A Polanyi-inspired perspective on social-ecological transformations of cities

ABSTRACT

Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally specific modes of living, grounded in different classes and milieus. We show how, today, two modes of living—“traditional,” established during postwar welfare capitalism, and “liberal,” formed during neoliberal capitalism—co-exist. In the current conjuncture of rising inequality, neoliberal urban regeneration, and accelerating climate crisis, these modes of living are not only increasingly polarized and antagonistic, but also increasingly unable to satisfy needs and self-defined aspirations. Therefore, we explore the potential of social-ecological infrastructural configurations as an alliance-building project for a systemic social-ecological transformation, potentially linking different classes, social segments and forces around a common eco-social endeavor.

Acknowledgments

We thank Mikael Stigendal, Sarah Ware, Leonhard Plank, Brigitte Aulenbacher, Anran Luo, Hans Volmary and five anonymous reviewers for their comments on drafts of this article; Eric Clark for pushing us to write this contribution; Tom Slater for his final remarks; and John Billingsley for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Foundational Economy Collective (Foundational Economy Collective, 2018, p. 20) refers to technical infrastructural configurations as the “material foundational economy.” For more information on the Foundational Economy Collective see: https://foundationaleconomy.com/.

2. The Foundational Economy Collective (Foundational Economy Collective, 2018, p. 21) refers to social infrastructural configurations as the “providential foundational economy.”

3. Conceptually similar to “foundational urban systems” (Hall & Schafran, 2017).

4. Our definition of (urban) sustainability is based on the potential of social-ecological universalizability, thereby enabling “freedom not only for the few, but for all” (Polanyi, 1944/2001, p. 265)—for instance, private swimming pools and gardens for all are illusional, while municipal swimming pools and public parks are feasible. Sustainable infrastructural configurations therefore enable practices that can be potentially universalized and constrain those practices that undermine this potential.

5. In The Great Transformation, the dialectics of improvement and habitation is not as elaborated as the double movement. However, Polanyi’s increasing concern with the “machine age” and his critique of progress that radicalized with the threat of nuclear destruction, shows his lifelong concern with the dialectics of modern improvement.

6. In the remainder of this article, commodification focuses on, but is not limited to, the commodification of fictitious commodities. In line with Dale (2012, p. 21), we do not want to “place undue emphasis upon a postulated moral distinction between natural and artificial commodities,” due to its problematic implicit assumption of a “natural” societal order and an “artificial” market order.

7. “It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community. … Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? … The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself.” (Polanyi, 1944/2001, pp. 35/39).

8. The anti-thesis (decommodification) is thus not the negation of its thesis (commodification), “but a negation which refers to itself, its own negation”—it is what commodification “lacks in order to ‘concretize’ itself, i.e. to actualize its notional content” (cf. Žižek, 1993, p. 122).

9. As Cangiani (2011, p. 193ff) argues, liberal capitalism during the 1920s differed substantially from neoliberalism since the 1980s (e.g., in market structure, technological developments, perspectives of democracy). Similarly, Dale (2012, p. 16) stresses that the neoliberal era is similar to the liberal era only with respect to the regulation of finance, rather than commodification as such.

10. Incumbent residents can experience feelings of displacement, even before the actual process of physical dislocation occurs (cf. Atkinson, 2015; Shaw & Hagemans, 2015).

11. The decommodified housing sector also remained exclusive to a certain extent, despite its size. Until 2006, only Austrian citizens could apply for municipal housing. Migrant workers, especially from ex-Yugoslavia and Turkey, depended on the private, often low-quality, rental housing-market and faced discrimination by private landlords (Kadi, 2018).

12. The limited-profit housing sector is subject to the Limited Profit Housing Act (Wohnungsgemeinnützigkeitsgesetz), which only allows for limited profits and guarantees the re-investment of these profits in social housing construction measures in Austria. This contrasts with the commercial housing sector, where property developers can make unlimited profits and have free disposal over them (e.g., to distribute them to shareholders).

13. The analysis of these modes of living is derived from sociological research (cf. Inglehart, 1997; Reckwitz, 2017, 2019). However, it needs to be empirically adapted to the urban context by future research. The ideal typical distinction suggested here is preliminary.

14. Forms of financialization, like cross-border leasing, were used for financing investment in public transport and education (Hamedinger et al., 2019).

15. Between 2009 and 2017 sale prices per square-meter increased by 164% for new dwellings and by 200% for used old (Gründerzeit era) apartments (Aigner, 2019, p. 23).

16. In 2015, every tenth residential project was planned as an investment and, from 2016 to 2017, the sale of new apartments for the purpose of long-term renting increased by 71.2% (Aigner, 2019, p. 18), thereby making exchange value “the master and use value the slave” (Harvey, 2014, p. 60).

