"Property can be thought of as enforceable claims to the benefits of resources. These claims carry with them duties and liabilities. The Anglo-American legal tradition has recognized essentailly three kinds of property rights. Private property is the right of individuals to exclude others from the uses or benefits of resources. (Legal individuals can be human or 'artificial persons,' as in the case of corporations.) Public property, owned by governments, gives state officials the right to determine who has access to resources held on behalf of a wider constituency. Common property is an individual's right not to be excluded from the uses or benefits of resources. Historically, common property rights were recognized and enforced for members of a bounded community. Thus, common property is usually distinguished from 'open access' or unappropriated resources that are beyond a prescribed political jurisdiction (as might be the case with fish outside territorial waters)" (Blackmar 51).
Ok, so:
private property = it's mine, i have the right to exclude whomever i want. no punks in my mall, no gay people in my house, whatever.
public property = it's the government's. in a representational government, representative officials say who can be there and who can't, presumably based on the desires of the broader constituancy. i guess this is why parks can close at a certain hour and homeless people can be run out, because officials have the authority from the community to do so?
common property = close to public, but requires some distinction as to who has the right to use. since it states 'for members of a bounded community,' it begs a question of membership. resident? taxpayer? citizen? human? it gets complicated. this is central to the issue of american indians and card-carrying...do you have enough 'native blood' to belong? can you prove it?
this article tackles 'the tragedy of the commons,' a 1968 article that i countered to argue for fruit-bearing treens in public spaces for mark francis' class last spring. what the tragedy of the commons states is basically that people operating in their rational self-interest will use resources from the land to their own benefit rather than the benefit of the collective, and each individual operating this way in the same commons will eventually ravage and destroy the commons because they have no personal stake in maintaining them. this has been used over and over to defend privatization -- if someone has stakes in land or resource, then it means that it will be better cared-for than without. the essay uses sheep herders as the example and grass as the resource.
'tragedy' assumes a few things without naming them as assumptions.
first, that it's not in anyone's self-interest to value commons as an entity onto themselves; that common space, sharing, and interacting with one another are inconsequential to people, or that valuing this is an exception to natural human behavior rather than the rule. i don't believe this.
we're social creatures, first and foremost. we like together and form communities. we watch each other. given the opportunity, we monitor one another. Allan Engler points out, “supporters of capitalism cite what they call the tragedy of the commons to explain the wanton plundering of forests, fish and waterways, but common property is not the problem. When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it…Capitalism recognizes only private property and free-for-all property. Nobody is responsible for free-forall property until someone claims it as his own. He then has a right to do as he pleases with it, a right that is uniquely capitalist” (58-59).
Additionally, Blackmar points out that also missing from this analysis is labor. Economists elaborated that common property offered no incentive to labor, and without incentives to it society would have to deal with "free riders" who don't pay their way, and "shirkers" who "cost too much and do too little." Anxieties of these people -- fueled by history of exclusion and a fear of a backlash from folks excluded (black people written out of opportunities for self improvement, immigrants used as strike-breakers) -- sponging off of public coffers morphed the way the public realm was utilized, from charging admission to formerly tax-funded venues like parks and zoos to expecting the government to run like any other private agency, and contract jobs to the lowest bidder (and assuming the false opposite, that if you don't, the ONLY outcome is the government overspending for less result.) (Blackmar 70-71)
She writes: "In retrospect, we can see that removing public labor from public property lifted a very big stick out of the bundle that historically had compromised American public space by integrating matters of governance, maintenance, use, and accountability. And in retrospect, we can also see that what was at stake in cracking the whip on shirkers and free riders was a determination that the politics of public space would no longer at its heart be a contest over the redistribution of wealth, even at the most basic level of paying public workers a fair wage" (71)
She actually offers a possible truism that i disagree with substantially. She asks, "When did people not resist paying into a common fund in order to sustain facilities that they only partially used themselves and that might be widely used by people they did not know?" (76) I can apprecate an American history containing a current of resistence to tax increases as the public sector expanded, but consider also Mexican migrant Hometown Associations. Throughout the united states (and presumably anywhere else), Mexican migrants are organizing in new locations to collectively send remittances back to the towns they've migrated from to fund community redevelopment projects. The mexican government is currently matching these dollars three for one, and they are being used to build parks, renovate churches and various other projects for municipal support. in addition, it's worth noting that migrant remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of income, just behind oil. (get sources for this from leticia.) obviously these people are demonstrating a willingness not only to send money back home, but to go to an additional effort to cooperate to put these dollars to work for the commons, even when dollars in the united states are few and these individuals may never return to mexico again. it suggests something about the importance of culture to political economy, and the power of the two to shape one another. what's going on with the united states culture that has devalued the public sector so tremendously? I can't offer any succint and essentialized answer. but i do think that our unique history of racism and exclusion in a country full of immigrants and our experience of slavery offer some clues.
