Growth Machine

Growth machine politics suggests that it is the local business elites who are the primary actors in sustaining an image of a city or a region based on a transformational growth ethic. These elites, along with politicians, local media, and utilities, mobilize both to pursue individual economic goals and advocate a viewpoint that growth (at any cost) benefits everyone in the community. This growth ethic seeps into all aspects of community life, including the political system, the agenda for economic development, and the social relations that contribute to local culture. Any issue that deviates from this growth ethic is automatically seen as a potential threat to rents and capital mobility or its exchange value. The rhetoric of these growth machine elites, therefore, tends to revolve around treatment of communities as instruments of profit. This is a doctrine of value-free development, a libertarian-style ethic that sees free markets as the only way to determine the best and highest values for land as well as provide for the economic growth that brings jobs and expands the tax base.

This growth ethic is embedded in long-standing notions of American exceptionalism, where private ownership of property is preferred over transfers of land that benefit the overall public good. Hence, tremendous authority is given to private real estate developers, as well as significant political autonomy at the local level. A growth machine ideology sees the role of local government as limited to only those actions that contribute directly to the economic development of a locality (zoning regulations, property tax issues, etc.). Growth machine elites are also fixed on the notion that urban planning represents a “rational science” to be used for providing order to urban systems while at the same time growing the infrastructure. Consequently, the urban planning process itself has traditionally been at the service of the growth machine apparatus, seen purely as a neutral force in directing home rule. But this planning power, while offering localities a sense of political autonomy, also represents a Trojan horse of sorts. Only the most affluent towns are able to create wealth and privilege from such an arrangement while perpetuating inequalities of wealth among places. Urban planning in this sense is a durable feature of growth machine politics in that it manipulates public resources to serve the economic exchange interests of local elites, often at the expense of the taxpayer. Growth machine politics, therefore, favor economic exchange values over other concerns, such as environmental, cultural, or social issues that are important to the livability of communities. These issues are taken up by local governments only when they can be justified as part of the growth strategy.

Conflicts arise, however, when other stakeholders in a community place a different value on land. For example, environmentalists, heritage preservation activists, or poverty activists see land from a different perspective. For the environmentalist, land is to be ecologically protected, for the heritage activists, it could have historical significance, and for the poverty activist, the way land is developed has implications for accomplishing a larger public good, such as affordable housing availability. All these actors can emerge to challenge the growth machine's use value of lands in their jurisdiction. As such, understanding the politics of place is fundamentally linked to this conflict between the exchange and use values of land.

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