Critical cosmopolitanism: Urban and regional studies into the 1990s

CKM-7185/89 $3.00+ 0.00 @ 1989 Pergamon Press plc

Geojorum, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 241-252.1989 Printed in Great Britain

Critical Cosmopolitanism: Urban and Regional Studies into the 1990s

PHILIP

COOKE,*

Cardiff,

U.K.

Abstract: This paper reappraises and contextualises the more salient contributions to British urban and regional studies in the 1980s. The particular emphasis will be on the contributions made by production geography, although the consumption geographic level will not be neglected. A further emphasis is on the radical wing of this work where the major advances have been made. This paper is structured chronologically. After an introduction pointing to the connections between social change and intellectual change, the first main section focuses on research developed to deal with the latter end of the Fordist era. The next section explores work on the crisis of Fordism and the emergent Post-Fordist era. Finally, a speculative conclusion picks out those elements of Post-Fordism which can be expected to underpin both spatial development and academic analysis into the 1990s.

Introduction: Change

Social

Change

and

Academic

Anyone reflecting upon urban and regional studies in Britain during the 1980s is faced with focussing on a moving target. The decade began with the remnants of a post-war consensus regarding the necessity for planning and some degree of economic management to bring adjustment to inequalities in the urban and regional system. Recognition that the private sector had long abdicated responsibility for the fates of the inner cities and declining regions had resulted in a rising budget and an extended scope for urban and regional intervention. Although the investment and legislation underpinning such intervention was firmly anchored in the central state apparatus, the local level had increasingly become a conduit through which policies were being implemented. Inner-city partnership between central and local state, and the establishment of economic development agencies in Scotland and Wales were examples of continuing concern with the problems such inequity posed for political integration within the nation-state. Thus planning was still a key instrument of urban policy and regulation

* Department of Town Planning, University of Wales, PO Box 906, Cardiff CF13YN, U.K. 241

remained an important part of state regional policy. If spending on some aspects of the former had peaked after 1976 that on the ‘latter had remained on an upward curve. However, all that was soon to change. If community renewal had been a motif of the preceding decade then economic revival was to replace it in the 1980s. The balance of policy was shown to have shifted sharply with the introduction of the Enterprise Zone concept in 1981. Now, the market, freed from the trammels of development control, was to be unleashed as the saviour of the inner cities. Pent-up entrepreneurial spirits were to be released from the bonfire of red tape. Local state powers over housing provision, welfare services and locally-raised revenue expenditure were shortly to be circumscribed to unblock the interrupted functioning of market mechanisms. By the middle of the decade the first division of local state apparatuses, the metropolitan counties were to be dismantled while comprehensive powers for urban spatial development, first tried out in Urban Development Corporations in Liverpool and London, were later to be extended to many other inner-city problem areas. The ‘inefficiencies’ of democratic concern for safeguarding local communities while seeking urban renewal were thus downgraded in favour of the ‘efficiencies’ of nominated bodies working closely in a new form of

242 partnership, this time between the public and private sectors, with the latter very much to the fore. Clearly the academic study of urban and regional systems had not remained static during this period of dramatic transformation. Although policiesespecially the radical right-wing Conservative policies that have been introduced under successive Thatcher administrations-have their effects urban and regional change cannot be reduced to policy-impacts of that kind alone. The existence of cross-national shifts such as those falling under the umbrella of ‘counterurbanisation’ (KEEBLE, 1980; FIELDING, 1983) whereby employment and residential growth were to be seen occurring in rural or semi-rural rather than metropolitan settings is a case in point. Another would be the growth also during the 1970s of so-called ‘branch-plant economies’ in many countries as capital restructured and relocated in regions which were reconverting from a traditional dependence on heavy industry. Some of the most interesting new research and, in particular, new theory of spatial development processes reached fruition around the study of such shifts at the turn of the decade. Geography, from having been a discipline obsessed with the study of space in its own terms, together with its academic pilot-fish in planning and urban sociology, turned from such questions as the development of urban hierarchies or industrial linkages (which were often answered in merely descriptive terms) towards the functional analysis of processes which structured space. This development in the discipline was particularly pronounced in two major spheres (COOKE, 1987a). The first of these was heralded by a new approach to studying the mechanisms underlying housing allocation and distribution in capitalist societies. Stimulated largely by the structural Marxism of the French school of urban sociology (PICKVANCE, 1976; CASTELLS, 1977) urban issues began to be analysed in terms of the functional question of consumption. What, the question was posed, is specifically urban about the city? To which the answer came that it was the mode of consumption which characterised the city. In particular, the city was conceived as the site in which the collective consumption of goods and services was concentrated. Housing, education, welfare and leisure services were all characteristically perceived as being state-provided. They were thus politically-contested matters which, indeed, defined the nature of urban politics and the struggles through which it was often manifested. This non-spatial conception of urbanity was to have a transformational