Showing posts with label political economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political economy. Show all posts
Monday, May 12, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
delores hayden
i was excited to read delores hayden, who offers feminist critiques of suburbs. i was particularly excited to find an article drawn from her book that my advisor reccommended be on my reading list -- now i don't have to read the whole thing.
i found myself captivated, and jotting notes of the history she traces of public subsidies and cronyism that brought about the suburbs, beyond just the invention of the car. it's one of those things that i've had an impression of being true but didn't have the evidence. Things i wrote down include:
-look up post WWII VA Bill - vets get homeloan at 4% with little/no money down. was this different than the GI bill that was for whites only, or is that the same thing? (edit: it's the same thing.)
-William Levitt, among the first tract suburban home builders, said "No man with a house can be a communist, he has too much to do." I don't know if he had ties to McCarthy when he said that, but eventually the two were pals. It's way significant that in the 50s, patriotism was demonstrated by spending your money, and that the nature of american identity shifted from the democratic nature of our government for all [white people] (political) to your ability and willingness to demonstrate your participation in capitalism (economics). He was playing on his personal interest and prospects for wealth as well as national cold-war anxieties (and eventually, hysteria). and to be honest, I don't all-the-way understand how fear of a communist economy grew to be such a global force. but i'm not adding another book.
(Leticia showed up, and I left this post for a few days. I'm back.)
Levittowns are significant in everybody's writing, from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs writing about their form, Hayden writing about the political economic forces that made them possible, and Loewen's inclusion of the fact that they were explicitly racist. Talking about them is a possible and really good exam question, that I'll have to come back to to tie together --later.
Tax subsidies for greenfield development, hightways, and 'economic stimulus building' at highway nodes began to appear beyond existing suburbs to predicting and making possible future suburbs, sort of like an anti-environmental Johnny Appleseed (who was a real estate speculator creating future orchards for cider production; he wasn't just some hat-wearing wierdo concerned with nutrition on the frontier)(see Michael Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire'). This is not because of the nature of things by themselves, but reflect the growing power of auto manufacturers, energy companies (who had a huge interest in the 'all-electric home,' for obvious reasons) and real estate developers who profit from growth in the context of post-war anxieties, a baby boom, civil unrest (black people were part of the filthiness of the cities) conspicuous consumption and a fear of communism.
In this new development, there were no requirements for public space! Public gathering points were desirable to and created by only the people who stood to profit from them, and so were always private centered around consumption -- like shopping malls -- and, particularly when these places were being erected as community forecasters instead of current community amenaties, there was no one around to advocate for anything public. not only is a mall a community space reinforcing a culture of consumption (and unattractive or unwelcoming to folks who can't participate in the spending), but they also behave very differently than free public spaces or commons. Try holding a protest at the mall, or a union strike. Private property rights protect the mall's right to evict people who are not in accordance with what they can deem acceptable behavior. (they do this every day, well before anything would escalate to civil disobedience. this is often recognized readily by people falling outside of norms while staying relatively invisible to people falling within norms, as David Sibly points out. punk rockers get asked to leave for looking spiky and broke, but 'regular-looking' people may never notice the absence of spiky punk-rockers. they probably assume that they're self-selected away; they have no interest in being at the mall. eventually, this is probably true, but it's important to understand the exertion of power before it becomes a result of personal choice. this is probably why today there's not as many black people in suburbs even though segregation is no longer legally enforced. but i'm ahead of myself.)
