Political Geography 18 (1999) 973990 www.elsevier.

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Alternatives to the New Urban Politics: nding locality and autonomy in local economic development
James DeFilippis
*

Rutgers University, Department of Geography, Lucy Stone Hall, Livingston Campus, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA

Abstract The New Urban Politics (or NUP) of local economic development has become one of the dominant themes in urban political economy in the last twenty years. But despite the volume of research this has generated, basic problems remain in the theories that underlie this academic and political work. This paper begins with a discussion of the understandings of the central concepts of locality and autonomy in the NUP. These understandings of locality and autonomy are then criticized for failing to recognize the relational and processual character of both of these constructs. Local autonomy is then retheorized as the capacity to control the production of place. In particular, the paper focuses on groups constructing institutions and relationships of local ownership. These organizations, it is argued, have combined the goals of local autonomy and local economic development, and in so doing have produced new localities in the places in which they are organizing. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Local autonomy; Local economic development; Community development; New Urban Politics

Introduction As urban politics have become increasingly centered around the goal of economic development, the issue of local autonomy in local economic development has come

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston, MA in April, 1998. * Tel.: +1-732-445-4103; fax: +1-732-445-0006. E-mail address: jdelip@eden.rutgers.edu (J. DeFilippis)
0962-6298/99/$ - see front matter 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 6 2 - 6 2 9 8 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 3 1 - 1

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to the fore in discussions of local politics both in geography and other social sciences. But the discussions of local economic development, which have fallen largely within what Cox (1993) has called the New Urban Politics, (NUP) have too often been mired in oversimplied, often unexamined, understandings of both locality and autonomy. The purpose of this article is, therefore, two-fold. First, it is to construct a more theoretically coherent understanding of local autonomy. Second, moving from the theoretical to the more explicitly political, it is to discuss forms of local economic development that offer actors working within localities the potential to realize autonomy in their relations with the supra-local world. The article begins with a discussion of how locality and autonomy have been conceptualized in the NUP. It then criticizes these understandings for failing to recognize the relational and processual character of both of these constructs. Building upon these critiques, it re-theorizes locality and autonomy. It then both aligns itself with, and criticizes, the Progressive Cities literature that has emerged in Urban Planning circles in the last 15 years. And it concludes by discussing forms of local economic development that reject the entrepreneurial premises of the NUP, and instead work to realize local autonomy by constructing locally-controlled institutions and structures of development.

Locality and autonomy in the new urban politics Over the last 20 years, there has emerged a body of literature concerning the changing role of urban governments, and their increasing emphasis on local economic development policies (Clarke 1990, 1993; Goetz & Clarke, 1993; Hall & Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989; Imbroscio, 1997; Leitner, 1990; Logan & Molotch, 1987; Peterson, 1981; Wilson, 1995). This literature has addressed both the goals and constituencies of urban growth machines, and the entrepreneurial state policies these regimes have implemented once they have come to power. Similarly, the NUP literature has focused on the decline in importance of the public provision of social services, housing and other goods of collective consumption, and the simultaneous growth of entrepreneurial forms of urban governance. Finally, the local state in the NUP has been characterized by such well-known institutional forms as public-private partnerships, business improvement districts, and the speculative investment of public capital. The arguments presented by planners and social scientists theorizing the NUP are based on the premise that since capital is increasingly globally mobile, localities are competing against each other more than ever before to attract this mobile capital. The conclusions drawn from this single assumption have varied greatly however, and have ranged from arguments that cities have completely lost their autonomy relative to this newly mobile capital (Peterson, 1981; Gottdiener, 1986; Logan & Molotch, 1987) to those that see a period of new localism as a result of this new mobility (Goetz & Clarke, 1993; Clarke & Gaile, 1998). Peterson (1981) was probably the rst social scientist to explicitly address the