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and by no means totally beneficial impact on the study of such fields as urban property development, publicsector housing allocation, the role of building societies in urban development, and the study of social movements (BREUGEL, 1975; HARLOE, 1977; HARVEY, 1978). The second sphere in which significant innovation occurred concerned regional industrial development. A new economic geography emerged in which the analysis of processes of capital accumulation at the level of the nation-state and beyond joined forces with a theoretically-informed study of the practices of capitalist firms faced with early effects of the slowdown in the long post-war economic boom during the 1970s. Interestingly, one key stimulus to this work also had a French structuralist-Marxist provenance (LIPIETZ, 1977) although the two fields of radical analysis remained, as Castells decreed, separate spheres for much of the following decade. Castells’s influential, although faulty, reasoning was that capitalist societies should be analysed as urban consumption systems and regional production systems. Housing, for example, was appropriately to be studied at the urban level, industry at the regional level. There were, to be sure, some later analyses which attempted to apply insights from the study of industrial development to the housing question [e.g. MERRE’IT (1979) and BALL (1983)] although these were still very much production-based. Only fitfully was this work extended into questions of social power and consumption [e.g. MASSEY and CATALAN0 (1978) and DICKENS et al. (1985)J. However, it is important to note here the influence of two ‘homegrown’ models which did attempt, to various degrees of success, to integrate politics, economics, and consumption in space. One was the ‘structuralised’ radical community studies carried out by the experimental Community Development Projects in the 1970s-half in, half out of the state apparatus they were funded to find new ways forward for areas badly affected by restructuring [see HIGGINS et al. (1983)]. In some ways these can be seen as actionresearch precursors of current ‘locality research’. Secondly, there was the influential tradition of Marxist social history cila Thompson and Hobsbawm, but developed to analyse the relations between production, class and political power in specific places [e.g. STEDMAN-JONES (1971) and FOSTER (1974)]. In urban and regional studies itself the only influential author to depart from such production-consumption taxonomising, principally by ploughing his own

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Anglo-Saxon furrow, was David Harvey whose writings have covered questions of suburbanization, inner-city housing renewal, the property and finance sectors and, at a general and abstract level, the processes of industrial capital accumulation and devalorisation. Harvey, though, has never studied regional industrial development in as much empirical depth as his early work on housing and property, so the division of academic labour can be said more or less to hold, even in his case. The questions which the new economic geography asked revolved around the continuation in all capitalist economies of regional uneven development. Why were there fast and slow growing regional economies? (By the early 1980s this was reformulated as fast and slowly declining economies.) What were the forms of control being exerted by industrial capital over production processes extended over space? How was the capitalist corporation reorganizing in the face of heightened competition and stagnating markets? What changes were taking place in the labour processes, technological content and gender divisions of the workplace? What was the role of the state in regional development, particularly where stateownership of industry came into contradiction with subsidy to the private sector through regional policies? All of these and related subquestions were the foci for what became an international effort to understand the structuring, and, crucially, the restructuring of industry and the space economy in contemporary capitalism (MASSEY and MEEGAN, 1979; HUDSON and LEWIS, 1980; WALKER and STORPER, 1981). In this paper I shall attempt to reappraise some of the more salient contributions to urban and regional studies in the 1980s. My own emphasis will-true to the Castellsian dichotomy for better or worse-be on the production geographic rather than the consumption geographic level, though the latter will by no means be neglected. A further emphasis will be towards the radical wing of this corpus mainly because that is where the main developmental dynamic of the subject has come from. This paper is structured chronologically, periodised perhaps, around the phases of intellectual and experiential development that have occurred in the 1980s and may be deduced for the 1990s. Thus the first main section focuses particularly on the political economy of the early years of the decade, calling attention to the conceptual apparatus then being developed to comprehend the latter stages of what can be called the Fordist era,

243 The next section explores the crisis of Fordism and the emergent analyses of what is coming to be called the Post-Fordist era. The final, somewhat speculative section, picks out some elements of Post-Fordism which can be expected to underpin the spatial development processes, and thus the academic analysis, of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At each stage of the discussion reference is made to the changing political and policy arenas that put into context but do not determine the changes in question.

The High Point of Fordism in Urban and Regional Studies

Since the discourse of this paper will be couched in terms of the Fordist and Post-Fordist mode of development, it is important to clear up definitional questions at the outset. The concept ‘Fordism’ was coined by GRAMSCI (1971) in his discussion of the practices of Henry Ford at the River Rouge automobile plant in Detroit. Ford, working under the tutelage of Frederick Taylor, introduced flow-line assembly and scientific management to the world. The plant was totally vertically-integrated and the labour process was decomposed into detailed tasks undertaken repetitively and routinely by assemblyline workers. The process was so alienating to workers that Ford made two crucial further innovations. First, he established the Sociology Department part of the task of which was to screen workers, weed out troublemakers and ensure as docile a work-force as possible. Second, Ford paid his workers the then astonishing sum of $5 a day for their labour. This, as well as acting as a considerable incentive to remain a Ford employee, enabled workers potentially to save enough of their income to become consumers of the product they were producing [for a fuller account of this history see BEYNON (1975)]. Fordism has tended to have a double meaning in the geographical literature. It can be used in a limited sense to refer simply to the labour process deployed in the modern factory system. Here, reference is made to the typical job-demarcation, task-specification, detailed division of labour, deskilled occupational roles, direct control of labour processes by supervisors, bureaucratic and hierarchical management structures, and functional as well as spatial separation of activities [see, for example, PERRONS (1981)J. The second, more wide-ranging meaning, the one used in this paper, takes the Gramscian insight into the necessity of a link between production and consumption in the capital accumulation process: Two