*******To say that private spaces masquerading as public spaces is significant, and problematic beyond what i've just said, it implies that true public spaces are important and worthwile. I think that they are. They're fundamental to democracy, if you ask me. though I'm going to have to do a little research to remember who said what that lets me say something like that.
Beyond public space, these first new developments had no zoning requirements whatsoever -- no examination of well-designed neighborhoods or transit either. They were built from the notion of the 'garden city,' building little small-towns that replicated the (presumably understandable) desire to have a small-town life without the noise or dirt (or diversity) of the city, but still have the access. (jane jacobs talks about this a lot, and it extends what loewen notes about the solution always coming from the way you frame the problem. in this case, no one bothered to look at successful city examples or get to the root of some city problems (noxious industry and OVERcrowding [not high density], and more difficult to talk about, the Nadir of black-white race relations.) However, because they were made possible with PRIVATE funding rather than public, they didn't bother with things like schools, road maintenence, trash collection or sewers. They built private service roads and no infastructure, and had no accountability or promise to even maintain the roads. The true libertarian market-analysis would suggest that a savvy consumer would pick up on these things and the development would fail because no one in their right mind would buy in to such a place, but the truth is that they did sell, and it was federal public money in the 60s that retrofit these developments with proper infastructure -- thus, offering William Levitt and the suburban residents a HUGE invisible subsidy (that still exists, though it's buried now under more complex planning processes, zoning, city budgets and public-private partnerships that are SO CONVALUTED that the simple process of endorsing policy with private individual purchasing power is rediculous, especially when it creates artificially low prices that are, on the surface, in a private consumer's best self-interest.)
Gail Radford cites the 1930s as a period when Americans "developed a two-tier policy to subsidize housing. Cramped multifamily housing for the poor, the elderly, femaile-headed families, and people of color would be constructed by public authorities, and more generous single-family housing for white, male-headed families would be constructed by private developers with government support [invisible subsidies and allowance of explicit exclusion of minorities]"(Hayden 45). And the consequences are profound -- for housing, culture, public sector and urban design -- "inadequate financial resources behind one effort [public housing] and wasted material resources [expedited obselescence, poor land-use] behind the other. And worst of all, it mystified many working-class and middle-class Americans, who saw minimal subsidies for the poor but never understood their own tract housing, highways, and malls were far more heavily subsidized” (Hayden 45, italics my editions).
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Can a capitalist economy ever be truly sustainable? It's built on GROWTH and PRIVATE SELF-INTEREST, not staying sufficiently the same. and we keep increasing the population. and communalism will only work in capitalism when it's realized by individuals that collectivism/collaboration is in a self interest, and then it will be figured out how to make profitable.
where are the women? theyre the ones i know the least about as i look at this history of the 20th century, and I know they had some things going on, esp. during WWII. I know about the rosies, but I don't know how their history influenced the shaping of space.
i found myself captivated, and jotting notes of the history she traces of public subsidies and cronyism that brought about the suburbs, beyond just the invention of the car. it's one of those things that i've had an impression of being true but didn't have the evidence. Things i wrote down include:
-look up post WWII VA Bill - vets get homeloan at 4% with little/no money down. was this different than the GI bill that was for whites only, or is that the same thing? (edit: it's the same thing.)