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implications of capital mobility on local politics.1 He argued that because capital and labor were mobile, cities had no choice but to prioritize the developmental policies of economic growth. Comparable arguments would later be made, although from different normative and political positions, by both Gottdiener (1986), and Logan and Molotch (1987), in two inuential texts that similarly argued that the mobility of capital had essentially prevented localities from pursuing policies that were not in accordance with the global market. Partly in reaction to the above literature on the decline of urban politics, and partly in response to the structuralist theories of urban politics that had been prominent in the 1970s (Cockburn, 1977; Castells, 1977), there has since emerged a literature celebrating the importance of local politics in this global era. Within this literature there have been two different, and not signicantly overlapping, schools: the new localists and the regime theorists. The new localists have argued that the mobility of capital has diminished spatial barriers to investment, thereby reasserting the importance of place-based characteristics in investment decisions. Clarke (1993: 4), makes this argument explicit when she states, To the extent that new production processes are, in fact, characterized by organizations seeking specic industrial atmospheres and attempting to reduce external transaction costs, localities not regions or nations are in a position to facilitate the minimization of these costs. Similarly, but along a different track, regime theorists have asserted that local politics still matter, and have focused on the construction of particular, local, political coalitions of urban governance, and have stressed the role of these governing coalitions (or regimes) in shaping local policy outcomes. Regime theorists however, have increasingly seen local political situations and contexts as solely the outcome of the agency of the political actors of the local state, and either larger-scale structures of the political economy, or non-state based political actors have taken an increasingly farther back seat (although see Lauria (1997) and Sites (1997), for attempts to pull regime theory away from this trajectory). This privileging of local state politics was made explicit by Mollenkopf (1992: 199) when he described New York City as a context in which the autonomy of urban politics was evident.2

Reconceptualizing locality and autonomy The NUP has been criticized for its over-simplied assumptions about globalization (Cox, 1993), and for the lack of empirical evidence to support the presupposed

1 It should be noted that while Peterson deserves credit for raising these issues, he did so in ways that politically encouraged the race to bottom of social service provision that he would later argue against (Peterson, 1995). 2 Mollenkopfs language exposes the reason why the New Localists and Regime Theorists have largely not been interacting. For while the new localists are addressing the prospects for local political autonomy, the regime theorists have been querying the possibility of local political autonomy. In short, the new localists are dealing with the questions of geographical scale, while the regime theorists are dealing with questions of power relations between realms of social organization.

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connections between global economic restructuring and urban governance (Hall & Hubbard, 1996). But leaving these legitimate criticisms aside, both of the NUPs conicting conclusions either the complete loss of local autonomy, or the emergence of a period of hyper local autonomy are still inadequate because they fail to understand the nuances involved in realizing local autonomy. First, a locality is not a thing that exists a priori, as the NUP seems to assume. Localities are, conversely, continuously being constructed and reconstructed, both by their relationships with the rest of the world, and by the struggles that take place within them. Also, the NUP seems to accept the local as the scale of the local state. Accordingly, its theorists have assumed away questions of what constitutes and produces the local. Cox (1991) has rightfully criticized the NUP for limiting its understanding of local politics to the actions of the local state, and not dealing with the role of larger scale structures and actors. But he does not take his argument far enough, and it should be argued that while government institutions play a very large role in producing localities, the local is not determined by any scale within the spatial division of labor of the state. Similarly, autonomy is not a discrete commodity that is possessed or not possessed by individuals or localities. Instead autonomy is a set of power relations. A locality therefore cannot have autonomy, since autonomy can only be realized through the social, political, and economic relationships that those within the locality are engaged in with the extra-local world. These awed understandings of locality and autonomy are at the heart of the failure of the NUP, and it is towards more coherent conceptions of these that this paper now turns. Locality The scale of the locality has been theorized in many different, often conicting, ways in the social sciences and urban planning in the last 20 years. Instead of summarizing this vast literature, I will simply pull out the parts that are most useful to my understanding of locality before I synthesize them into a working denition. Taylor (1982) denes locality as the scale of experience, and Agnew (1987) would later expand this notion into locale, as a way of trying to understand local political behavior. The idea of locale is that individuals live their lives in a place or setting, and that setting, as the site for many of their daily experiences, constrains and inuences their behavior. In this sense, the locale is active, and does not simply change due to human agency and structure, but plays a part in the construction of both the agency and structure (Giddens, 1979) that constitute everyday life. The experiential component of this understanding of locality was made most explicit by Clarke and Kirby (1990), who describe the locality as the scale where, a common sense is formed by those within it. It should be stressed, however, that this formation of a common sense within a place is actively constructed and is the result of unequal power relations within that place. Clarke and Kirby further argue for an understanding of locality as, as nexus of community, household, and workplace, which are essential components of everyday life and crucial organizations that shape political values and ideology (Clarke & Kirby, 1990: 394). In connecting local

