Growth Coalitions

The idea of growth coalitions (or “the growth machine”) in urban politics grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, especially associated with the work of Harvey Molotch, John Logan, and William Domhoff. They suggested that urban power politics were dominated by growth machines that have privileged developers over the wishes of local residents. The idea behind the growth machine derives from Marxist economic ideas of exchange-values dominating use-values.

The general idea is that local power is structured around land-based interests and landowners simply want the value of their land to rise. This ensures that there is a common interest between ordinary home owners and capitalists or rentiers owning large areas of land. Organized capitalists initiate development within the community that [Page 299]will help raise the value of all land. Democratically elected politicians will support new development because it will secure employment, raise land values, and keep the bulk of the local population happy. However, growth-machine writers argue that the benefits of local growth are skewed away from the general population toward the rentiers and capitalists. Exchange-value is favored over use-value, so development does not necessarily achieve local growth—or at least it does not ensure development that will increase local growth in the form of employment or amenities that are useful for the local public.

William Domhoff, an elite theorist, argues that growth machines intertwine local, national, and international developers. Domhoff reexamined the evidence of Robert Dahl's New Haven, Connecticut, study that argued community power machines were pluralist, saying that the local business community had met with Mayor Lee—the central actor in Dahl's study—within weeks of his election, to urge their development program on him—a program that had been developed under the previous regime. Growth-machine writers argue that development is cited in virtually all community power studies because it is one of the most important issues affecting communities and ends up as central to all local power issues.

Although the growth-machine model was developed specifically to examine community power in the context of U.S. cities, the model has been applied to numerous developed and developing countries. Whereas in the United States the growth machine is fueled by private interests, in other more corporatist states the interlocking of private and public growth efforts is more apparent. Here, development strategies might favor bureaucratic or local state interests over those of purely private developments. However, many studies of European and Latin American growth machines suggest that extensive landholding by local governments enables them to sell land to developers to help them buy elections. Developers also favor greenfield sites, and environmentalists have suggested the growth machine distorts the use of land away from redevelopment of low-value but developed land. Government could and should push for greater brownfield development.

The growth-machine literature spans the agency-structure divide, using structural accounts of the interrelationship between exchange-value and use-value and suggesting that the impersonal force of development and rising land values motivates home owners, capitalists, and local politicians. This argument relates to Clarence Stone's claims of systemic power or Keith Dowding's work on systematic luck. However, this structural power interpretation of the growth machine, seen in Logan's and Molotch's work, sits less well with the more empiricist account in Domhoff's work. In his work, the role of individuals within the capitalist class predominates. His version of the growth machine is highly agent specific, examining the relationships between specific individuals who network and conspire to promote their own capitalist interests. The growth-machine model is closely associated with Stone's regime theory that became the dominant model of urban power structures in the 1980s and 1990s.

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