The new political geography: seven years on

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 0 1982 Butterworths

QUARTERLY,

Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1982,6!5-76

The new political geography: seven years on PETER HALL

lJniversit_r of Calqornia at Berkehy CA 94270, USA and The Universit_y, Reading RG6 2AB, England

ABSTRACT.This paper is a retrospective view of the developments within the ‘new political geography’, identified by the author in 1974. This area of study concentrates upon decision-making, particularly in relation to public intervention in the urban economy. Since 1974, two distinct strands of research have continued to develop. The first draws heavily upon positive (American) political science, and focuses strongly upon the behaviour of actors such as bureaucrats and community groups. The author’s own research on Great Planning Disasters is discussed as an extension of this approach. The second strand has evolved from Europe, and is particularly concerned with a political-economic interpretation of public provision--or ‘collective consumption’. Both approaches, it is argued, have their strengths and weaknesses, which are illustrated with respect to motorway construction histories in London and Paris. What is required is some cross-fertilization of approach, perhaps in association with welfare geography: without this, political geography in this context will be constricted.

At the Institute of British Geographers’ Annual Conference in Norwich in January 1974, a number of geographers were asked to contribute to a symposium on the relationships between geography (and geographers) and public policy. I accepted the invitation to talk about a subject that for the previous few months had interested me: the possibility of developing a new kind of politica geography, that would incorporate relevant insights from political science and related disciplines in order to understand rather better the forces that were shaping the contemporary city. The paper started from an observation that there was then an astonishing lack of connection between theory in human geography and theory in political science (Hall, 1974,48). Younger human geographers, developing their PhDs at that time, were rejecting the 1960s approach of the big, quantified macromodel because they found it lacking depth in explanation. They were therefore concentrating on microstudies of actual decision-making: of factory location in a development area, the line of an urban motorway, the siting of a power station. Consequently, they were seeking a body of theory that would help them understand the roles of the individuals and groups who served as actors in these decision processes. However, apart from the neo-Marxian framework then best represented by the work of behind them, work then only available in Harvey (1973) or Pahl (1970) -and,

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French, such as the seminal book by Castells (1972)-there was little to draw on. The paper therefore sought, in a very tentative and outline way, to develop the skeleton of such an approach. It argued that the main thrust ought to be toward a positive kind of theory, that described behaviour within the framework of what would happen given certain assumptions. It went on to argue that the theory would partly draw on analogies with economics, partly on analogies with sociology. These two lines would give different results, for economics typically described a world based on self-interest, competition and trade-offs, while classical Parsonian sociology stressed mutual adjustment and adaptation. However, both shared a concern with margin adjustment and trade-offs between individuals and groups, in a world where all objectives could not simultaneously be satisfied-this was also the world of political science. Given that, the paper suggested that some of the most important insights might come from the school of so-called positive political science: a school that tried to apply economic insights to the study of political behaviour. There were two kinds of theory here: microstudies derived from von Neumann and Morgenstern’s theory of games (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944); and macrotheory derived from theories of the firm, such as Downs’ Economic Tbeor_yof Democracy and Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent (Downs, 1957; Buchanan and Tullock, 1962). Such an eclectic theory, the paper suggested, could be applied to studies of public policy decisions at either central or local government level. Such decisions would be geographical ones, in that they had a locational content. They would also involve competition between groups to obtain the supply of space as a public good, or in other words a good that was not bought and sold in the marketplace. Thus the new political geographer would be concerned with the values, the organization, and the access to power of different groups, with the relationship of these groups to the decision-making process, and with the alliances, bargains, promises and threats made between one and another among them. At that time, there were only a few studies that began to suggest the possibilities of the new approach. I had myself become interested in it as a result of work on the history of the policy of urban containment in England after World War Two, which suggested that in practice much of this policy reflected a struggle for the distribution of environmental goods between powerful and less powerful social forces (Hall et al, 1973). Studies made by Julian Wolpert and his then colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, concerning key locational decisions in American cities, were published in fugitive form and gave powerful theoretical insights (for instance, Mumphrey and Wolpert, 1972). Work by a number of PhD students, published only some years later, used such insights within a British decisionmaking context (Grant, 1978; Twinn 1978) but they were few in number. Great planning disasters The tentative thoughts in the 1974 paper represented a first attempt to develop a theory that could then be applied in a series of case studies of actual planning decisions. By a process partly deliberate, partly dictated by accidents of available information, these case studies came to concentrate on what could be called great planning disasters-that is, planning decisions involving very major investments, that appeared in the eyes of many informed observers to have represented major mistakes, either because they went ahead but were subsequently