244 concepts are of key importance to the securing of this link in theoretical terms. To quote LIPIETZ (1985): ‘The French school of regulation’ has developed around the concepts of the ‘regime of accumulation’ and the ‘mode of regulation’. The regime of accumulation is a systematic mode of dividing and reallocating the social

product, which achieves over a period a certain match between the transformation of the conditions of production and final consumption. The mode of regulation is defined as the ensemble of institutional forms, networks and norms which assure the compatibility of behaviours in the framework of a regime of accumulation. In other words, the accumulation process requires different forms of management as it develops out of periodic crises. Fordism was both a reorganization of labour processes and a restructuring of consumption norms. In its early intensive phase, the link was made within the private sector through competitive, plantbased wage-bargaining. In its post-war intensive phase these norms became collectivised, often with state intervention under a ‘corporatist’ mode of regulation and, more importantly, a Keynesian system of demand management which raised consumption norms, accompanied by a welfare state which helped keep costs to capital down by supplying a social wage. It was, of course, these arrangements that entered severe crisis in many countries in the 1980s. The analysis of urban and regional development processes from a radical standpoint entered the scene at about the point that the Keynesian-welfare mode of regulation and the Fordist regime of accumulation were entering crisis. With respect to the urban level of analysis, we have already seen that the generalisation of a welfare state, incorporating increased provision of centrally-funded public health, education, housing and leisure activities, was the motive force for a redefinition of the idea of ‘the urban’. From urbanity having been defined overtly or covertly in terms of some spatial referent such as the specific culture that arises where spatial concentration of social activity occurs or of least-cost locations for general marketexchange transactions, it was now to be seen as the particular form taken by the welfare state in space. This ‘despatialization’ of the city or urban locality also reduced, to some considerable extent, the element of agency, of initiative-taking from the urban level. Rather, capitalism was presented as having certain-basic requirements, such as a healthy, educated workforce housed in improving conditions; the state acting either as capital’s instrument or in its interests, provided a welfare state; and the concrete forms of that welfare state were realised in cities to

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which labour was attracted, thereby becoming the healthy, educated, better-housed labour pools that capital required. This circular reasoning had a certain elegance to it, the more so when more subtle theorists such as LOJKINE (1977) pointed to the parallel existence of production functions in cities in which the state, through roads and other infrastructural investments, also subsidised in the interests of productive capital as well as helping the realisation of value for finance capital by creating demand for retail and office space. Space was thus, to a marked degree, becoming uniform as cities everywhere were subjected to the same mass-provided collective consumption goods. Indeed Fordist methods were increasingly to be found in the new labour processes necessary for the construction of mass-housing using system-building techniques. What could be more Fordist in its bureaucratic hierarchies than the separate division of the welfare state providing for the needs of the citizen from cradle to grave? Even the architectural styles of the most luxurious icons of Fordist modernity, the downtown office towers, were so similar as to provoke the critique that everywhere was getting to look like everywhere else as late Modernism’s international style, with its mirror-glass curtain walling and cubelike constructions, imprinted its presence upon city skylines. As CASTELLS (1977) noted this relegitimised the dominant ideology of accumulation in the symbolic fabric of the central city. All this was by no means taking place unproblematically. There were urban upheavals ranging from riots to more conventional protest movements from representatives of now-devaluing urban communities in the face of encroachments by community renewal or city centre extension schemes. Some of these gave pause to the new commentators upon the urban scene to consider a new political phenomenon-the urban social movement. This, it was thought, heralded new possibilities in politics whereby class-based movements formed around workplace solidarities might be joined by urban protest movements to so disrupt the delicate mechanisms of Fordist accumulation as to bring about a real shift in the balance of power within particular nation-states. This almost occurred in the Paris of May 1968 as protesters from workplace, community and academia joined forces in pursuit of societal transformation. However, in general, the claims for the systemic significance of urban social movements have, thus far, proved exaggerated as CASTELLS (1983) later recognised upon sober reflection.

