Grounded City

= "four leading academics propose the ‘grounded city’ – where sustainable transport, accessible broadband and modest housing take precedence over ostentatious tower blocks". [1]

Definition

"A city committed to making access to foundational goods and services more widely available to citizens; and does so, without restricting the privileges of citizenship to a narrow group."

Discussion

Excerpted from Ewald Engelen, Sukhdev Johal, Angelo Salento and Karel Williams:

"In an urbanising world, everybody says they want a fairer city. If that is the aspiration, the question is what stands in its way? What do we need to change to deliver that fairness?

Our manifesto is about how the fairer city can be achieved by changing both the imaginary and the practice underlying economic and social policy. The central argument is that we can move towards a fairer city by reframing our problems and rethinking our solutions in two ways:

1. Break with the dominant old problem of the competitive city, which competes economically against other cities and sponsors internal competition for limited opportunities.

2. Stop fixating on redistributive policies which will not deliver fairness, and start thinking about reorganising policies which build a grounded economy in the areas which are not exposed to competition.

The global obsession of our age is competing everywhere with everyone for everything. In the mainstream imaginary, every city has to chase competitive success in a league table where it secures prosperity by getting ahead of others.

Our premise is that competition is the wrong kind of imaginary; that we are trapped by an idea of the externally competitive city as a basis for economic success. The content and meaning of that success then goes largely unexamined until somebody notices that prosperity is manifestly failing to trickle down and the tax system actually reinforces income inequality.

This manifesto argues for a different kind of imaginary: the “grounded city”. The success of a city should not be measured externally by relative size and the ability to come first ahead of equals; rather, the measure should be a city’s internal ability to distribute mundane goods and services which ensure the civilised life of the largest number of its people.

Fairness is not summed up in Gini coefficients of income inequality, but in access to the foundational goods and services that all citizens should enjoy.

After 1945, policies for fairness in high-income countries were imagined in a kind of social democratic frame of redistribution through services and income support, financed from a progressive tax system. But today, such tax systems are everywhere not within the realm of the politically possible.

Centre-left and right parties have all now shifted on to managing internal competition through social engineering, using schools and infrastructure, to redress competitive disadvantage.

But we believe it is time to think radically about delivering fairness not by redistributing income or reforming schools, but by re-organising sectors of the economy. We can have new business models, even if 80% income tax rates are not on the agenda." (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/24/manifesto-fairer-grounded-city-sustainable-transport-broadband-housing)

Finding fairness in the ‘grounded city’

How do we reframe the city’s potential? Where can we find an alternative imaginary about something other than competitive success? The fairer city is a good enough ideal, even though fairness is a peculiarly Anglo-American idea (there is no Italian, French or German word which can express the evocative and generic English idea of fairness). The problem is its international unattainability through income redistribution in today’s world.

Income tax rates well above 50% on immobile firms and citizens were part of a post-1945 conjuncture in the industrialised countries, when there was political pressure from an organised working class through trade unionism (and parties aligned with labour) in a system where the prudent bourgeois were minded to make concessions. We shall not see high tax rates again in the absence of such conditions. The centre-left’s nostalgic attachment to redistributive taxation has faded, and all parties now increasingly problematise fairness as a matter of managing internal competition: the result is standard packages of policy remedies whose reach exceeds their grasp.

It is time to think more radically, by challenging the assumptions and reversing the principles of the competitiveness imaginary. On this basis, we propose a new imaginary of the “grounded city”, where each city does not compete externally with others. Instead it reviews its activities, then aims to make locally relevant improvements in its internal capacity to provide a larger number of people with the basic goods and services that provide the material basis for social life.

The grounded city is a fairer city delivered through radically different policies, necessary because the current packages of policy fixes for unfairness are inadequate to the scale of the problems and their drivers. In centre-right and centre-left variants, these policy fixes are set in a frame of managing internal competition: the centre-right backs jobs and schooling as a basis for more equal competition; the centre-left favours an overlapping package of schooling plus minimum wages and some redistribution through family credits and such like to compensate for disadavantage. Either way, the conscience of our competitive age is about “equal opportunities” through policy remedies which, in our view, are necessary but not sufficient for a better, fairer city.

