Sean Tarjoto								Prof. Neil Brenner
Urban Political Economy							Final Paper

Edges of Crisis: Local Regimes and the Boundaries of Decentralizaton
Popular culture images of the city in chaos through films like Escape from L.A., Mad Max, The Postman, and the sequel Escape from New York would contrast with the images of global destruction in the late 20th century for this entire period, during which the 20th century’s most powerful ideological competitor to Capitalism collapsed, opening the doors toward Non-Aligned Nations and developing nations within what was termed by the academic and political institutions as  “the Third world” 
	  The scattered pattern of economic collapse surrounding developing nations would appear shortly before the next oil crisis. All nations discovered their position as competitors within global single economic ideology as one now forced to re-identify itself, for the sake of their own populations and the sake of less economically developed sovereigns. 
During the late 70s and 80s the decentralization of much of the urban central business district began to mirror much of the same fashion as the shantytowns and urban ghettos of these developing nations. A multitude of reactions both academic and political toward this struggle developed by both sides appeared during the late 20th century.  Many of them appeared to operate with negligible understanding of the increasing importance during the time of capital’s relationship in the expanding globe of labor and markets; the political and social struggles considered to be crucial in the development and maintenance of strong local communities, or the trans-nationally networked profit drive to territorialize areas and spaces for new flows of capital will be considered in this economic historical narrative of Late Capitalism in wane of the 20th century.
Appearing in the period encircling the late 60s and continuing far after the popularization of social movements as viable political strategies were the sporadic, but influential surge of grassroots political campaigns waged from economically depressed and struggling communities.  Commercial partnerships with municipal governments forced changes both bureaucratically and spatially in the urban atmosphere that served as the impetus for these campaigns, and their offspring umbrella coalitions which served as icons of political power, though they soon solidified to life of their owns, shouldering the campaigns on electoral platforms.
	In Margit Mayer’s analysis of the collapse of the central state economic control paradigm, already existing modes of regulation through division of labor and localized production coordination “assured the coherence of the overall regime.” Capitalist cities became crucial to organizational purpose and goals, though they did not necessarily define the policies of these goals. Within the United States, these cities were subordinated to State budget caps, national crises tied within the web of international interests. The reaction of private capital to the sunset of predominance of the domestic market was to create “trans-sovereign” contacts through local, sub-national, governments, of which the larger more populated cities would reign greater political power to engage in “perforated sovereignty."  Regional/local forces became more active in advancing strategies for national GDP to the world market. 
In Mayer’s analysis more complex - and implicitly less political importance - of economic regional and local policies of the 1980s were subordinated to the national purpose as defined through the exercise of Federal policies in labor and immigration, military and interior affairs.   During the growing pains of this new political transition toward “perforated sovereignty”, due to increasing deindustrialization and shotgun-migrations to the suburbs, the metropolitan city became the “entrepreneurial city”, forging, in Mayer’s words “new forms of public/private collaborations”, “new bargaining systems” and “re-structured social services” through local interventions into government row capital.
Communities, business coalitions, and public institutions vying for sources of capital allied with these entities through state-sponsored mediations. In Harvey Molotch’s theory of the city as a “growth machine”, these resources are captured through the complex urban political process for the purpose of the development of land value. In the urban economies of scale that manifest themselves in the difference between costs-of-living, crime rate, and ultimately in uneven development, the welfare of public space has profound meaning in terms of its value and use.  Areas with high land value showcase public spaces, whereas spaces within weak growth coalitions must struggle to keep these areas from being hidden by racial boundaries, undone by crime and over-policing, open to access.  From the perspective of the Times Square, the dimmed line of demarcation between public-private capital was also the boundary between racial differences, political identities, gender stratifications and the forms of yellow/red/green urban chaos that, once redefined by the 42nd Street Development Project with Prudential and Park Tower Realty, transformed the public space as the arena for economic transactions as the primary dominant exercise of social order. Within Battery Park, the politically tenuous state of public space itself marched forward with the “local growth machine” cavalry of global financial services primarily competing with global commercial interests. There, the meaning of public space as shared appeared nearly totally weightless when measured atop the scales of international capital.  This capital, when in turn, spread across the “delimited” international grids of offshore banking centers and Export Processing Zones, located themselves outside the physical and conventional values of public space but never appropriated with equal (or, perhaps pejoratively, in total) proportion to private space. 
Back at home, New York local growth machines could not ensure low-priced competitive rents when the price index was comprehensive enough to include lofts in London, Hong Kong and Singapore. Further, these municipalities invested in securities that expanded within the emerging global network, and government officials inexperienced in global financial affairs suddenly appeared less and less competent (though still shrewd), to manage global financial affairs. 
The role of the state as a source of capital was downplayed. It was comparatively inefficient to private capital, could no longer accumulate without suffering symptoms of economic withdrawal whose damage would be seen in educational and health services.  The measure of the success of these local growth machines was dependent on the success of the tax-backed security.  As the fortunes of entire regions were dependent on sour bets of individual brokerages, integral urban elements without “viable” infrastructure quality (graffiti murals, community gardens and centers frequented by gentrification activists) came to be seen as risky expenditures by private brokers. 
Areas occupied by low-income minorities became the front lines of the global trade wars, buffering the central city in New York, the suburbs in L.A., or the commercial developments in Orange County, and their beneficent residents from the losses that appeared or had the potential to. Since the process of the local growth machine appeared to shadow the political process at the Capitol, the partnerships involved evolved toward increasing concentration of commercial ventures and global financial services, high-income suburban neighborhoods outside the city and the extravagant private parks behind the shade of the property line.