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Moving away from questions of collective consumption to those of production and the more regional scale, the central concept through which late Fordism was being comprehended was ‘industrial restructuring’ (MASSEY and MEEGAN, 1979, 1982; MASSEY, 1984). The language of Fordian discourse was present in some of this emergent literature (PERRONS, 1981; DUNFORD, 1979; DUNFORD and PERRONS, 1983) but it tended to become occluded in the internal debate partly because of a sometimes overformal presentation of empirical reality within categories which could seem rigid, especially in the British case. Moreover, the discourse of the restructuring thesis offered both a theoretical grip on a notoriously dynamic field of study, and a method of analysis preliminary to generalisation which was appealing to many refugees from regression analysis. Some of the most fruitful exchanges of ‘friendly fire’ on the relevance of Fordist discourse occurred in the Conference of Socialist Economists’ ‘Regionalism’ study group [see, for example, MASSEY (1978), DUNFORD et al. (1981) and MORGAN and SAYER (1983)]. What emerged was a strong tendency to undertake sectoral studies of industrial restructuring at the meso-level to test out the three main propositions of the thesis. These propositions were that firms faced with a loss of market share as a result of increased competition would, if one excluded merger as a major alternative to bankruptcy, engage in one or a combination of three strategies. They would, first, rationalise both capital and labour, scrapping the former and making redundant the latter. As a result they would intensify labour processes for those workers that remained, thus also making even more productive use of retained capital. Third, either in combination with the first and second strategies or as a result of their failure, they would make significant investment decisions often involving technological change, relocation or both. Amongst other investment decisions could be the merger option which was, in the late 196Os, under the Labour government’s Industrial Reorganization Corporation (IRC), a favoured mode of regulation to modernise British industry in preparation for a then-abortive attempt to enter the EEC where much greater capital concentration was prevalent. A new research agenda had thus been set, one which also took the analysis of space beyond the surface level of industrial landscapes and into the inner

245 sanctum of production organization. However, the most significant feature of this research strategy was the way in which, by exploring industrial processes, a much richer picture of spatial structure was revealed. One of the simplest, but most telling, insights to emerge was that space played a hitherto unsuspected constitutive role in the restructuring process. Capital’s rationalisation strategies often coincided with the closure of plants in mature urban space where long-established labour organization and industrial solidarity meant the continuation of relatively high labour costs, especially where there was also a high skill content in labour processes. However, in some major industries such as electrical engineering, automobile manufacture and clothing production, restructuring involved the establishment of new plants in peripheral regions. New labour processes, often associated with technological modernisation, were introduced. New kinds of labour were also to be involved, particularly women and younger men, in learning relatively rapidly the deskilled production techniques in such industry. Thus the spatial distribution of untapped labour pools had become a key factor in the development of a new ‘spatial division of labour’ (MASSEY, 1984). The state’s mode of regulation was also influential in this process in three main ways. First, encouragement was given to the development of collective bargaining and other quasi-instruments for the settlement of industrial disputes. This meant that, theoretically, wage levels and differentials could be smoothed out over space to some extent. However, women workers were not subject to the same payment criteria in the absence of equal opportunities legislation or its effective dilution in practice, and so became a valued labour-power source. Second, the merger-mania which the IRC had partly fostered meant that company headquarters were located or relocated in London and the South where inter-industry and industrygovernmental information flows were strongest. Third, regional policy was in an active phase. Accordingly, capital was encouraged to relocate production facilities to declining and reconverting heavy industry regions such as Tyneside, Clydeside and South Wales. These were also major centres of political support for the governing party of the period. Perhaps the most interesting development in this chain of theoretical and empirical reasoning, and one which took such analysis from the confines of geography into an influential position within other social science disciplines was the insight it offered into the mechanisms causing social and political change in

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space. Urban sociology had, as noted, begun to reject spatial analysis and at the same time the long tradition in more general sociology of community studies had become exhausted, not least as a consequence of internal critiques (BELL and NEWBY, 1971). However, the restructuring thesis brought space back into sociological discourse with some effect. URRY’s (1981) paper on the manner in which locality had become conceptually and empirically a crucial site for the understanding of social change engaged urban sociologists in debate and prompted further work at the subregional scale (COOKE, 3981; LANCASTER REGIONALISM GROUP, 198.5). Moreover, spatial questions were now increasingly incorporated in the most advanced sociological theorising and analysis (GIDDENS, 1981,1984; MANN, 1986). The launch of the journal Society and Space in 1983 also bore witness to this exciting cross-border interchange. To conclude, therefore, this section of the discussion, it is clear that, especially as a result of the new, radical theoretically-informed research into the historical processes producing regionally uneven development, the prospect of a reconstructed geography, sensitive to the scalar interactions between the global and the local spheres, was in prospect. MASSEY’s (1984) idea of ‘rounds of investment’, producing over time intriguing regional and local disjunctures and transformations in the social and political composition of space was pivotal. Here radicalization of social relations, there deradicalization of solidaristic traditions, resulting perhaps in new forms of local political action, perhaps competitive as in URRY’s (1981) formulation, perhaps more collectivist as in studies of ‘red islands’ [see DUNCAN and GOODWIN (1988) for a review] or COOKE’s (1984) exploration of ‘radical regions’. This gave new impetus to the quest for a better understanding of urban and regional development and change. The Crisis of Fordism and Global-Local

Relations

By the portentous year of 1984 it was becoming clear that the model of capitalist development informing the analyses just described was becoming inadequate both as-a research tool and as a regime of accumulation. In personal terms the light dawned on me while standing in line at the local post office and overhearing a complaint over the counter that “in the 70s the bosses were offering us productivity bonuses, in the 80s it’s flexibility bonuses. Either way we end up working harder.” Thus it is that theory and practice, structure and agency, knowledge and interests come together in the humble pursuits of everyday life.

