City Transformation and the Global Trope: Indianapolis and Cleveland

Abstract

This paper examines an issue that can be subsumed under one of the three theoretical points of entry for this special issue: how the idea of globalization as a deployed imagining in common urban discourses (‘the global trope’) has helped to produce a new socio-spatial polarizing kind of governmentality. It is recognized that globalization is now merely a new reality, but also a powerful rhetorical device whose invoking can be a potent political tool for capital in its drive to transform cities. This new governmentality—what is termed neoliberal progressivism—is shown to be shaped and emboldened by this global trope. At this rhetoric's core, a supposed new hyper-competitive reality makes rust belt cities easily discardable as places of investment, production, and business. These once enclosed and confident containers of the economic, in the rhetoric, have recently become porous and leaky landscapes rife with a potential for dramatic economic hemorrhaging. Against this supposed reality, cities are portrayed as beset by a kind of accumulation disorder and uncertainty that now haunts them. The city, as a place of becoming, is a threatened but historically resilient locale that once more must act ingenuously to survive. Through this, the new governmentality's dominant contours—a proposed shock treatment of re-regulation, privatization, and re-commodification—is grounded and rationalized. In this context, the new governmentality is shown to be generating a new low-income punishing uneven development across US cities which most decisively marginalizes low-income African-American communities.

Notes

1. I use the terms growth machine and neoliberal governance with distinctive meanings in mind. The term growth machine references the nexus of local-based institutions—prominent builders, developers, realtors, the media, and the local state—that unify around a shared vision of city growth and push aggressively to make this a reality (see Logan and Molotch, 1987). The term neoliberal governance, encompassing the local growth machine, privileges the power and influence of the local state as a body that manages and regulates the diverse spheres of city growth, economic development, housing policy, and socio-spatial life of populations.

2. Data was obtained for this research via textual analysis of newspapers and city technical reports, and open-ended discussions with interviewees. Textual analysis deconstructed stories about city growth, city redevelopment, and city restructuring in two local dailies, Cleveland Plain-Dealer and Indianapolis Star, and stories from the web. Stories and articles using the terms growth, redevelopment, globalization, and ghetto were identified for review. Open-ended discussions were also conducted in the two cities in the early 1990s and in 2004 and 2005. I conversed with local planners, city officials, city program heads and representatives, community activists, residents, and youth in person or by telephone. To obtain credible responses, all interviewees were initially asked if they preferred to have their names withheld from future write-ups of the data. Nearly 90% of the 65 interviewees opted for this. For this reason, comments by discussants frequently fail to carry a name or simply provide a pseudonym.