17. For a detailed discussion on “gentrification” see Maloutas (2012) and Slater (2006).

18. “Women’s workshop.”

19. The inner-city neighborhoods referred to in this article exclude the city center, i.e. Vienna’s first district; cf. Figure 1.

20. This rather one-sided perception expresses prejudices of the liberal avant-garde.

21. To respond to an anonymous reviewer’s comment, we deem it necessary to stress that in Vienna, like elsewhere in Europe, migrants do not have a self-contained and distinct mode of living since this group is itself highly stratified. Concentrated in the inner city, they are both gentrifiers and incumbents, liberals and traditionalists.

22. Jaeggi (2014, p. 252) defines modes of living as historically and culturally different “problem-solving strategies” for achieving certain desired outcomes. Successful problem-solving strategies become routines: e.g., the male breadwinner model during Fordism. But at a certain stage, this problem-solving strategy became dysfunctional, unable to satisfy the changed aspirations of couples at the end of the 20th century.

23. Paradoxically, while such places are promoted as “innovative, exciting, creative, and safe to live or to visit, to play and consume in” (Harvey, 1989, p. 9), they are, being in national and international competition, often subject to “homogenization of technology, architecture and culture” (Smet, 2016, p. 7).

24. The case of market ideology´s failure is well documented for the UK. Nearly four decades of aggressively selling the idea of home-ownership in the UK have had a self-defeating effect; since 2008, there has been a consistent decline of mortgaged home-ownership, and a sharp increase of private rental, showing increasingly unaccomplishable modes of housing (Froud et al., 2018, p. 9).

25. A “city for all” foregrounds opportunities for political and social participation for all residents, not just those formally entitled to vote. This is where the idea of resident-centered citizenship takes hold, which focuses on participation in the design of the living environment and the shaping of the infrastructures of everyday life. For example, in Vienna, those around 30% of residents ineligible to vote could still be entitled to the equal access to social-ecological infrastructures (Hamedinger et al., 2019).

26. For example, 26.3% of all apartments in Vienna are still council housing (Kadi & Verlič, 2019, p. 35).

27. Object-related subsidies provide funding for the construction of private homes as well as rental or owner-occupied apartments. In addition to object-related subsidies, subject-linked cash benefits provide direct funding to families or individuals for whom subsidized housing is still too expensive. However, in Vienna, subject-linked cash benefits have remained limited to a fifth of the amount spent on object-related subsidies (Vollmer & Kadi, 2018, p. 257).

28. “habiTAT” is similar to the community land trusts (CLT) in the United States and the “Mietshaus-Syndikat” in Germany.

29. Such a hegemonic project does not imply homogenous interests. As Hajer (2006, p. 69) emphasizes: “Discourse analysis brings out, time and again, that people talk at cross-purposes, that people do not really or do not fully understand each other. This is a fact of life, but, interestingly, this can be very functional for creating a political coalition. … It can be shown that people, that can be proven not to fully understand each other, nevertheless together produce meaningful political interventions. My argumentative discourse analysis does not start from the assumption of coherence or full understanding. I suggest that much communication is in fact based on interpretative readings, on thinking along, measuring statements in terms of whether they ‘sound right.’”

30. The following narratives, like the above analysis of modes of living, are preliminary and need refinement through future empirical research.

31. This might limit the rise in consumption and emissions by breaking the “work and spend” cycle that results from fixed hours and rising consumption, i.e. the scale effect, and,might further shift consumption toward more time-intensive and less carbon-intensive ways of need satisfaction, i.e. the composition effect (cf. Gough, 2017, p. 187f).

32. Neoliberal urban regeneration and financialization of the housing sector have had stratifying consequences for residents. Homeowners without high mortgage burdens as well as tenants in social housing have remained well protected; in Vienna, social housing remains a sector with good quality, avoiding downward spirals. However, the affordable housing market has become increasingly inaccessible for less affluent newcomers (especially youths and migrants), who suffer from soaring rents in the private housing market. This has brought uneven urban development, social fragmentation, and spatial polarization, widening the gap between market “insiders” and “outsiders,” in the Viennese housing market (Gutheil-Knopp-Kirchwald & Kadi, 2017; Kadi, 2015).

33. The Vienna City Administration (2014) partially acknowledges this; it aims at strengthening poly-centers in inner-city neighborhoods, but wants to create context-sensitive centers in the outer-city.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Bärnthaler

Richard Bärnthaler is a pre-doc researcher at the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Andreas Novy

Andreas Novy is head of the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Basil Stadelmann

Basil Stadelmann is research associate at the Office of Cantonal and Urban Development of Basel at the Department of Presidential Affairs.