Some of the policy novelties are valuable. The new technologies for procedural fairness, complete with opportunity commissions and policy advisers in city hall, are invaluable in preventing discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation, and they continue to be necessary. But procedural fairness does not secure substantive outcomes in high-income countries, where the proliferation of anti-discrimination policies since the 1970s has been accompanied by sharply increasing inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. These inequalities are materialised in all our cities by residential segregation around hierarchised districts, from the desirable, gentrified suburb to the sink estate.

How and why does the concern for fairness co-exist with growing inequality in our cities? Because the fairer city is so far an aspiration which does not any longer come with any kind of politically actionable and substantive policy programme that has the leverage to deliver fairness in terms of broad outcomes.

Fairness in terms of outcomes is, of course, much harder to achieve than fairness in terms of process on social housing allocation. For example, schools as institutions and teachers as professionals deserve our social respect and financial support; but there is no evidence that they are up to the social engineering task of compensating for the many other kinds of disadvantage generated in the home and within the neighbourhood. The most likely outcome is that centrist politicians announce the aim and then simply give school teachers another good kicking for failing to achieve the unachievable.

So if fairness policies in a competitive frame promise more than they can deliver, why not change the frame by reversing what might be called the principles of operation underlying the practice of the competitive city?

One master assumption underpins the ideology of competitive cities. Boris Johnson stated this assumption in his 2013 speech on the relevance of Margaret Thatcher: “Like it or not, the free-market economy is the only show in town. Britain is competing in an increasingly impatient and globalised economy, in which the competition is getting ever stiffer.”

But this claim mistakes the competitive part of the economy for the much larger whole which contains many sheltered sectors. It leads London’s mayor and many others towards city policies focused on sectors of the future which have a supposedly key role in international competition in tradable goods and services: the corollary is neglect and mismanagement of what we call the foundational economy, and the sphere of sheltered production of many other mundane goods and services which are important to the welfare of every citizen.

The idea of a heterogeneous economy means only that the economy has different spheres or zones which run on different principles. The historian Fernand Braudel argued in Civilisation and Capitalism “there were not one but several economies” from the 15th to the 18th century, with one economic zone above and one below the market and competition. Were he writing now, Braudel’s injunction would be to explore present-day economic life in ways that recognise its multiplicity and its organisation into zones and spheres which have different internal logics and variable salience for material welfare.

The tradable competitive sphere has all the key sectors which associate themselves with a high-income present and a glamorous future. Here we have wholesale finance and markets, the prestige end of business services in accountancy, law and consulting, anything digital or supposedly knowledge-based from media to advertising, together with the parts of manufacturing which have high tech associations. The object of competitive global city policy is to attract more of these glamour activities to locate in their city, adjacent to a hub international airport.

The metal bashing, plastics moulding and assembly work of manufacturing is then to be relegated to industrial districts and cities which are in the hinterland of an Asian country, half a world away from the US or Europe. The industrial working class becomes increasingly Chinese, while the successful post-industrial global city draws in service workers to meet the needs of the frequent flyers in business class who use the local hub airport. Tradable goods and services – from smart phones to call centres – become ever cheaper without commensurate benefits in well-being and quality of life for city dwellers in either Asia or California.

Glamour front-end activities of branding and design have the power to subordinate and claim the profit of assemblers and suppliers; as Apple does at the expense of Foxconn’s Chinese workforce in Shenzhen. The effects of such corporate success in western cities are muted because financialised companies sterilise reserves offshore; and at city level, corporate success often turns into crowding out (not trickle down), as when Google workers compete for San Francisco housing.

In contrast, we seek to define another sphere of the economy, geared to producing mundane, foundational goods and services that have three inter-related characteristics: first, they are necessary to everyday life; second, all citizens regardless of income consume them; and third, they are distributed according to population through branches and networks. The list of such activities includes: the privatised pipe and cable utilities together with transport; some traditionally private activities such as retail banking, supermarket food retailing and food processing; and some traditionally state-provided activities including health, education, and welfare or social care, which are now increasingly outsourced. Such activities employ 30-40% of the workforce in all the world’s cities, yet they figure only as instrumentalities in the competitive city paradigm because city boosters recognise the competitive city must have infrastructural improvement.

Against this, we would argue that in Shenzhen or San Francisco, the ordinary citizen’s welfare, material well-being and cultural participation all depend very directly on the provision of an adequate quantum of foundational goods and services which are priced or de-commodified so that they are accessible to the majority of city population. These issues about foundational supply are not abolished by “economic development”, they only change form: in a Brazilian favela or an African shanty town, the issue will be absence of sanitation and paying for electricity; in London the issue will be the absence of reasonably priced family housing for lower-income workers with jobs in the central city.