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experiences to political practices, they return us to Agnew, as the relationships between local experiences and political practice continue to dominate his work. Recently, in an attempt to theorize the importance of context in politics, he has argued, the micro-geography of everyday life (work, residence, school, leisure, and so on) denes the more-or-less localized settings in which patterns of social interaction and social group formation are realized (Agnew, 1996: 133). The local, therefore, is the scale of lived experiences. As such, it is not xed at any dimensions (be it the scale of city government, the neighborhood or the metropolitan area) but varies in size and location for different people, depending on their socially structured ability to access space. But locality is not completely amorphous, and even though political boundaries do not dene localities, they are central to their constitution. On one level this is because the state is such an important component of the set of our daily experiences, and most peoples interactions with the state occur at the local scale (whether it be with the police, schools, social service providers, etc.). Additionally, the state, as we will see below, is not xed itself, but is the codication of power relations. As such, the local state is one of the primary arenas in which contests over the locals common sense and experiences get played out. There is something intuitively powerful about this conception of locality, but it seems to assume the a priori existence of localities, and then discusses the relationships between those localities and the people within them. The questions of how and why this common sense is formed, and these experiences are lived, remain unexplored, and the dynamics involved in the production of the localities get lost in work that relies solely on this framework. Along a different line, Massey has argued that localities are moments in the stretching out of social relations (or space). In this framework, places emerge out of a larger set of relationships. This is useful because it recognizes that places are uid constructs, not things that are assumed to exist. Localities are therefore partially dened by their location in their relationships with the outside world, as well as the relationships that exist within them. In Masseys early work these relationships were primarily economic, and places were a product of their location within the spatial division of labor (Massey, 1984). While this was an extremely important argument against the mainstream liberal understanding of poverty in cities or regions as a function of the qualities of the people within them, it was also very limiting and it reduced places to simply products of their historical economic geography. More recently, Massey (1994) has broadened her understanding of the production of places to include gender and race relations as well. But further sets of relations in the production of places can be identied. In the aforementioned article, Agnew argued that there are six sets of relations out of which places emerge (the division of labor; communications technology; state structure; class, ethnic and gender divisions and conicts; social movement ideologies; and the above mentioned daily experiences) (Agnew, 1996: 132133). While this may sound a bit like a cookbook recipe, it is not meant to be a denitive description of the production of localities. Instead it is meant to be a set of ideal types of relations that combine and intersect in different ways at particular times and in particular

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places. But this argument is still rather vague, and while it is important to recognize that localities are relationally produced, it remains unclear as to how those relationships translate into the daily practices and experiences that constitute a locality. Perhaps Coxs (Cox & Mair 1988, 1989; Cox 1993, 1995) arguments about local dependence can be of use to us here. Cox and Mair (1989) offer the idea of locality as a function of the locally dependent structures, agents and institutions that exist within it. They state: Socio-spatial structures of immobility, in combination with geographical delimitations that effectively maintain social relations, are the material bases for the production of actual territories at various scales. More specically, there are certain social relations and certain actors that simply need to be in a place, and for whom mobility, while often technically possible in this age of hypermobility, is de facto not an option. So while everything is relationally produced, that is not the same as saying that everything is mobile. The primary example is that of capitals invested in a place, that, in order to recoup the initial investment, need to continue to have value ow through them public utilities and property owners being the archetypal examples of this. But local dependence extends well beyond capitals that are temporarily xed. Most of the institutions that help to form a common sense, schools, local newspapers, places of worship, small retail businesses, and (with the disappearance of federal to municipal revenue transfers Eisinger, 1998) increasingly, local governments, are, for all intents and purposes, place dependent. Also, for long-time residents of a place, mobility often does not seem like an option given the variety and intensity of the social relationships and networks the residents have often constructed. Similarly, for many people of color in the United States, geographic mobility is simply not an option, given the institutional and structural barriers that prevent it. These residents are functionally just as place dependent as any xed investment. Together, these are the actors that engage in local political struggles, not just over economic development, but the entire spectrum of political conict, ranging from school district battles to housing and commercial zoning disputes. When these arguments are brought together, localities can be understood as the scale of experience, constructed through unequal power relations and conicts between those social actors and structures that are functionally immobile as they try to create a common sense and dene their position in their relations with the supra-local world. Localities, therefore are never xed entities. At the same time, however, many of the relationships the locality is engaged in are relatively stable (including those that are place dependent), and we must be careful not to construct a view of localities that is too processual and uid to be intellectually and political useful. The questions become, how are these relationships stabilized (or codied), who decides, and at what scale are those decisions made. With these questions we can now turn to... Local autonomy The idea of autonomy has a long history in western thought as being connected with the individuals ability to act in a liberal democracy, and has been understood as something held by people (or not held) as they entered the public arena to partici-

