Community benefits agreements and growth coalitions: leveraging the growth machine thesis for alternative organizing strategies

ABSTRACT Growth machine theory, inaugurated by Harvey Molotch in 1976, continues to be a major way to understand the dynamics of urban growth in the U.S. and beyond. Growth machine theory, with all of its recent provocative changes, nevertheless still fails to capture the subtleties and complexities of organizing for accountable development based on growth dynamics in cities. In our essay, community benefits agreements are examined as one of the leading edges of a kind of local politics that Molotch and others have for the most part failed to recognize in their analyses of the political economy of growth, and argue that this analysis has implications for developing alternative and systemically transformative strategies for accountable development. We leverage the theoretical grounding of the growth machine to put forth new transformative strategies for accountable development, imagining what they might theoretically look like if the logic of the growth machine was fully taken into account.