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criticized, or because they were abandoned after the expenditure of much time, money and skilled manpower. The resulting study was published six years later (Hall, 1980). One question for this paper is how far the extended study fulfilled any of the promise of the original formulation. Properly, that is for others to answer but, insofar as an author’s self-criticism can sometimes be of use, it will now be attempted. The book consists of some half-dozen case studies, mainly but not exclusively taken from the field of transportation-the Concorde aeroplane, the third London airport, the aborted London motorways plan, the Sydney Opera House and San Francisco’s BAR?: system-together with two others that were deemed to have been successes snatched from the jaws of disaster: the British National Library and the new campuses of the University of California and the California State University system. The aim of this section of the book is simply to tell the story of each, as far as possible chronologically, with as much detail as is needed to get the full tlavour of the criticial decision and the framework within which it was made. This in the event did not prove too difficult. What did prove difficult, in contrast, was to develop the theoretical explanation in the second half of the book and what proved most difficult of all was the feat of applying this theory to the cases, in order to inform them and explain them. The theoretical part was a logical development, at much greater length, of the brief outline of 1974. A distinction was made between positive and normative theory, and the decision was made to concentrate on the positive element before returning to normative questions at the very end of the book. Then, the positive side was developed in terms of an interaction between three groups of actors: the local community, the bureaucracy (including the technical bureaucracy), and the politicians. This framework, and much of the detail that filled it in, was derived from the American school of positive political science and related areas. In consequence, it did not paint a very flattering picture of any one of the three groups. All were seen as following paths of self-justification, self-reinforcement and self-aggrandisement. Thus the bureaucracies were essentially seen as defensive bodies. They had narrow conceptions of their roles and tended to defend these. Their procedures tended toward inertia. On those occasions when they did become dynamic-which, generally, were when political initiatives resulted in the identification of a new political problem area-they ratcheted up in size in order to tackle the new problem, but seldom if ever ratcheted down when a problem diminished or disappeared. Consequently, there was a built-in tendency for bureaucracy to produce too large a supply of public goods, at too high a cost. And finally, particular bureaucracies tended to exist in an unholy embrace with their own client populations, who were well-organized to obtain even greater supplies of their preferred public good. The community, similarly, appeared in a less than heroic light. It generally constituted a small minority of the entire electorate; it consisted of interest groups-or classes, in the sense of Dahrendorf’s use of the term-with particular concerns (Dahrendorf, 1959, 213). These groups were interested first to get their pet issue recognized, secondly to press for a major policy shift to meet the issue, and thirdly to get the measure implemented. In order to do this activists had to cooperate with the bureaucracy, and even to enter into it, while also exerting subtle

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pressures on politicians to join in coalitions with them or acceed to their demands in other ways. The politicians, in a similarly unflattering view, tried to maximize votes in the same way that consumers aim to maximize utility or producers try to maximize profits. In general, their strategy was to remain near the centre of the political field but to try to broaden the coalition of voters that supported them, by offering increases in real income to particular groups. Such groups tended to care more about losses in their existing levels of welfare, than about potential gains; and this tended toward maintenance of the status quo. Further, since such groups could exert great leverage in situations of low voter turnout and geographical concentration of issues, politicians must carefully react to their wishes-even though, in most cases, they might constitute only a small minority of all qualified voters. In general, the result was a great deal of instability, in which coalitions or quasi-coalitions formed and reformed around a series of issues. Such a form of analysis, the book claimed towards the end, helps powerfully to explain many of the more puzzling features of the great planning disasters earlier described: the tendency to cost escalation, the successful resistance by the established bureaucracy to many pressures for change, the tendency for some decisions to be reversed again and again. It showed finally how politicians and bureaucratic establishments could join forces in order to develop a programme that both of them liked-even against considerable outside opposition. In all, the book concluded: It adds up to a convincing explanation of how decisions are bungled, but not of how they might be taken with more foresight and more careful evaluation (Hall, 1980, 248).

