Reviews for Urban growth & economics

The average rating for Urban growth & economics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-13 00:00:00 Jerry Fleming A classic of urban sociology, using a deceptively simple framework for assessing urban development, by asking who controls the "exchange value" of a given urban site, and how their power lines up against the stakeholders of the (current) "use value" of the urban locale. Ironically, there appears to be a deep conservatism at the root of the book -- that is, a bias in favor of urban incumbents, over those who would change the urban fabric to make way for new kinds of uses. Certainly many of the latter or often motivated by little more than venality, and often their would-be clients are not a particularly pleasant lot (bourgies); but this hardly means that we should romanticize the "daily round" of the urban incumbents. Even seen from the point of view of the urban poor, achieving historical social justice may be easier through mobility to new locales than through attempts to force incumbent urban power structures to be more fair by holding developers hostage. Often the only choice facing the urban poor is continued poverty and social exclusion in their current site, on the one hand, versus "displacement" on the other. The fact that many of the urban poor move out of their incumbent neighborhoods as soon as they have the money to do so and social barriers to mobility (e.g. segregation, formal or otherwise) are removed, is a good sign that these are neighborhoods that do not necessarily warrant defense in their current mode. In short, just because developers act as urban vandals doesn't mean that the thing that they are vandalizing is necessarily all that nice. That has to be assessed on a case by case basis.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-09 00:00:00 Timothy Cox This book was all right. I felt like it was trying to put a guilt trip on rich people the whole time. Not that I should have felt guilty because I'm not rich but rather aspire to be.