan. Planners and neighborhood activists wrestled over the historic value of an iconic neighborhood in planning the future of Coney Island. Each case study describes the often highly contested negotiation between market and other rationalities that produced the material outcomes that emerged. Each shows how efforts to serve ends other than efficiency, growth, and competitiveness confront the dominance of market rationality, producing new opportunities and outcomes in the production of urban space.
As illustrated in this special feature, the concept of planning rationalities serves as a useful heuristic contributing to urban geographic literature on place-making, neoliberalization, and the materiality of markets. Because all rationalities are contingent constructions, the hegemony of market rationality and neoliberalization must be constantly maintained and contested through plans, discourse, and material practices. Understanding how market rationality is constructed illustrates the ways that it can be remade to meet humane and sustainable ends.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
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