Our argument is simple. If we want fairness, then we should focus on the foundational economy and reorganise these activities to make them more grounded. This requires new kinds of policies which build on the naturally sheltered part of the economy and more or less reverse the operating principles of your local city hall as it has pursued competitiveness." (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/24/manifesto-fairer-grounded-city-sustainable-transport-broadband-housing)

Policy Proposals

"Here are two new directions and some recommendations for city policy:

1. Invest unshowily in improving the supply of foundational services in specific and locally relevant ways (instead of promoting the ostentation of iconic buildings and grand projects of regeneration which are the same everywhere for competitive cities).

Symbols are a constitutive element of the history of our cities. All major European cities have built self-images around symbols, mostly architectural symbols as with Haussmann’s Boulevards and the Eiffel tower which can together stand for Paris. The ideology of city competition has elevated the symbolic power of architecture to an extreme degree, but has damaged the symbolic heritage of our cities, filling their business and residential districts with “iconic buildings” by starchitects which reproduce the same styles in different places. The result is a developer-led spectacle of ambition and competition materialised with no sense of place and history.

More than 200 tower blocks of more than 20 storeys are presently in planning or under construction in London and three-quarters of them will be luxury flats; Manchester council has put millions into the Spinningfields office and financial district. How does the ordinary citizen benefit from such development? For citizens in present-day cities, the invisible and foundational economy is far more necessary and salient than highly visible, iconic additions to the cityscape which make money for developers and produce look alike cities that fit a generic template in the mind of city hall.

Rather than significant investments in the architecture of ostentation, we need investment and incremental innovations in what we usually take for granted: the infrastructure for sustainable transport, the treatment and distribution of drinking water, underground drainage systems, waste recycling, telecoms and broadband systems accessible to everyone everywhere, modest but energy efficient family housing in unremarkable districts with public spaces and services. And to see how all this can be done in a territorially responsible way by expanding local firm and workforce capability and improving quality of work.

The logic of this priority is that is that it requires us to engage with the specifics of infrastructural deficiencies in individual cities. Each city has a bundle of very specific needs, resources and opportunities: a different topography, a different history, different levels of income and inequality, a different provision of existing infrastructure. London is not Amsterdam, Milan is not Johannesburg.

Locally relevant improvements have to be defined without the one-size-fits-all assumptions of competition: dedicated bike lanes are not an issue in sprawling megacities or towns built on steep hills. In many low-income cities, access and pricing for basic utility services is an issue for edge-of-city informal settlements that lack utility infrastructure and/or require long-distance commuting; in a cold, high-income country with old housing stock, the priority might be short term measures that alleviated fuel poverty and longer term issues about financing necessary investments in secure, sustainable energy supply. In most cities, building or buying social housing and capillary transport improvement will be objectives which are interconnected physically and in terms of pricing decisions.

This kind of shift to specifics would not be intellectually or politically easy, because it requires priority setting and chain thinking about local connections and consequences; but the shift is attractive because it sidesteps the absurdities of the ranking game. If we are concerned with the foundational economy in one city, the measure of success is not primarily an external measure which involves ranking one city against others in meaningless cross section; the measure of success becomes primarily internal and temporal.

The question then becomes: to what extent is that city providing (reasonably priced or decommodified) material conditions of civilised life? For example, take five key domains of foundational security (housing, utility supply, food, health/social care and education) and then ask: to what extent are adequate and reasonably priced key services in each domain available to ordinary citizens and, specifically, how far down the income scale to median incomes or below does this provision extend? It should be clear that cities which rank high on global competitiveness often rank low on one or more basic foundational criteria, as London does on housing. Specifics and time are both crucial because the basic assumption is that policy is about cities doing do more and better in specific domains over time to improve the local offer of foundational goods and services.

2. Promote social innovation which meets basic social needs with a learning government in the leading role (instead of fixating on technical innovation which promises but no longer delivers diffused benefits from productivity and economic growth)

Technical innovation was the embodied aim of 20th-century industrial cities whose suburbs presupposed the motor car and electricity distribution systems; productivity gain and GDP growth were then measures of our national achievement, on the assumption that economic gains would be broadly distributed.