How far is this claim justified? Some might say that the theory, borrowed as it is from various places predominantly American, provides a misleading picture of politics in general. Politicians in Britain, it might be said, are impelled by motives that are often genuinely more compassionate; the operations of pressure groups are less professionally organized and less ruthless; but against that, the bureaucracy is more permanent and more able to maintain its own position. The central difference is that the political process in America is more transactional, more shifting, than in Europe; and that positive political science’s central assumption-the notion that political behaviour can be interpreted in terms derived from economics-has a peculiarly American bias. There is, perhaps, an element of truth in this; but against it, the argument can be used that European politics are becoming steadily more like American politics under the influence of the media and their national coverage of issues, coupled with the rapid development of the single-issue pressure group. The proof of this particular pudding is in the eating: does the theory give a convincing account of the political processes behind these particular decisions, or does it not? If no, what other kind of theory might give a better explanation? Here, the book is perhaps at its weakest. The theory is not properly engaged with the case studies, but rather sits on one side of them. There are connections to be made, but they are not made fully and in detail, only in suggestive outline. The London motorways, for instance, represented a classic case of a political commitment, made right at the start of the life of a new local authority, to a technical initiative that had actually been devised within the bureaucracy of its predecessor. This commitment was made at a time when popular values-or,

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better, the values of critical decision-shaping persons and groups, such as the media-appeared to be heavily in favour of a bold, expensive, surgical solution to what had been identified everywhere as one of the central problems of the metropolis: the existing traffic congestion, and the apparent impossibility of handling the expected growth of private cars on the existing road system. The new authority, the Greater London Council, was at first virtually built around its Department of Transportation, which eventually took over the whole strategic planning operation, and which was centrally committed to the principle of the motorway plan. The politicians remained enthusiastic until the detailed plans threatened homes and neighbourhoods, engendering an extremely well-organized protest group that first unsuccessfully tried to form itself into a political party, but then learnt their lesson and concentrated on persuading one of the two major parties (Labour) to incorporate their position into its election platform. The whole of this story, in fact, can be interpreted very successfully using the composite body of theory. There is however a missing element--and it is one stressed both in the opening chapter of the book, and in its close. This is the question of values and of value shifts, especially as mediated and amplified by the mass media. At the start of the London motorways saga, in 1965, there was a very prevalent belief that a large-scale investment solution was appropriate. Indeed, this was only part of a more general belief in the virtues of the high-technology, high-investment solution to most urban problems. Very rapidly, during the late 196Os, this approach came to be attacked and to be superseded by a contrary principle of tackling problems incrementally and on a small scale, with minimum investment and minimum disruption of the existing urban fabric. This in turn was associated with a view that saw the private car no longer as a beneficient source of mobility, but rather as an antisocial polluter and agent of socio-economic discrimination. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this change, few would doubt that it happened--and happened very rapidly and decisively, not only in London but in cities around the world. The question must be: why did it happen? Was it in some sense spontaneous? Was it master-minded? And did it occur in response to some perception, previously unfelt, that suddenly altered the entire picture? The best answer, within the positive political science tradition, to all this seems to be as follows. For a long time previously, there had been a movement on the other side of the fence. It had already coined the kinds of slogan that were later to become so popular, such as ‘Small is Beautiful’. But, in the era of feverish high technology, it could not gain much access to the media. Then, partly as a response to actual events, partly perhaps due to a generational shift, it began to gain the access it sought-first in specialized outlets, then more widely as the mass media followed the expert debates. In London, a critical event was the opening of one stretch of motorway, Westway, in 1970. Instead of being a triumphal demonstration of the new era of mobility, it was attacked by the media for environmental disruption. In this, the media were responding to-but were in turn amplifying-a mood not among the general public, but among a relatively small minority of well-organized people. How to account for such swings of opinion, nevertheless, remains elusive. It seems to demand a model rather like catastrophe theory (Wilson, 1981), whereby the process of change in a body suddenly speeds up and results in a change of state. Whatever the explanation, there can be no doubt that for several of the case studies

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70 in the book such a change merely for the abandonment

was decisive. It provides one main explanation not of the London motorways, but also for the growing

opposition to the Concorde project and even some of the zig-zags of governmental attitude towards the Third London Airport project and, unless an appreciation of such possible swings can be built into the planning process, similar upsets are likely in the future. That is a principal burden of the final chapter of the book, which discusses

possible

improvements

in the planning

process.

