Urban Slack

• In Event: Urban Partisanship, Housing and Elections

Abstract

This paper updates the concept of “slack,” introduced by A.O. Hirschman, and proposes it as a useful tool for the study of American Political Economy — especially for explaining the maldistribution of resources in American cities.

Hirschman described the concept of slack in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). In prior work, he had observed that economic development depends on “calling forth and enlisting for development purposes resources and abilities that are hidden, scattered, or badly utilized.” (Hirschman 1958). In EVL, Hirschman called these resources and abilities “slack,” and took what he described as “the radical step [of] recognizing the importance and pervasiveness of slack.”

Hirschman offered three insights concerning slack. The first was that organizations -— whether firms, cities, or other types of government or association —- pervasively leave some resources unused. The second was that slack is both an economic and a political phenomenon. Here, Hirschman built off the observation by Robert Dahl (1961) that participation in electoral institutions routinely reflects a degree of apathy that political scientists find concerning. Hirschman conceived of slack as referring not only to productive resources lying idle, but also, in a political system, citizens who do not vote. Finally, Hirschman proposed that, rather than being a bad thing, slack helps organizations to function. This is so, he explained, because organizations can call upon spare capacity during a time of crisis. In short, Hirschman suggested that slack facilitates resilience—an organization’s ability to withstand a shock.

This paper updates Hirschman’s functionalist conceptualization of slack, by accounting for the role of power, interests, distribution, and path dependence. It considers and compares slack urban resources based on recent findings across three settings: land use regulation and the housing affordability crisis (e.g. Trounstine 2020); the deployment of vacant land for food production (e.g. Ela 2019); and low-turnout municipal elections (e.g. Dynes, Hartney, and Hayes 2021). By comparing how productive and civic capacity is pervasively underused in these seemingly disparate contexts, I explain how slack can serve the interests of incumbent rights-holders —- from homeowners and landlords to employers and elected officials. Across these domains, rules designed to help incumbents capture the rents produced by slack can in fact hinder the reallocation of idle resources and civic capacity during a moment of crisis.

My analysis suggests, contra Hirschman, that slack is not necessarily functional for an organization. Whether disused resources and capacity are mobilized during a time of crisis depends on policy innovation and political mobilization. The paper describes and compares strategies for overcoming the interests of incumbents and activating slack resources. It closes by proposing how an updated account of slack grounded in political economy can help explain the maldistribution of resources in American cities, and their ability to withstand economic and environmental shocks.

Author

• Nate Ela, University of Cincinnati