But this assumption is no longer valid in the high-income countries: as Thomas Piketty has demonstrated, the national macro-economic trends in high-income countries are to greater inequalities of wealth and income; as the UN concluded in its 2012-13 State of World Cities “cities generate wealth but it is not shared equitably”.

GDP growth has no rationale when the benefits are captured by the top 5% of the population, which in our cities means urban ecologies of residential segregation by income. We believe the emphasis needs to be shifted towards social innovation that promotes a civilised, inclusive city which performs fair outcomes in all its decisions. A city committed to making access to foundational goods and services more widely available to citizens; and does so, without restricting the privileges of citizenship to a narrow group, as in Gulf State urbanism.

The social problems we now need to solve in many cities are those such as adult care in an era of weakening family ties and ageing populations. To our knowledge, no world city has model arrangements for care of the elderly; their care is a challenge to our ingenuity and, like the quality of public school meals, a litmus test of our civilisation.

All of this requires financial innovation for social purposes which means not higher taxes but new forms of taxes to provide an adequate revenue base.

The competitive city is associated with the race-to-the-bottom, post-1979 incentive strategy of cutting tax rates (and allowing all kinds of general exemptions, especially in corporate tax) in the hope of attracting and retaining big business. Instead, the discourse should be about responsibility when business which draws private benefits from city expenditure (on everything from education to law and order) so that business should, in return, pay its fair share of the social costs; and the valuable businesses are those which are rooted in place and accept their social obligations.

But the answer at this point is not higher tax rates but new forms of taxes which tap the capital gains and incomes created by urbanism. Because taxation is a social technology where innovation in forms of taxation has come to a halt after a heroic century of achievements from 1850-1950 which gave us social insurance, sales tax and income tax deductions for weekly paid workers. The problem of our own time are not about financial innovation but about innovation applied for private purposes regardless of social consequences, as with sub-prime mortgages and other forms of long chain finance.

The argument must be about how to connect social obligation and fiscal innovation. There is then no escaping the point that the grounded city needs some kind of land value tax, for reasons which were familiar to radical Edwardians before 1914 but have subsequently been forgotten. Urbanism generates increases in the price of land and property: for the individual land owner, property renter and homeowner, these increases are an unearned increment arising from social development and the investments of others, especially public bodies which provide infrastructure. As the city creates the unearned increment, it is only sensible that the municipality should, through tax, take some of the value of the increment.

The precondition for mass welfare in the grounded city is a re-invented tax base intelligently spent on public goods and services which directly benefit the mass of the population. One implication is that there are limits to single-city policy because there are places, like Detroit or Liverpool, which have been set problems which cannot be solved from limited local sources. Cities do not, of course, have a full control of all the levers.

Another implication is that intelligent use of the levers depends on rebuilding proper expertise, especially within the tradition of town planning, globally represented by figures such as the late Sir Peter Hall. But this does not imply the idea that urban government is in some general sense for planned cities and against the market, only that the state and planning must take responsibility for some fundamental basics of city organisation.

This implies a shift from seeing the private sector as a source of enterprise and dynamism to seeing the public and third sectors as a source of initiative, experiment and legitimacy.

The grounded city is neither an insoluble city problem in the 1970s sense, nor a city black box in the 2000s sense delivering pleasant surprises. The grounded city is instead a site of diverse experiments and learning which could and should be publicly led.

Drawing on thinking from science and technology studies, government is about experimenting; experimenting is about learning; learning is about building on successes but also about making mistakes; and learning is also about recognising these as mistakes, and moving on.

We think these experiments have to be led by the public sector because only city and city region government has the tax revenue base, local knowledge and democratic legitimacy to require and sensibly lead large scale change. Public sector outsourcing so far, in sectors like rail operation in the UK, reveals a private sector which is risk averse, reluctant to commit investment and unlikely to experiment in socially desirable ways; while private sector capital is hardly necessary if governments at various levels can borrow and do so more cheaply than the private sector. Against this background, a new social contract is required, enforced as we have argued elsewhere by a social process of licensing which enforces corporate responsibility according to local and sectoral circumstances.

The point of fragility in all this is not the coherence and integrity of our vision of the grounded city; the question is about whether it is possible to put together a coalition of city government and civil society to get things done. We live in an era of post-democracy which has removed many of the pressures on city governments world-wide to act radically. Hence the lazy default pursuit of competitive success will continue for a little longer, though not without challenge by a new ideal." (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/24/manifesto-fairer-grounded-city-sustainable-transport-broadband-housing)