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pate in democracy (see Dworkin (1988) for a recent continuation of that tradition). At the heart of this traditional view of autonomy is the understanding that possessing autonomy means having the ability to act without outside interference or constraints. That is, autonomy, in this usage, is the freedom (and autonomy is a close sibling to freedom in liberal democratic thought) to act independently of, and almost in isolation from, the outside world. Early attempts to theorize local autonomy from Saunders (1979) and Clark (1984) did so with many of these same understandings. For Saunders, local autonomy was a residual category that resulted from three different processes: ecological forces, market forces, and political forces. Clarks work was somewhat different. In his framework, autonomy was based on the two, inter-related, powers of immunity and initiative. Both of these powers were granted from higher tiers of the state, and autonomy was understood as both state-based and a discrete, exchangeable object. More recent theorizations have moved away from the earlier arguments which seemed to assume that autonomy is only something granted (either actively or passively) from above in limited amounts. Gurr and King (1987) have instead argued that localities have much more autonomy than was previously theorized, they begin with the assumption of autonomy and then discuss two types of constraints: Type 1 are economic and social; and Type 2 are political. Building upon this argument, Wolman and Goldsmith, 1992 and Goldsmith, 1995) have discussed local autonomy as, the ability of local governments to have an independent impact on the well-being of their citizens (Wolman and Goldsmith, 1990: 3) in the face of these two sets of constraints. While these recent efforts are more analytically useful than the residual and static views of autonomy possessed by Saunders and Clark, there are still fundamental problems with these conceptions. First, they continue to treat autonomy as something that is either possessed or not possessed by localities as they enter the policy-making process. They argue that there are varying amounts of autonomy, depending on the political and economic context of the different localities. But autonomy is an expression of power, and as such, it is not a static thing granted or possessed by individuals, states, or localities, but is instead a relational construct. Second, in these conceptions of autonomy, autonomy is a function of the localitys ability to act independently of outside forces, or in isolation from outside inuence or constraints. But if we have dened localities as partly a function of the extra-local social relationships they are embedded within, then clearly our conception of local autonomy cannot require the isolation of localities. Since autonomy is a form of power, any theoretical understanding of it must emerge from an understanding of power. Taking Foucaults relational theory of power and applying it to autonomy, Brown (1992: 263) has argued: Power is not what a social object holds; it is how that object is linked to other social objects in enabling or constraining ways. Foucault further argued that power relations are constitutive of all social interactions, and can not be rooted, a priori, in any class, social group or institution. At the same time, however, he recognized that institutions become the foci for the exercise of power. Therefore, while power relations are all

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pervasive, they are not without specic forms or divorced from social structures and institutions (and the technologies which partially constitute those institutions). Similar arguments were made by Poulantzas (1978), and later, Jessop (1990) in their discussions of the state. They argue that the state is a social relation, and that state power is therefore the codication of power relations. As such, this codication process (which, it can be argued, is just the exercising of power by those in positions of control) is not a neutral one, and the emergent institutions are then immersed in the complex web of power relations (or what Poulantzas called, an institutional ensemble) themselves. But the power relations that were codied into the institutions continue to manifest themselves in those institutions. The result is that different political projects operate with different sets of barriers and opportunities. Poulantzas called this uneven political playing eld, Structural Selectivity and Jessop rened the argument into, Strategic Selectivity in order to divorce the concept from the assumption of capital and class as the structurally determined bases of power. So what does all this mean for an understanding of local autonomy? First, it means that we need to understand autonomy as a form of power, and that autonomy is therefore a relational construct. Autonomy is not a thing, but a process and a set of complex relationships. For local scale actors to be autonomous, they must therefore transform the relations they are embedded in to allow themselves greater control over those relationships. Second, autonomy might be relational, but that does not make it amorphous, unidentiable, or placeless. Autonomy might not exist in itself, but it does nd expression in the institutions that lie at the focal points of a localitys relations. When Lake (1994) denes local autonomy as, the capacity of localities to control the social construction of place, he is really talking about the ability of local scale actors to control the institutions that connect them to the rest of the world. Third, the possibility of local autonomy is partially a function of the political goals of those trying to realize it. The current set of power relations in the capitalist political economy, and the hegemony of capital that is both an outcome of those power relations and constitutive of them, means that local-scale projects confront different opportunity structures as they attempt to gain control over their relations with the extra-local world. For local scale projects antithetical to capital, the possibilities of realizing autonomy are strictly constrained, and Conroys case study of the institutional barriers faced by the Socialists in local government in Burlington, VT provides an excellent example of this (Conroy, 1990). This is not, however, to say that localities could ever completely control the production of their place, or realize complete autonomy in their relations with the rest of the world, regardless of the political projects undertaken, or institutional framework constructed. Localities are too embedded in, and constructed through, too many social relationships for those within them to ever fully control how they are produced. Also, autonomy, like all forms of power, is inherently meet by opposition and contestation (Foucault, 1980), and the conicts over the production of a locality are never fully resolved, only periodically made less explicit. Local autonomy, therefore, can be dened as the ever-contested and never complete ability of those within the locality to control the institutions and relationships that dene and produce the locality.

