Political-Economy of Local Land-Use Policy: Place-Making, Development, and Relative Power of Business, Civil Society, and Government

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 18. Urban Development

Abstract

This study takes a new look at place development, interrogating the relative power of local business, civic society, and government actors in localities across the United States. We address the central question of who controls the development agenda by focusing on land-use and economic development policy. We address the contested question of who controls place-making, a question that has largely been scrutinized through the lens of case-studies, analyzing it in comparative manner across subnational space for localities across the nation. Conceptually, we extend the growth machine literature to provide a fuller accounting of its societal actors, and speak to some of its proponents’ puzzling findings that policies ostensibly designed to stymie growth across places may actually promote it. We use a unique data set from a survey of county governments, which to our knowledge is the only nationally generalizable data on local governments’ policies (N >1,700). Despite the importance accorded to civil society in the literature, we find that civil society actors are essentially powerless when compared to business. Growth machine business actors call the shots in terms of setting the economic development policy agenda. But intriguingly, we also find that business actors do not influence environment-related land-use policies. The findings suggest that communities’ land-use policies may be carefully designed to leave enough leeway for growth machine interests and continued place development. Support for such policies allows growth machine actors to publicly signal support for managed growth and environmental protection, although the reality of place-making on the ground will remain business as usual. Finally, local governments affect both economic development and land-use policy; this suggests they face continuing exchange-value pressures to create growth to increase revenue streams, yet at the same time, they yield to local use-value pressures to mount at least modest attempts to preserve the environment.

Authors

• Lazarus Adua, University of Utah

• Linda Lobao, Ohio State University