POLITfCAL CXQGRAPHY QUAR~~Y, VOI. 3, NO. 4, october 1984,349-357

Book reviews

Pouw and Gsis in the City: Corporations, Unions aped Urban Palicy, Roger Friedland, Macmillan, London, 1982, xxx+ 248 pp., f14.00 (hardback), f5,95 (paperback).

This book is a ~~reti~ly sophisticated empirics study of inter-city variation in various US urban policies. It draws on two traditions: the quantitative study of policy outputs, and an approach to urban politics which is broadly Marxian but which places emphasis on organiza- tions rather than classes or economic laws of motion. Friedland’s main argument is with models which attribute policy to urban conditions-for example, which explain high urban renewal expenditure by high need, as evidenced by poor housing. He rightly points out that such modefs present policy as being a technical matter in which the benevolent role of the state is assumed. Against this he argues that policy formation reflects political struggles and he focuses on the role of corporations and trade unions.

The hook starts with a careful analysis of the various ways in which business influence has been conceptualized in the literature of community power and elsewhere, and rejects the equation of corporate power with business par- ticipation in politics. For him this power is structural, deriving from corporate control over resources on which policy-makers depend in order to impiement policy.

After a brief chapter on economic changes in the American central city Friedland passes to his empiricai study. This consists of a series of regression anatyses of data from 130 US cities over f DO 000 in size. The data cover urban renewal funding, War on Poverty funding, black political violence, expenditure on municipal jobs, and fiscal strain. But this is no abstracted empiricism. Throughout the book the data are presented within the political-economic frame work, and a very wide literature is drawn on.

The novelty of the book is Friedland’s intro- duction of corporate power and union power into this empiritcal analysis. He uses data on the number of corporate headqu~~s and national trade unions in a city to measure these concepts. In so doing he, of course, bypasses the problems of measuring power in *is structural sense raised by Crenson and Lukes, but this is the price

paid for the extensiveness of the book’s empirical coverage.

The heart of the book lies in the two chapters on urban renewal. Friedland brings out the uneasy coalition between those who saw urban renewal as about low-income housing, and those-who prevailed-who saw it as a way of clearing dums at pubhc cost for commercial redevelopment. As we would expect from a previous article on the political effects of organizational structure (Friedland et al., 1977) he lays stress on the organization of urban renewal authorities, and how this facilitated links with private developers and prevented ‘inter- ference’ by politicians and public housing advocates.

Passing to the book’s empirical findings, Chapter 5 concludes that ‘corporate power increases the local level of urban renewal, net of local economic conditions or that corporate headquarter activity is itself a local stimulant of such urban renewal’ @. 117). This is in Iine with Friedfand’s hypothesis that renewal spending is a matter of meeting the costs of private growth, not of replacing the worst housing. Some reservations are necessary here. Friedland does not consider the opposite causal relation, that it is urban renewal activity which in fact allows the building of the blocks occupied by corporate headquarters. And, more tech- nically, the absence of beta-weights in the tables in Chapter 5 (though not elsewhere) prevents the reader from assessing rival explanations; the low level of ip-’ (0.03, 0.12, 0.16 as well as 0.53) suggests important factors have been omitted, and his stress on the statistical significance of the difference between regression coefficients, to the exclusion of its actual size-it may be negli~ble -is unhelpful.

Subsequent chapters conclude that War on Poverty spending was a response to the political power of the poor, not their poverty (chapter 6), that black political violence was related to the sire of the local biack population, to police activity and to unreformed local government (chapter 7) and that it led to both repressive and cooptive responses according to the local strength of corporate and union power (chapter 8}, and that local economic growth does not reduce fiscal stress (chapter 9). (In these last two chapters high values of Rz result only from the

350 Book reviews

inclusion of past values of the dependent variables as independent variables.) Strangely, Friedland’s focus on corporate and union power is inexplicably absent from Chapters 7 and 9.

This book is an example of a rare breed, a quantitative empirical study addressed to signifi- cant theoretical questions. This type of comparative study is an essential step in evaluating the conclusions of single-city case studies. On the whole I found the theoretical argument about urban renewal more convincing than the empirical evidence, and would be reluctant to accept Friedland’s claims about corporate and union power. This is partly because of the simple measures of these concepts, but equally because of the significance of excluded variables suggested by the low explanatory power of many of the regression analyses as well as by theoretical considerations. For example, while socio-economic variables are well represented, variables relating to political processes are much less so, and financial and property interests (see p. 124) also deserve inclusion. But this is a very stimulating study which can be recommended to anyone wishing to be abreast of the latest thinking about urban renewal in the United States.

C. G. Pickvance

Reference

FRIEDLAND, R., PIVEN, R. F. AND ALFORD, R. (1977). Political conflict, urban structure and the fiscal crisis, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 1, 447-47 1.

The P&tics of Location: An ~~tro~~~ctj~~, Andrew Kirby, Methuen, London, 1982, 220 pp., 25.95.

Modern political geographers are currently struggling with the theoretical relevance of locational issues in social science. Geography seems to be caught up with the ‘explanatory fever’ that infected sociology and political science some years ago, Political geographers are asking whether location is an important inde- pendent variable in explaining human inter- actions, or whether location is an epiphenom- enon of more basic social and political forces, an empty stage on which the great social forces of economics and politics contend.

Andrew Kirby has written a concise yet

thoughtful overview of the issues facing modern political geographers. He addresses important theoretical issues, yet he grounds his work in the empirical literature on such topics as access to health and medical care, electoral organization, and the distributional effects of the United Kingdom’s rate support grant to local govern- ments. The self-conscious attention to both theory and empiricism make this a book worth reading by geographers, political scientists and urban planners.

The debate in political geography over the unique contribution of location in explaining social interaction parallels one in political science concerning whether ‘politics matters’, or whether all variability among political systems can be explained by social and economic variables, Both disciplines must meet the challenge of modern Marxism, which would define away a role for both location and politics. In the case of location, there exists ‘a spatial logic to the economic structures in society’ (p. 9), but that location does not influence the development of economic structures. Social differentiation is manifested in ‘people poverty’, and ‘place poverty’ is simply a consequence of this basic economic fact.

Salvaging political geography as a social science discipline capable of independent explanatory power, in Kirby’s view, hinges on two arguments. The first is that social conflict occurs in modem society on both production and consumption issues. Production issues raise class-based cleavages; consumption issues raise status-based cleavages. Kirby bases his argument here both on the sociology of Max Weber and on empirical observations of social conflict. For example, he argues that home ownership gives individuals of similar class locations different views on social issues; moreover, residents of council estates view the political world dif- ferentiy than do renters in the private market, even where class is constant.

The second link in Kirby’s chain of reasoning is that location is an independent contributor to status-type conflicts. In support of this proposi- tion Kirby presents a thorough overview of geographical concepts, and in particular the notion of the spatial externality. He argues that location affects the access to social amenities and necessities independently of class; for example, his review of the literature on health care indicates that space friction affects the working class more severely than the middle class. In a very fine chapter on electoral organization, the author presents material on ‘partisan carto- graphy‘ and ‘spatial lobbies’. In case studies of the Third London Airport and the location of public roads, Kirby shows how locational issues