-William Levitt, among the first tract suburban home builders, said "No man with a house can be a communist, he has too much to do." I don't know if he had ties to McCarthy when he said that, but eventually the two were pals. It's way significant that in the 50s, patriotism was demonstrated by spending your money, and that the nature of american identity shifted from the democratic nature of our government for all [white people] (political) to your ability and willingness to demonstrate your participation in capitalism (economics). He was playing on his personal interest and prospects for wealth as well as national cold-war anxieties (and eventually, hysteria). and to be honest, I don't all-the-way understand how fear of a communist economy grew to be such a global force. but i'm not adding another book.
(Leticia showed up, and I left this post for a few days. I'm back.)
Levittowns are significant in everybody's writing, from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs writing about their form, Hayden writing about the political economic forces that made them possible, and Loewen's inclusion of the fact that they were explicitly racist. Talking about them is a possible and really good exam question, that I'll have to come back to to tie together --later.
Tax subsidies for greenfield development, hightways, and 'economic stimulus building' at highway nodes began to appear beyond existing suburbs to predicting and making possible future suburbs, sort of like an anti-environmental Johnny Appleseed (who was a real estate speculator creating future orchards for cider production; he wasn't just some hat-wearing wierdo concerned with nutrition on the frontier)(see Michael Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire'). This is not because of the nature of things by themselves, but reflect the growing power of auto manufacturers, energy companies (who had a huge interest in the 'all-electric home,' for obvious reasons) and real estate developers who profit from growth in the context of post-war anxieties, a baby boom, civil unrest (black people were part of the filthiness of the cities) conspicuous consumption and a fear of communism.
In this new development, there were no requirements for public space! Public gathering points were desirable to and created by only the people who stood to profit from them, and so were always private centered around consumption -- like shopping malls -- and, particularly when these places were being erected as community forecasters instead of current community amenaties, there was no one around to advocate for anything public. not only is a mall a community space reinforcing a culture of consumption (and unattractive or unwelcoming to folks who can't participate in the spending), but they also behave very differently than free public spaces or commons. Try holding a protest at the mall, or a union strike. Private property rights protect the mall's right to evict people who are not in accordance with what they can deem acceptable behavior. (they do this every day, well before anything would escalate to civil disobedience. this is often recognized readily by people falling outside of norms while staying relatively invisible to people falling within norms, as David Sibly points out. punk rockers get asked to leave for looking spiky and broke, but 'regular-looking' people may never notice the absence of spiky punk-rockers. they probably assume that they're self-selected away; they have no interest in being at the mall. eventually, this is probably true, but it's important to understand the exertion of power before it becomes a result of personal choice. this is probably why today there's not as many black people in suburbs even though segregation is no longer legally enforced. but i'm ahead of myself.)
*******To say that private spaces masquerading as public spaces is significant, and problematic beyond what i've just said, it implies that true public spaces are important and worthwile. I think that they are. They're fundamental to democracy, if you ask me. though I'm going to have to do a little research to remember who said what that lets me say something like that.
Beyond public space, these first new developments had no zoning requirements whatsoever -- no examination of well-designed neighborhoods or transit either. They were built from the notion of the 'garden city,' building little small-towns that replicated the (presumably understandable) desire to have a small-town life without the noise or dirt (or diversity) of the city, but still have the access. (jane jacobs talks about this a lot, and it extends what loewen notes about the solution always coming from the way you frame the problem. in this case, no one bothered to look at successful city examples or get to the root of some city problems (noxious industry and OVERcrowding [not high density], and more difficult to talk about, the Nadir of black-white race relations.) However, because they were made possible with PRIVATE funding rather than public, they didn't bother with things like schools, road maintenence, trash collection or sewers. They built private service roads and no infastructure, and had no accountability or promise to even maintain the roads. The true libertarian market-analysis would suggest that a savvy consumer would pick up on these things and the development would fail because no one in their right mind would buy in to such a place, but the truth is that they did sell, and it was federal public money in the 60s that retrofit these developments with proper infastructure -- thus, offering William Levitt and the suburban residents a HUGE invisible subsidy (that still exists, though it's buried now under more complex planning processes, zoning, city budgets and public-private partnerships that are SO CONVALUTED that the simple process of endorsing policy with private individual purchasing power is rediculous, especially when it creates artificially low prices that are, on the surface, in a private consumer's best self-interest.)