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The crisis of Fordism was caused by a slowdown in productivity. Fordist production methods had reached certain limits, imposed technically by the rigidities of the transfer-machinery, occasioning long periods of downtime on assembly lines, breakdowns as machinery became more sophisticated but required more elaborate maintenance, and delays causing back-up on production lines. Moreover, the context of production was also changing. Competition from new international giants posed problems of quality and price for Fordist manufacturers, while changes in consumer demand meant that the economies of scale deriving from mass-production of standardized products were becoming diseconomies. The crisis in productivity, rising unemployment and generalised depression of the late 1970s and early 1980s had ushered in neoliberal administrations in many countries suffering the incomprehensible syndrome of stagflation-stagnating output with rising inflation. These problems in turn were reflected in an ideological and political-economic antipathy to the welfare state, a revaluation of the virtues of the marketplace as distributor of the social product, and an uncoupling of the Fordist compact between the regime mass-collective accumulation and the Keynesian mode of regulation. This, of course, did not mean the end of mass-production. Such is the scale of the global market for capitalist output that mass-production can never be unlearned. Indeed the first response to the Fordist crisis was to attempt to globalize the production process in a strategy to which LIPIETZ (1985) refers as ‘peripheral Fordism’. New production sites were found in Latin America, South East Asia and Southern Europe as corporations sought to maximise the low-wage advantages and anti-union policies of the nation-states of the periphery. However, the inability of such countries to complete the Fordist link between production and consumption, thereby extending the internal market, meant that output was increasingly directed back to the already saturated markets of the core. When, simultaneously, the international debt crisis forced all but a handful of newly industrialising countries to throttle back on their development programmes and cut the limited social benefits some had been able to institute, a total rethink was called for. This rethink has involved wide-ranging experimentation with significant implications for urban and regional systems. To some extent the model to which restructuring corporations have aspired has been a Japanese one. The Ford motor company, for

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example, named its response to the failure of peripheral Fordism the ‘AJ Strategy’, AJ standing for After Japan. Amongst the standards to be emulated were the key Japanese advantages of being able to mass-produce and export at low cost, high quality and high reliability the consumer goods which were the monopoly of Western Fordism. Unlocking the secrets of the Japanese system has been a long and painful process. However, amongst the ‘direct and indirect changes to production that are becoming widespread (at least at the level of rhetoric) are the following.

247 Tennessee and the NUMMI plant in California are modelled on the spatially concentrated Japanese supply system. In Britain the intensity in the use of subcontracting seems to be increasing, though the numbers of subcontractors probably are not, partly as a result of the great shakeout in British industry following the depression of the early 1980s. In any case small European space economies can operate a quasi-Kanban or Just-In-Time system without close spatial propinquity provided that the transport infrastructure is good. It is worth noting, however, that Japanese inward investors such as Nissan in North East England and Matsushita in South Wales have begun to gather small clusters of ‘satellite’ suppliers together close to their main assembly plants.

First of all, there is a growing recognition that the Japanese advantage rests less on the sophistication of the technological forces of production and far more upon the inclusive and consensual social relations of production. This phenomenon takes many forms, some of the less important ones of which, such as lifetime job-security and single-status canteens, have received unnecessary attention. One example of a distinctly Post-Taylorist attitude is that concerning the idea of Total Quality Control. Whereas under Taylorism-Fordism the worker was required to divest her or himself of any manifestation of subjectivity in relation to the work task, thereby becoming truly an appendage to the machine, Total Quality Control requires the opposite. Instead of an army of supervisors and quality control inspectors disciplining and monitoring the Fordist worker, the Japanese system requires each worker to be their own inspector. Thus every task undertaken on the assembly line is itself intended to be both a fabrication and an inspection process. Workers are encouraged to tell managers of faults and managers are expected to be able to undertake as well as understand the production process and production engineering. This, not the fact that they wear the same uniform, explains the high accessibility of management to labour. Achieving this level of worker-involvement may prove impossible in Western industry, with its history of social distance, managerial incomprehension of production, and ‘getting metal out the door’ mentality.

Other experiments include the introduction of Flexible Manufacturing Systems which can embody a multiplicity of computer-aided subsystems in production, notably in the design, engineering, assembly and information aspects of the process. In combination with Total Quality Control and Just-In-Time delivery systems these technologies exert a gravitational pull on small subcontracting firms. This is because they are often required to deploy some of the new technologies used in the client companies, and the setting up and refinement of such systems involves constant interaction between the partners. This can involve the’client firm installing its own machinery in subcontracting plants and a high degree of intervention, sometimes even as far as labour relations issues, by the larger in the smaller firm. It is important to stress that these are tendencies rather than realisations in the new regime of accumulation but the spatial implications of the tendencies are relatively clear. It is highly unlikely that new investments will be as spatially dispersed within the corporation as was the case under Fordism. The exception, in terms of the space economy rather than intracorporately, is that inward investment may, because of perceived work-culture disadvantages from locating in mature urban economies, continue to seek greenfield locations in the periphery.

