Cities in pursuit of economic growth

Abstract

During the past two decades, issues of local economic growth have come to dominate urban politics and planning in American cities, and local governments have adopted increasingly entrepreneurial economic-development strategies. Explanations of this by previous writers have claimed that entrepreneurial behavior by the local state is either economically determined, or stems from the initiatives of relatively autonomous political agents. In this paper it is contended that, in order to reassess these conflicting explanations, it is necessary to analyze how economic and political processes operating at different spatial scales interact to determine local policy formation and outcomes, and a conceptualization of local state action using this approach is developed. This is then applied to explain the evolution of downtown development policies in the central cities of American metropolitan areas. It is also argued that local context must be incorporated into the analysis in order to account for inter-urban variations in policy outcomes, and an abbreviated comparison of two central cities, San Francisco and Minneapolis, illustrates the importance of this.