Gail Radford cites the 1930s as a period when Americans "developed a two-tier policy to subsidize housing. Cramped multifamily housing for the poor, the elderly, femaile-headed families, and people of color would be constructed by public authorities, and more generous single-family housing for white, male-headed families would be constructed by private developers with government support [invisible subsidies and allowance of explicit exclusion of minorities]"(Hayden 45). And the consequences are profound -- for housing, culture, public sector and urban design -- "inadequate financial resources behind one effort [public housing] and wasted material resources [expedited obselescence, poor land-use] behind the other. And worst of all, it mystified many working-class and middle-class Americans, who saw minimal subsidies for the poor but never understood their own tract housing, highways, and malls were far more heavily subsidized” (Hayden 45, italics my editions).
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Can a capitalist economy ever be truly sustainable? It's built on GROWTH and PRIVATE SELF-INTEREST, not staying sufficiently the same. and we keep increasing the population. and communalism will only work in capitalism when it's realized by individuals that collectivism/collaboration is in a self interest, and then it will be figured out how to make profitable.
where are the women? theyre the ones i know the least about as i look at this history of the 20th century, and I know they had some things going on, esp. during WWII. I know about the rosies, but I don't know how their history influenced the shaping of space.
Harvey: The Political Economy of Public Space
It was just a year ago that I first attempted to decipher anything called 'political economy' in a formal way, and the phrase threw me into a fit of underacademic-identity anxiety. after much effort from an entire class of graduate students to make michael p. smith speak comprehendably to only somewhat above-average education levels, we finally got him to say that politics and economy belong in the same dialogue, and that once upon a time politics and economics were the same thing instead of separate disciplines.
oh. ok.
The experience certainly contributed to my ability to get anything out of Harvey's article, though I still hate the way these people organize a sentence and rely on lingo, and anyone citing Richard Sennett is going to take me at least an hour and a half to read. Gear up.
The article uses a case study from second empire paris to describe the process of segretation of space by class interest happening simultaneously with militarization and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a social value/practice.
If this sort of thing didn't exist before, is this tied up in deepening lines between physical space and exclusionary spatial practice? Sure. If anything, it points out the deeper causes for spatial practice to be spatially exclusionary -- the behavior differences between classes arent neccesarily new, but there were other forces at play that separated spaces further, so that exclusion might happen not just at a specific locality (you can't come in this restaurant dressed like that) but more district-wide (Ugly Betty belongs in Queens, and midtown manhatten is something different.) It made the grain coarser, and there are several ways to observe this in place.
He states his conclusion pretty clearly: "The character of public space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional...and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasipublic and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public sphere." The bourgeoisie in paris could "assert their hegemony in politics as well as in economy at the same time that they claimed privileged access to and control over the public spaces of their city" (31-32) This has implications for the role of public space in facilitating democracy, or maybe more specifically, dissent and disobedience. walk through open plazas and public-looking gathering spaces in san francisco and ask yourself, 'could we hold a protest here? could workers strike here?' when a space masquerades as public but behavior is actually policed, it can be profoundly disempowering for already disadvantaged groups and increases power of the already powerful, who use the commons for something very different and have agency in government and the knowledge of the internal system to enact their politics within the institution.
