Week 6

I am interested by this new concept of international citizenship, and how it would play out.  There are many reasons for political boundaries as they exist today—controlling immigration, public safety, differences in governance systems.  Is it possible a world could exist where all these barriers fall away?  Migration patterns would be totally unfettered: a free-market movement of labor toward those parts of the world that exhibit labor demand.  Such a world would eschew big-government regulation, and political philosophies like Marxism and communism. 

To be sure, this system would fall apart quickly.  Businesses would become the new regulators, imposing restrictions on their employees and their families.  Armies would center around trans-national organizations, or business associations.  Either an international court of law would have to be created to arbitrate between these businesses, or they would be left to parse it out themselves.  With spatial considerations like territory and land property totally up for grabs, it would not be surprising if the environment suffered even greater devastation, perhaps to the point of no return.  But perhaps it wouldn’t matter, because in a purely market-driven world order, technology would accelerate so quickly that new worlds could be colonized and the human race expanded.

Week 5

Weber discusses how TIFs are an example of neoliberalism in the urban context.  TIFs, or Tax Increment Financing schemes, are methods employed by governments or local associations to encourage growth among businesses, generally with relation to a spatial area like a downtown.  TIFs allow a government or community association to invest in infrastructure, capitalizing incremental tax revenues to pay off debts of construction.  This provides a bonus for businesses within TIF districts who profit from the extra attention paid by the government to local infrastructure.  

Of course, the problem with a TIF arrangements on a broader scale is that they preference those localities who have the knowledge and capital to take advantage of them.  Weber notes that TIFs operate best when established at the perfect moment, and the ability to predict this timing will elude many townships and most independent small-scale operators.   For this reason, neoliberal philosophy admits a lessening of equity that theorists should keep in mind.  While TIFs work well for the lucky few involved, it has the likely outcome of isolating outliers and hindering their economic growth.  A more regulation-heavy government allows all firms a more equal shot.  On the other hand, in the absence of TIF schemes and other similar encouragement, the growth potential of all firms might be mediocre at best.

Week 4

Endogenous growth in a city might simply equate to the portion of the city’s economy that is ‘service.”  Endogenous growth essentially applies to all of the economic activity that is generated within and by the city itself, for consumption in the city, whereas exogenous growth pertains to capital moving into the city from outside.  Exogenous growth is another name for external trade.  Endogenous growth encompasses the service economy and retail economy that support the residence of thousands of people in an urban environment.  But if exogenous factors ceased, the endogenous economy would crumble.

Centripetal growth tendencies are natural enough, and have been evidenced throughout the course of human history by people convening at central or convenient locations for the transaction of business. Centrifugal growth is a result of continued centripetal growth, in that space is limited capital.  In the modern world activities that have typically been profitably located in the core are moving to the outskirts of cities.  Firms are getting more efficient about what kinds of business needs to be conducted downtown, and what can be relegated to the fringe.  Cities are transitioning into megaregions, and we should try to understand these regions writ large as centripetal forces.

Week 3

Friedrich Engels’s observations of lower-class working conditions in Manchester constitute an important specimen of physical design analysis.  Engels is particularly interested in how the spatial configuration of slum lots contributes to unsanitary living conditions, as well as to the profit of landowners who build and rent these spaces.  His writing brims with descriptions of huts built upon one another, with almost no open space for the movement of air and no facilities for the removal of waste.  Excrement and offal crowd the living quarters of the English working class.

Engels’s observations of slum conditions provide good evidence for the need for land use regulations.  Though now land use regulations may be considered to be excessive, it is good to read about a time when the lack thereof caused unsafe and inhumane conditions right in the city core.  The keeping of livestock, for instance, Engels shows can be unsanitary.  Yet today, urban farming is all the rage, and many urban residents lament that land use laws forbid them from keeping food animals.  Can sanitary regulations leftover from the dystopic industrial slum be adapted to fit with modern lifestyles, and considering modern technology?