Edge City
Meanwhile, resident communities where the state capital or social programs began developing plans to mirror smaller communities and the quieter, less volatile social life of rural areas in the U.S. Midwest. These were locales consisting of residents whose social welfare did not as heavily reliant on the health of the city agency funded or not by the transnational corporation. But the phenomenon that would accompany disaster would travel in a reverse isomorphic direction. Neighborhoods whose residents co-habituated in a multi-ethnic atmosphere were eventually segregated from the predominantly high-income former residents, who moved to the periphery of those town-communities at the outskirts of rural America, forming new “edge cities”. 
	One can physio-spatially grasp Garreau’s concept of Edge City as the separation between central business districts on a regional scale.  The centers of these cities lie at the deepest points of counties, but the peripheries appear adjacent to major automobile highways. At the outset of the 80s, the arteries of this transport medium were situated in direct intercourse toward the collapsed central city, but also stretched away to hazardless out-of-the-way criss-crossing junctions trespassing the suburban peripheries. Attempts to attract consumer confidence and cheaper goods toward “ghettoized” CBDs were futile, since, appearing in scatterstorm over the periphery were cheaper shipping costs and goods sold by franchised ultra-market bulk-purchase corporations that, early in the transition to post-Fordist flexible production systems, purchased mass amounts of land that would have been priced at least twice as much in the city. These bulk–purchase companies sold vast quantities of all manner of goods, from produce to expensive consumer electronics.  The exchange value of these bulk goods sorely outweighed the perceived price and use value of their retail counterparts inside the decaying downtown centers. 
At the peripheries, the primary consumer suburban communities owned the advantage of faster accumulation cycles, more capital, and higher cost of living rates. Traffic on the major highway artery increased, and white-collar production and service sector economies developed adjacent and in clusters (especially in the form of strip-malls), forcing the under-maintained city to create, modify, and assign itself the role of appearing at these “frontiers” in the hope of aggregating some capital. Multi-scalar forces at work here between the city that must invest in zoning the territory, sudden influx of income into the industrial labor sector, and the appearances of franchise companies and financial branches, not necessarily from the CBD, throughout the territory of the edge.  Three separate historical elements must be examined in understanding the development of Garreau’s edge city.

Surge in housing market, the New Deal, and the affordable housing finance mortgage helps the lower-income bracket subsidized the single family. The birth of racially diverse middle-class suburbs occurs sometime in the mid-20th century, as series of state-sponsored urban programs known as the Homeowners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Authority, and the National Housing Authority use redlining, restricted covenants, and explicit block-busting that favored mostly Anglo-Saxon middle class mortgage applicants, segregating them from the collapsing and quickly de-centralizing CBD.
At the same time, the Eisenhower Administration located the centers of industrial growth within Detroit, the Northeastern region of the United States, and mass energy supplies at Alaska and Texas – the Federal Highway system was developed to bridge oil resources to an emerging automobile industry, paving the way for the oil-gas pipelines which would secure the economy for the youth-hood of an entire generation.
The military industrial complex enters a pubescent stage of domestic expansion as U.S. Army bases locate outside the edges of central cities (near edge cities), fueling central industrial growth.  The Air Force and Navy appear at coastal cities and the Great Lakes
The stage for the next 30 years of mass petroleum consumption was set, as the American economy re-established the economic veins it once saw in the pre-Depression Rockefeller steel-coal-train industry.  The role of the urban city in ensuring this paradigm invites a wave of influx of immigrants, who arrive seeking to benefit directly from the new federally-promoted economic surplus.  
	After the 1970s, ARAMCO and the OPEC countries began manipulating their regional advantage toward facing a global economic competition now appearing from with greater intensity from the United States. Throughout the North American highway and metropolis, oil prices squeezed by OPEC were understood within the Carter administration as a threat toward the national infrastructure but also as a threat toward “national security”. If the primary energy supply line aboard the western hemisphere collapses, then the loss of economic power will be shortly followed by the loss of military and consequently, political power. 
	Within local urban regimes, the coming oil crisis also posed as a threat to economic and social stability – as these cities would become the axis points of either recovery or failure.  The appearance of failure would have to contend with overwhelming inflation/unemployment rates and pressure on social services as racial antagonism left unsettled during the pre-segregation period and the complexity of immigrant relations catalyst an already boiling pot of socioeconomic political differences in class gender and race.
Given the truth of an emerging trend toward ensuring the security of profit as synonymous with the strive to maintain law and order – the role of the state as a container of authority and power was consistently being usurped by:
- Bypassing sovereign borders of all subsidies by sub-national authority to particular firms thru the use of foreign tax dollars, offshore banking centers, Export Processing Zones, to secure an internationally tailored global economy.
- The public perception of local government role as ‘junior partner’ to private firms, yet continuing to share risks and equities.
- The trend toward seeing social problems as business problems.
It is difficult to believe these scenarios, never conscious of their acceleration toward a crisis, would continue to escalate in the following years through the gentrification of urban space on a macro-scale spanning whole regions in almost systematic sense of disorder. The socio-spatial differences in the relation of land value of area to demographic, demographics to development priority, and cost-of-living rates effect toward the accumulation cycle have opened critical questions on the social value of diversity, of work and social life.  The consideration of these answers would appear both visibly, as the source of income for lower-class minorities disappeared, and once vibrant communities were torn apart for throughways whose chance for revival was devoured by the starving inner-city. Within the urban realm these were the sites that struggled to be recognized as the last sites of the labor-capital conflict in the late 20th century.