Other elements of a ‘Japanisation’ strategy may prove more tractable. For example, the widespread use of subcontracting linked to a Just-In-Time delivery system for stock handling has had some impact on Western companies alert to Japanese practice. U.S. industry has, in some instances, moved closest to the exemplar of Toyota City where a galaxy of small businesses clusters around the eponymous assembly plant. Thus Buick City, the Saturn project in

Whether or not such tendencies point to the reemergence of the Marshallian industrial district (SABEL, 1988) remains to be seen. It is by no means impossible, as some progressive local councils have guessed, judging from the speed with which some adopted the rhetoric, and, to some extent, the policies appropriate to developing a local ‘flexible specialisation’ strategy (PIORE and SABEL, 1984; MURRAY, 1985). There is a natural synergy

248 between the decline of large-scale, mobile capital investment, the deindustrialisation of many parts of the more mature cities and regions, the withdrawal of the regional aids so typical of the Fordist mode of regulation, the aura of virtue surrounding small businesses and the ‘enterprise culture’, and the concern of most local authorities to be seen, to varying degrees, to be doing something to secure the employment base in the locality. This bundle of changes helps explain the shift in analytical focus from the regional to the local level in the urban and regional studies literature of the late 1980s. The discovery that successful industrial districts were to be found functioning in parts of north and central Italy, not to mention the phenomenon of new high-technology complexes found especially in U.S. localities such as Santa Clara, Orange County and Boston, revived interest in the prospects of a new developmentalist strategy being elaborated (COOKE and DA ROSA PIRES, 1985; SCOTT, 1986,1988). In Britain local labour market studies, such as PAHL’s (1984) account of the informal economy in Sheppey, stimulated interest in household survival strategies in the face of economic adversity and added an important ingredient to emergent work on gender geography (WOMEN AND GEOGRAPHY STUDY GROUP, 1984). Insights from the fruitful findings regarding ‘spatial divisions of labour’ (MASSEY, 1984) and the generally recognised superiority in explanatory power of radical geography over its more orthodox variants led to large-scale Economic and Social Research Council fundingwell over 21.5 million---on three research initiatives to explore the changing nature of localities in the context of what, with hindsight, can be seen as the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism (COOKE, 1986; GALLIE, 1986; SAVAGE et&., 1987). Out of the critical engagement within and between these research teams a new theorisation of space and spatiality may be seen emerging. A central concept is that of locality. Locality is conceived as a crucial social basis for collective identification. It is a pivot standing between structure and agency: it is thereby a concept of crucial though still relatively unrecognised significance to, for example, the theory of structuration. GIDDENS’ (1984) gropings towards an understanding of the significance of spatiality to social life in fact led him down the wrong Hagerstrandian micropath because its diffusionist perspective left subjects weavng a dance through space and time not because of their own existential capacities but as an atomistic outcome of stimulus-response relations. Giddens’ subsumption of space into the

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anodyne notion of ‘locale’, cognate to a large extent with the geographer’s equally anodyne notion of place, testifies to the failure of his theorisation to come to terms with the spatial dialectics of structure and agency. To be sure, localities are conditioned by structural enablements and constraints. Their labour and housing markets are disrupted by collective decisions by states and capitals to: go to war, restructure production, deregulate financial institutions, cut public expenditure, inter dia. However, the fact that they are not all equally affected negatively or positively by such pervasive determinants testifies to their inherited spatiality and, crucially, their socio-political capacity to change, albeit waywardly on occasions, the nature of that spatiality. This is the patrimony of citizenship, the result of democractic struggles, unevenly distributed in space and time, to establish rights or entitlements in the spheres of politics, welfare and the economy. Local struggles often led to the appropriation of citizenship rights from recalcitrant structural forms such as the state, capital or dominant ideology. By ignoring the effectivity of local movements, structurationism conceivably takes a step backwards from the most structuralist of insights regarding the relevance of urban social movements. Locality, then, is the expression of the conscious social base, to be distinguished from the idea of community which now appears as a more unconscious culture of the Arran Islands or Bethnal Green, or the introverted ethnic enclaves of guestworkers or immigrants denied or choosing not to activate the citizenship rights taken for granted by the full members of the modern nation-state. Citizenship is high on the contemporary political agenda. Under the hegemony of neoconservatism it has been deployed as an economic category. Freedom is defined as the individual right to choose amongst marketable commodities. Rights are defined in terms of avoidance of collective provision, and ability to pay is the ultimate expression of individual sovereignty. However, citizenship is itself a social process consisting of questians of social reform, local self-determination in the collective sense, and social co-operation to set to rights the inequalities of market mechanisms. Local solidarity has been and continues to be a crucial means of transcending such inequities, the more so, of course, when local solidarities extend co-operatively over space. Thus the zero-sum game of competition and beggar-thy-neighbour can become the positive-sum game where all in the boats benefit from the rising tide.