Alternative approaches The question,

posed earlier, then arises: would an alternative

approach

offer a better

explanation? The most obvious-if only because, since the original 1974 paper, it has become almost the standard approach to questions of this kind-is the Marxist approach, particularly in its latter-day form of Political Economy. In essence this approach runs as follows: social conflicts are basically class conflicts, that is conflicts between groups of people defined by their relationship to the productive process. As the underlying basis of production changes, so will the constitution of classes and their interrelationships. Marx, writing about early capitalism, analysed class conflict between two groups: capitalists and proletarians. Today, analysts must confront a more complex situation based on the existence of an international capitalist economy in which the key role is played by multinational corporations, characterized by extreme mobility and flexibility in their location. Increasingly, in their need corporations

to counteract a tendency toward a falling rate of profit, these adopt two strategies: in advanced industrial economies they substitute

capital for labour, but at the same time they seek to shift locations to newly industrializing countries where the payment to labour is far lower. The result, in older industrialized countries--and especially in older industrialized regions within unemployment and a process of deskilling, these countries-is plant closure, whereby formerly work in unskilled

skilled industrial workers lose their jobs and are forced jobs in other industries at lower rates of pay.

to find

Both in Great Britain and in the United States, this approach has now produced extremely interesting empirical work which fairly convincingly explains the course Massey and Meegan, 1979; Harrison, 1981). of industrial change (for instance, However, almost by definition this kind of approach does not aim to tackle the kinds of conflict studied in Great Pfunning Disasters. Here, we have to look to a rather different approach, concentrating on the ‘local state’ and its planning policies, and exemplified in Britain by work like Cockburn’s (Cockburn, 1977) and in France by some of the case studies of Castells (Castells, 1978). The latter’s study of planning in the Paris region is particularly worthy of study, since it covers very similar ground to the London motorways case study in Great Planning Disasters. Castells argues that urban problems in latter-day capitalist societies express themselves chiefly through contradictions in what he calls the collective-consumption sector, which can be equated with the supply of public goods in my distribution and management of these terminology. Further, the production, collective means of consumption increasingly depend on direct or indirect state intervention (Castells, 1978, 38). He argues that increasingly, private consumption depends on collective consumption; thus driving a private car depends on the existence of collectively-provided roads, and private enjoyment of culture depends on collectively-provided education. Thus they are absolutely necessary for what in

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Marxist terminology is called the reproduction of labour power--or, in nonMarxist terms, the supply of labour at the workplace. And, at the same time, popular movements of all kinds-such as tenants’ associations and committees of public transport users-increasingly intervene to demand more of these services. However, the provision of this collective consumption has to take place at a lower rate of profit than the average level. So there is a contradiction in the capitalist process. Castells, in the paper under discussion, does not attempt to give a detailed account of the urban crisis in France-then the subject of a collective research project. Indeed, he points out the astonishing fact that there is not even a superficial historical account of the development of French urban policies during the post-World War Two period. He does offer some illustrative hypotheses however. During the period 1951-1963, in response to the needs of industry and also to popular pressure, a vast programme of collective housing was undertaken, especially in the fast-growing Paris region. Associated planning measures and public credit measures ensured the production of the maximum possible amount of housing at minimum cost-and with minimum amenities. Then, from 1963 to 1973, priority was given to private capital accumulation, and the major planning measures of this period-the new towns of the Paris region and the associated rapid transit system, the RER, both embodied in the 1965 Plan (Schema Directeur) for the Paris Region-were specifically aimed at accommodating new supplies of labour and transporting them to their places of work (Castells, 1978, 5&53). Later still, after 1973, there was a shift away from the large public projects of the Gaullist era and towards policies of ecology and environmental protection. Finally, from 1976 onwards, there was another shift: with deepening economic recession, not only were the majority of large projects stopped, but in addition the quality of life projects collapsed (Castells, 1978, 54-56). Castells’ explanation of these shifts-which we have seen paralleled in the experience of Britain and other major industrial countries, albeit with slight differences in timing-is particularly interesting. He argues that in the first period, from 1951 to 1963, the first objective of capital was to ensure the production and reproduction of labour power without having to invest directly, giving rise to a policy of state intervention to produce collective means of consumption. In the second stage, from 1963 to 1973, there was shift towards satisfying the demands of large-scale finance capital through the major new developments. This policy however failed both economically, in burdening the budget and winning the disapproval of the very financial interests it was supposed to serve, and socially, in helping provoke the events of May 1968. In the third period, from 1973 to 1976, capital withdrew and stressed the notion of a return to nature, which ideologically served the interests of the growingly important petty bourgeoisie. Increasingly, in this period, the actions of the state took on the character of theatre: the more was talked about, the less was done (Castells, 1978, 55-57). This whole process is however not simple nor linear. As Castells puts it: Thus policies as diverse as housing, transportation, territorial planning, restructuring urban centres, and so on appear objectively articulated as a function of the interests they express at each point. These functions are not arbitrary or linked to this or that political event. They express the rhythms of capitalist accumulation, class struggle, the evolution of the state. But the social evolution

