The Effects of Urban Containment Policies on Urban Economies - Focused on U.S. Metropolitan Areas -

This paper assesses the mutating role of the state in today’s flourishing technology hubs in major cities and metropolitan areas across the globe through a comparative lens. Conventional wisdom associates the contemporary phenomenon of high-tech urbanism with minimum state intervention. In public as well as in scholarly debates, technology-intensive urban economies are customarily portrayed as a phenomenon whose formative creativity and ethos stems from an essentially post-political nature. As these economies emerge, thanks to the cooperative dynamism of urban societies, political governments are considered merely as coordinators of inter-actor relationships, particularly as managers or orchestrators of innovative ‘business ecosystems’ and ‘platforms’. We, in turn, suggest that today’s emergence of technology-based economies in a selected circle of major cities and metropolitan areas is an inherently political phenomenon, as it is closely linked to what we call the strategic urbanisation of the state. Looking at the trajectories of Finland and Italy during the post-recession decade of the 2010s, we disclose the state-driven selective mobilisation of urban economies as a response to the low-growth present of national political economies. In doing so, we argue that the entrepreneurialisation of selected urban locations cannot be understood without considering the qualitatively transformed roles of the local and national states. The coming together of entrepreneurialist and urbanising state strategies disclose a shift towards a start-up state whose distinctive features differ qualitatively from those of both the investment-oriented late-Keynesian entrepreneurial state and the decentralised local economic governance envisaged by today’s city-innovation theorists.

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The Military Metropolis: Defense Dependence in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

City and Community ◽

10.1111/j.1540-6040.2010.01359.x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 25-48 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gordon Gauchat ◽

Michael Wallace ◽

Casey Borch ◽

Travis Scott Lowe

Keyword(s):

Urban Areas ◽

Metropolitan Areas ◽

Military Spending ◽

Policy Implications ◽

Military Bases ◽

Urban Economies ◽

Defense Procurement ◽

Urban Political Economy ◽

Defense Contracts ◽

The Military

This article examines the “military metropolis,” an urban community that depends highly on military expenditures in order to sustain economic vitality. We build on past theories of military Keynesianism and employ insights from urban political economy theory to examine the effects of defense contracts and defense personnel spending on five measures of labor market quality (median household income, income inequality, poverty 125 percent, unemployment, and casualization) in 276 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in the year 2000. Whereas previous studies of military spending have focused primarily on nations and U.S. states, this study examines metropolitan areas. We test three hypotheses about how federal military outlays might influence urban economies: first, the defense–dependency hypothesis suggests that urban areas rely on defense dollars in varying degrees to sustain their economic stability and vitality. Second, the localized effects hypothesis proposes that defense personnel spending on military bases and civilian personnel will have more immediate effects on urban economies than spending on defense procurement contracts. Third, the gunbelt hypothesis predicts that military spending has affected urban economies unevenly, benefiting metropolitan areas in some regions of the country more than others. The results of this study support all three hypotheses. We offer interpretations of our results and discuss the policy implications for U.S. metropolitan areas.

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