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The irony of political power in contemporary Britain is that it is precisely these forms of social energy that are being stifled. A particular psychosis exists against the local state. Powers which have existed locally since the dawning of the modern nation-state are eroded or simply taken away. The major form of decentralism is directed towards increasing the power of market relations. Where market-failure occurs central state institutions such as the Urban Development Corporations are imposed to override local democratic accountability and, with the fiscal muscle of the central state, stimulate the production of urban spectacle [see DUNCAN and GOODWIN (1988)j. Regions and localities are burdened with the injunction to compete, sell any local asset, especially if it can be safely packaged as ‘heritage’ (HEWISON, 1987). Thus we see the emergence of a generalised marketing of ‘place’ itself. Localities left behind in the Post-Fordist scramble for new market niches and flexible specialisation must sell themselves as icons of a vanished past. Places for the tourist gaze are multiplying weekly but the gaze is directed nostalgically at the preserved relics of previous regimes of accumulation. Radical urban studies seem to have been somewhat overwhelmed by the rolling back of the Fordist mode of regulation. A field of study that defined itself in terms of collective consumption has experienced a crisis of identity under the onslaught of privatisation. For the moment it seems that, in the main, accounting exercises are being undertaken. Gentrification, a product of the burgeoning service class, remains an important process, the exotic outgrowths of which continue as a subject of fascination, the more so as the property market finds new niches in the derelict remains of deindustrialised cities and waterfront locations (MILLS, 1988). The progress of privatization in the public housing sector, and the growth of new, non-municipal forms of housing management are subjects to which an increasing number of researchers are paying attention (FOREST and MURIE, 1985). Others have changed tack altogether to focus on consumption patterns and consumption cleavages often in practice defined by housing tenure [e.g. SAUNDERS (1984)]. Perhaps the most interesting development to note of late is the emergence of work seeking to link aspects of the new knowledge from production geography, especially that relating to locality and local labour markets, to the study of housing markets, a connection that is long overdue and promises to be fruitful (HAMNE’IT and ALLEN, 1988).

Urban and Regional Studies

Going into the 1990s

Some trends, noted in the previous section, seem likely to be important elements in the research agenda for urban and regional studies in the future. A safe bet is probably that the transcending of the Castellsian division of the spheres between urban consumption studies and regional production studies will be completed. The processes that have been sketched here point to the revival of some older cities as key sites for consumption, the range of urban functions, production, leisure and spectacle. Cities are struggling, often successfully, to re-exert their traditional primacy in the face of the suburbanization and counterurbanization of the 1970s. There is much to explore, especially from a radical perspective, in the possible re-emergence of cities as key production complexes, particularly where production takes forms akin to those more commonly found in the Third World. A Post-Fordist economy, structured around exploitative relationships between client and subcontracting firms may, in the context of deregulation of minimum wage limits under neoconservative governments, be expected to give rise to complex tiers of industrial linkages extending well beyond the normal sphere of production into the home in the form of homeworking, child labour, and pensioner participation in the labour market. However, there will undoubtedly be new urban, even regional, spaces on which to focus academic scrutiny. It is becoming clear that the global role of a financial Leviathan such as London is recreating both its urban and regional space economy. The commuting shed now extends to Yorkshire, Glamorgan and Devon as a result of transportation improvements and vertical take-off in housing costs. In limited respects the housing economy may actually be driving forward parts of the manufacturing and services economy as fortunate London houseowners take advantage of the seller’s market and perhaps reinvest the surplus in a small business in Wiltshire or Wales. Moreover, the insatiable quest for routine labour in the still, to some extent, Fordist production systems of the larger banks, insurance companies and finance houses, may be responsible for the noticeable growth of producer services employment in a 60-mile ring around London, as back-office work is decentralised to the labour pool niches in the genteely-accented outer parts of the Home Counties. Overlapping the now enlarged Greater Southern Region of Britain is always the military-scientific infrastructure with its associated high-technology defence industry complexes, the mapping of which may be facilitated by

250 observation of recent suicide statistics. Civilian hightechnology industry has clear spatial preferences too, strung out along the motorway systems of the South, eschewing, except for Scotland, the Northern fastnesses where heritage parks predominate. The North-South divide will continue to exert a fascination but of more interest are the now finegrained variations between local spaces with the Two Britains. What have been the sources of relative developmental success in places like Chester, York, Lincoln and Lancaster? Is it their shared Roman heritage? Could it be that, as we enter the PostFordist age, the aestheticization of place through a revaluation of heritage and a fabrication of ‘meaning’ through a new neoclassicism in architectural styles is what the enterprise culture seeks as a reward for enduring Japanisation? The question of culture is going to be of growing importance to spatial analysis in the foreseeable future. We lack the conceptual tools even to define the spatial division of culture at present, but that it is a real phenomenon, growing in complexity as the social structure polarizes and differentiates, seems indisputable. Ideas such as WILLIAMS’ (1977) distinction between dominant, emergent and residual culture may, placed in a spatial context, give us equivalent tools to those supplied by MASSEY and MEEGAN (1982) to help us understand the restructuring of production and space through investment in rationalisation, intensification and technological change. Alternatively, this is probably too Fordist a way of looking at questions of culture, even local culture, in a Post-Fordist era. Cultural theorists seem now to be more comfortable with ideas of difference, pluralism, even ‘ocular regimes’ (JAY, 1988) as ways of coming to terms with the splintering of mass-motifs into ready-to-wear, disposable or designer aesthetic positions. Where, in space, do emergent cultural regimes come from? Should we with LIPSITZ (1987) be exploring the margins, examining the novelty that is forged when the Tijuana Brass meets the Grateful Dead over the corpse of Richie Valens in East Los Angeles? The anthropologists probably cannot help us much as they hurry away from theory to explore the poetics of writing (CLIFFORD and MARCUS, 1986). Alternativeiy, such work contains strong resonances with the project of ‘thinking the margins’ (SCHULTESASSE, 1987). The Fordist era and its Modernist aesthetic carapace treated the Third World as ‘the Other’. However, Post-Fordism is forcing the integra-