of urban

policy

is not linear:

tendencies

are often

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The newpolitical geography contradictory, and thus state intervention is not separate from, but a result of this totality of contradictions. Thus urban policy is not merely a consequence; it acts on social relations, it produces effects on class struggle.

But finally, Castells argues, this process has limits that were reached during the mid-1970s. Attempting to socialize the costs of capital, while allowing the profits to be siphoned off privately, had structural limits which eventually led to uncontrollable inflation; while the attempts to integrate the masses have been overwhelmed: The dismantling of urban planning, the disengagement of the state, the poverty of the socialised consumption sector, the abandonment of large projects, the growing disorganisation of the large cities, the corresponding myth of a return to the past (i.e. a ‘return to nature’) all are diverse traits of a similar phenomenon: the crisis of state intervention on the crisis of the reproduction of the labour force (Castells, 1978, 60). Castells’ contribution on the Paris region has been quoted at length, because of all the literature in this genre it appears most closely to tackle the same order of problem that is attacked in Greatplanning disasters: the study of planning failures,

and in particular of reversals of planning policies. It does so, clearly, from a very different theoretical perspective. Which approach can be said to be more helpful in explaining the actual events? The answer seems to be that the different theories do rather better in explaining different parts of reality; but that sometimes, neither does very well. Take, first, the development of the great capital projects that were characteristic of both the British and the French urban economies in the 1960s. Positive political science seeks to explain these in terms of a conjunction of forces: a tenaciously established technocracy, that had developed major projects as a result of political initiatives; politicians, seeking to maximize votes by discovering policy bundles that would please particular interest groups among the electorate; and these interest groups themselves, corresponding either to producer or consumer interests. To take a concrete and highly relevant example, the ambitious and very expensive urban motorway plans in both London and Paris-abandoned in London, largely completed in Paris-were conceived within powerful public engineering departments, and endorsed by politicians seeking highly visible symbols of their activity. They tended to endorse them, because the signals they got from the relevant interest groups-motoring organizations, the ‘roads lobby’ generally, the media concerned with rising car ownership and traffic congestion-were all positive. Later these signals changed-too late to change the policies substantially in Paris, just in time in London. The Marxist explanation of the same policy, as seen, interprets it as a specific shift by the state towards the interests of large-scale finance capital: away from policies stressing social consumption and the reproduction of labour power, and towards direct support of the productive apparatus. Later, finance capital itself rejects the policies because of their expense and their indirect effect in fermenting social unrest; it demands their replacement by policies of ecological concern, which satisfy the ideological demands of the emerging petty bourgeois groups at minimal expense but with maximum publicity. Marxist theory thus offers one advantage over the positive political science approach: it provides a concrete explanation of why the state (or, in London, the local state) should become concerned with roadbuilding at a particular stage in