Here's what I'm interested in further - He goes on to assert that "no amount of 'new urbanism' understood as urban design, can promote a greater sense of civic responsibility and particiaption in the intensity of private property arrangements and the orgainzation of commodity as spectacle...remains untouched" (33). I appreciate the clarification -- you can't just build it differently and expect behavior to change without changing this other stuff too. And the way things get built -- new urbanism included -- is clearly processed in a capitalist political economic context, and if it is a process of privileged power and control, it's bound to be impossible to build anything that really shakes the system. But which comes first? can building spaces with intention of facilitating participation and responsibility help to change the system? Or do we have to find some way to change the system so that we can build our cities in a more egalitarian way? I mean, I sort of think that if the public spaces and public sphere serves in part to make room for educating folks with less access/agency (signage, teach-ins, demonstrations), then they have to exist for the system to change. or else we have to find a different space for that education and communication to happen in. the internet helps, but you still have to know how to use it (and it has to stay neutral) and be able to get to it/own a computer and pay a utility bill for it. and surveilance is a huge and still-growing issue. (how did i get on that wierd 5-year special-search list, anyway? I'll never know.) and i don't think it's a substitute for the physical environment, by any means. we didn't evolve as a species to live in computer-land, and no technology fetishizing or sci-fi future-human-evolution sketch will make it so.
oh. ok.
The experience certainly contributed to my ability to get anything out of Harvey's article, though I still hate the way these people organize a sentence and rely on lingo, and anyone citing Richard Sennett is going to take me at least an hour and a half to read. Gear up.
The article uses a case study from second empire paris to describe the process of segretation of space by class interest happening simultaneously with militarization and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a social value/practice.
If this sort of thing didn't exist before, is this tied up in deepening lines between physical space and exclusionary spatial practice? Sure. If anything, it points out the deeper causes for spatial practice to be spatially exclusionary -- the behavior differences between classes arent neccesarily new, but there were other forces at play that separated spaces further, so that exclusion might happen not just at a specific locality (you can't come in this restaurant dressed like that) but more district-wide (Ugly Betty belongs in Queens, and midtown manhatten is something different.) It made the grain coarser, and there are several ways to observe this in place.
He states his conclusion pretty clearly: "The character of public space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional...and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasipublic and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public sphere." The bourgeoisie in paris could "assert their hegemony in politics as well as in economy at the same time that they claimed privileged access to and control over the public spaces of their city" (31-32) This has implications for the role of public space in facilitating democracy, or maybe more specifically, dissent and disobedience. walk through open plazas and public-looking gathering spaces in san francisco and ask yourself, 'could we hold a protest here? could workers strike here?' when a space masquerades as public but behavior is actually policed, it can be profoundly disempowering for already disadvantaged groups and increases power of the already powerful, who use the commons for something very different and have agency in government and the knowledge of the internal system to enact their politics within the institution.
Here's what I'm interested in further - He goes on to assert that "no amount of 'new urbanism' understood as urban design, can promote a greater sense of civic responsibility and particiaption in the intensity of private property arrangements and the orgainzation of commodity as spectacle...remains untouched" (33). I appreciate the clarification -- you can't just build it differently and expect behavior to change without changing this other stuff too. And the way things get built -- new urbanism included -- is clearly processed in a capitalist political economic context, and if it is a process of privileged power and control, it's bound to be impossible to build anything that really shakes the system. But which comes first? can building spaces with intention of facilitating participation and responsibility help to change the system? Or do we have to find some way to change the system so that we can build our cities in a more egalitarian way? I mean, I sort of think that if the public spaces and public sphere serves in part to make room for educating folks with less access/agency (signage, teach-ins, demonstrations), then they have to exist for the system to change. or else we have to find a different space for that education and communication to happen in. the internet helps, but you still have to know how to use it (and it has to stay neutral) and be able to get to it/own a computer and pay a utility bill for it. and surveilance is a huge and still-growing issue. (how did i get on that wierd 5-year special-search list, anyway? I'll never know.) and i don't think it's a substitute for the physical environment, by any means. we didn't evolve as a species to live in computer-land, and no technology fetishizing or sci-fi future-human-evolution sketch will make it so.
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