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tion of non-Western discourses (notably Japanese) into Western foundationalism in the face of a narrative of decline prevalent in the West as Fordism’s crisis was worked out. Perhaps, therefore, we approach the 1990s seeking to develop further an understanding of locality as society and culture in the absence of place through what Rabinow has called ‘Critical Cosmopolitanism’ (MARCUS, 1988). Clearly, the discussion of cultural absences in contemporary spatial theory points to the vexed question of Post-Modernism in geography. As the 1980s close, there is a burgeoning literature of sometimes vituperative inflection around the relevance of this new narrative or post-narrative of the condition of our times. Its early reception too easily equated aspects of aesthetic Post-Modernism with the debased cultural predilections of insurgent neoconservatism (HARVEY, 1987). It is now, however, becoming clear that something of aesthetic Modernism’s wellsprings of creativity have run dry as the logics of abstract expressionism and all the other isms have run their course (COOKE, 1987b). Already post-modern architecture is looking remarkably like Farrelly’s observation that it was “no more than a painted corpse . . . no more than the pretty plaything of rampant capitalism” (FARRELLY, 1986). Yet many of the elements that have gone into what undoubtedly and unsurprisingly was appropriated first by the property developers and place-marketers had their origin in a critique of the inaccessibility of the elite cultural norms of late Modernism. Was late Modernism in its built form in any sense radical or progressive? Was even early Modernist architecture able to deliver on the ideals its proponents professed? The residents of Everton Heights may have a view on that. Some of Post-Modernism’s emphasis on difference, pluralism, parody and play has the rather intriguing capacity to remove the aura from the professional and financial authority that late Modernism imposed on cities everywhere. Construction techniques are now so simple, particularly for office blocks, that architects are only needed to bolt on the gimmickry to complete the theatrical facade. This loss of professional aura, masquerading behind an often childlike egotism, contains within it possibilities for progress, fuller involvement by the citizenry as clients and designers when, as must occur soon, the central state functionaries inform their governors of the impossibility of administering the social totality of Britain from a computer terminal in Whitehall.

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We come therefore to the necessity to continue with the painstaking and sometimes less than appealing anatomisation of the flaws in Thatcherism and, if it is not already just a memory, ~eaganism. We saw at the outset that the Fordist-Modernist tradition of urban reform and community renewal has been effaced by a harsher concern with freeing up markets and securing local and national economic revival on capital’s terms. Plan has, to a large extent, given way to market. Amongst the instruments most widely in force in contemporary Britain are the so-called ‘publicprivate partnership’ where the state does indeed act as both the committee for the bourgeoisie and the ideal collective capitalist. However, as, in the closing years of the 198Os, the internal contradictions of Thatcherism begin to reveal splits in the supposedly perfected system of economic management forcing rapid increases in interest rates to try to control historic balance-of-payments deficits, the market will begin, once again, to reduce its urban and regional concern and interest. It is important that urban and regional researchers point to the scale of the hidden subsidies necessary to weld together the partnerships that, for the moment, continue to drive away the poorer sections of society from their best sources of access to income in the labour markets of the central city. It is imperative that the central question of citizenship is examined in the light of changes underway in the urban and regional system. It is vital to assess the significance of alternatives to centralism, of which the local, with its immediate capacity to situate identity and solidarity, is of key importance. It is essential that all of these questions are posed within the kind of theoretical combination that has informed this piece of writing, one capable of fostering a Critical Cosmopolitanism. Acknowledgements-A

number of people helped me with this paper. For inviting me to write it, Simon Duncan. For inviting me to take up the Belle Van Zuyl visiting professorship, thus enabling me to write it at short notice, the Faculty of Geographical Sciences at the University of Utrecht, especially Frans Dieleman and Jan Van Weesep. For their stimulating company at the ‘Modernity as History’ conference in Copenhagen Mike Featherstone, Jonathan Friedman, George Marcus and Scott Lash. For their hospitality at Copenhagen and Roskilde, Henrik Toft Jensen and Soren Villadsen. The usual disclaimer applies.

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