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development. The political scientists, in contrast, are left with the task of explaining why roadbuilding should become identified as an ‘issue in good currency’ (to quote Donald Schon’s phrase) at just that time (Schon, 1971,123-144). The lexparsimoniae (or, some would say, the simple-minded explanation) is that traffic congestion, in the phrase of the philosopher David Braybrooke, was then going through the ‘Issue Machine’ (Braybrooke, 1974). The Marxist explanation introduces an element of deliberate manipulation: the forces of large-scale capitalism at that point required a road-building programme, either because otherwise the urban capitalist economy was in danger of collapsing through traffic congestion, or because this congestion threatened the sales prospects of national automobile producers, or a combination of the two. This superficially appears more plausible, but almost by definition there is no way of proving it. Doubtless, in the early 1960s the so-called ‘roads lobby’ did prove very successful in helping identify the issue of congestion and in focusing the attention of the media upon it, whether in Britain or France or any other advanced industrial country. But this still does not explain why it should have acted at this particular time rather than sooner or later. Finally, it does not explain quite why the same group of finance capitalists suddenly decided that it did not like the policies that had, ‘apparently’, been developed specifically for its benefit. It is at that point, in fact, that both the political science and the Marxist explanations run into trouble. The political scientists in effect find the ecological movement coming out of thin air, as a sudden value shift. They try to explain it in terms of interest-group politics-in particular, as a direct dialectical reaction to the facts of roadbuilding in practice--and in this they can claim some success. This still does not explain the sudden and explosive force of the change, especially among the media. Similarly, the Marxists have difficulty in explaining why finance capital should so suddenly reverse its attitudes and should demand retrenchment in the form of an ecological movement. Their theory would have better power if the shift had arisen at about the time of the first major capitalist crisis of the 1970s: the 197374 oil shortage and its consequences. In fact the ecological movement began to gain pace in Britain and in other countries at almost the peak of capitalist prosperity in the late 196Os, and to have significant impacts on policy-in the form of the abandonment of the London motorways and other large-scale schemes-in the first half of 1973, well before the oil crisis had begun to cast its shadow. In any event, it is far from clear why capitalism’s response to a crisis should be to abandon the large-scale investments on which its profitability depended. Thus, to a considerable extent, both theories leave the ‘great transformation’ of the early 1970s unexplained. In part, this is perhaps because neither of them has been well enough developed at the critical level: the application to the actual developments, which needs to be done in considerable circumstantial detail. It is always possible that either, or a combination of the two-whereby the positive political science part was left to fill in the detail within the broad Marxist structure-might provide a convincing degree of explanation. As yet, the case is non-proven. The theory in both cases tends to float in the air, unpinned to the historical facts. Broadening

the theory

This parallel development of the two schools does not exhaust the developments in the field of political geography during the period. For there have been significant

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developments in related areas--above all, the field of the so-called geography of welfare. If political geography is about the distribution of public goods-which also includes the avoidance of public bads, like pollution-then studies of the distribution of real income, meaning by this all the monetary and non-monetary elements that enter into the calculation of a social welfare function, must clearly be relevant to it. Here of course the work of David M. Smith, especially on the distribution of public goods and bads as between regions and within regions and cities, is extremely important (Smith, 1977, 1979). In the work of Kevin Cox, who has produced what is so far the only real textbook of the new political geography, we can see a distinct fusion of the positive political science tradition with the geography of welfare. Indeed, much of the matter of the book overlaps with that in the two studies by Smith produced at about the same time. Both authors distinguish spatial levels of analysis: international, intranational (or interregional), and intrametropolitan. Both are centrally concerned with questions of measuring the spatial incidence of goods and bads, including the problems of constructing composite indices. But Cox is also concerned with the processes that bring about these measurable patterns. He discusses the roles of different agents in the processes of change in the contemporary city: the relationships between real estate interests, local governments and neighbourhood organizations. He shows how different organizations have different levels and kinds of resources to aid them in the bargaining process, and how competitive outcomes are affected by the juridical structures within which the actors operate. Interestingly, however, though some of his theory is chosen from the positive political science tradition-albeit rather partially-little of it, with the exception of one work of Harvey, draws very explicitly on Marxist analysis. In this respect there is a strong distinction between the work of Cox and that of Smith-and this despite the fact that at the level of empirical observation they cover such similar ground. This underlines the point made earlier: that the lack of relationship is perhaps the most striking observation to be made about the new political geography. The new schools seem to have proceeded on parallel tracks without much cross-fertilization-though latterly, through contacts between colleagues, there are signs that this is beginning to occur. There are perhaps reasons why this should have been so, though they are not very good ones. Positive political science, partly because of a process of accident, has come to be associated with the new intellectual right in the United States (though to a much smaller degree in Britain, despite the efforts of the Institute of Economic Affairs to publicize it). The main contributors to the theory have formed a relatively small and well-defined group, who have made a contribution to the intellectual debate in journals with a well-defined ideological position, such as The Public Interest. The tone of this literature has been highly sceptical of much of the political process and of the motives that underly it. In particular, it has questioned the significance of the bureaucracy’s role, and has suggested that bureaus may tend toward their self-preservation and toward unnecessary enlargement of their activities and their production of services. In contrast, of course, the flood of Marxist urban scholarship in recent years has developed through quite different informal colleges, publishing (and criticizing) its work through different networks. Perhaps to a greater degree than with other networks, this group has tended increasingly to shut itself off from the wider discourse, mainly through its highly specialized use of language. Its theoretical approach, like that of the positive political scientists, is highly sceptical of

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motives-at least, the motives of the bureaucracy and the politicians, which it views as a State apparatus caught between the inexorable demands of Finance Capital above and popular community movements below. (When it studies the motives of the community leaders themselves, it can come close to the trap of romanticism). Yet, despite this superficial similarity to the framework of the positive political scientists, it has not taken on any of their intellectual baggage-and neither has the reverse process occurred. We should end by asking whether this is either necessary or helpful. The author’s view is that it is neither. The two traditions could offer a great deal to each other, since their level of theoretical explanation is somewhat different and quite possibly complementary. There are of course general differences in viewpoint and in interpretation of historical forces and processes. Most political scientists would doubtless not accept that capitalism is in the throes of some terminal crises-but then, increasingly, neither would many Marxists. (There is, of course, the irreducible difference that Marxists believe in the certainty of an eventual terminal crisis). On the other hand, many Marxists would not accept that community movements are motivated by other than truly popular spirit-though even positive political scientists would be willing to allow them some purity of motive. No one, therefore, should expect a complete convergence. But one might look hopefully to some mutual understanding, and to the development of some eclectic body of theory. Otherwise, two important traditions will be the poorer. References BRAYBROOKE,D. (1974). Trajic Congestiongoes throrcghthe Isme Machine: A Case-stu& in Issue Processing, Zhstrating II Nets Approach. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. BUCHANAN,J.M. ANDTULLOCK, G. (1962). The Calcnhsof Consent: Logical Fonnhtionsof Constihtional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. CASTELLS,M. (1972,1977). LaQuestion Urbaine. Paris: Maspero. English translation (1977): The nrban qtiestion. London: Edward Arnold. CASTELLS,M. (1978). City, Class and Potver. London: Macmillan. COCKBURN,C. (1977). The Local State: Management of Cities and PeopIe. London: Pluto Press. Cox, K.R. (1979). Location and Pteblic Problems: A Political Geography of the Contemporav World. Chicago: Maaroufa Press. DAHRENDORF, R. (1959). Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Socieg. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. DOWNS, A. (1957). An Economic Theory of Democrag. New York: Harper and Brothers. GRANT, J. (1978). The Politics of Urban Transport Planning. London: Earth Resources Research. HALL, P. (1974). The new political geography. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 63,48-52. HALL, P. (1980). Great Phnning Disusters. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. HALL, P., THOMAS, R., GRACEY, H. AND DREWETT, R. (1973). The Containment of Urban England. 2 volumes. London: George Allen and Unwin. HARRISON, B. (1981). Rationalization, Restructuring and Industrial ReorganiZation in Older Regions: The Transformation of the Nery England Economy since World War II. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. HARVEY, D. (1973). SocialJlcstice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. MASSEY,D.B. AND MEEGAN, R.A. (1979). ‘The Geography of Industrial Reorganisation: The Spatial Effects of the Restructuring of the Electrical Engineering Sector under the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation’. Progress in Pfanning, 10, Part 3, 155-237. MUMPHREY,A. AND WOLPERT, J. (1972). Eqnio Considerations and Concessions in the Siting of Public Facilities. (Research on conflict in locational decisions, Discussion Paper 17). Philadelphia: Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. PAHL, R.E. (1970). Patterns of Urban Life. London: Longman. SCHON, D.A. (1971). Bvond the Stable State. London: Maurice Temple Smith.

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