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With this denition of local autonomy, an understanding of the NUP becomes possible. Both conclusions (no autonomy and hyper autonomy) are too simplistic. The increased mobility of capital has not rendered localities powerless (or taken away localities autonomy). Localities have always been produced through a complex set of relations with the extra-local world. The current mobility of capital simply means that, in order for agents within localities to realize autonomy, they must construct structures and institutions of capital accumulation that limit the potential for mobility by transforming the scale at which they are dependent. Conversely, the increased possibility to attract this newly mobile capital has not generated any form of hyper-local autonomy because the production of the localities is still controlled by larger-scale capital. That is, the ability to dene places as simply sites of capital accumulation and reproduction remains uncontested if development is understood as the ability to make conditions right for the attraction of outside capital investment. Until the relational and processual qualities of locality and autonomy are understood, the debates of the NUP will continue to miss the point.

Community-based organizations, progresive cities and the NUP While the debates of the NUP have been waged, there has emerged another set of literatures examining the possibility for a more progressive and equitable urban political economy, which I will refer to as the progressive city literature. This literature has focused on city governments that, through the efforts of left, or leftleaning regimes, have addressed issues of affordable housing, afrmative action, environmental and public space protection, and historic preservation (see Stone, 1993, for a useful summary of progressive regimes). The seminal work in this literature is clearly Clavels The Progressive City (1986), in which he documents the rise of progressive regimes in ve different cities in the United States. In the years since, he has continued to work in this same vain, and has been joined by others who reject both the defeatism of the City Limits argument, and the inequities that come with the entrepreneurialism of the new localists. The City Limits argument is rejected for its denial of local politics in determining local outcomes. Conversely, the new localist argument is rejected for its emphasizing the local as solely a site for economic investment. The central question driving the progressive cities literature, therefore, is essentially the same as the one driving this article, and it is: what, in this era of capital mobility (and disappearing federal support for cities), is the potential for people in cities to work towards the (broadly dened) goals of social justice at the local level. This literature is appealing both intellectually, for rightfully and tangibly arguing that local politics still matter, and politically, for claiming a place for issues of equity and justice in urban politics. But there are two problems with this literature. First, it focuses on the goals and activities of the city governments, repeating the mistake of those within the NUP who accept the local as the scale of the local state, and thereby relegates smaller scale, non-state, political organizing (often referred to as community or neighborhood organizing) to a secondary role. But if, as I have argued,

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the local is the scale of experience, then for most people in medium to large-sized cities, the local is much smaller than the boundaries of the municipality. This is especially true for working class people, immigrants, and people of color, all of whom are structurally limited in their abilities to control space outside of the areas of cities into which they are segregated. Also, this focusing on city government belies the fact that progressive city politics have almost always emerged from the building of coalitions from pre-existing smaller scale local organizations within these cities. The second aw of this literature, which, it can be argued, stems from the rst, is an often too uncritical understanding of community organizing. This leads to a promotion of community-based policies as a progressive end in themselves (Mayer, 1991), or a willingness to turn a blind eye to the problems observed in the community-based strategy (Imbroscio, 1997). But all community organizations are clearly not the same, and the entrepreneurial turn in city government policies has been mirrored by a comparable pro-market direction for most community development corporations (CDCs the primary vehicle for local economic development in the community based strategy). In fact, it has often been argued that for CDCs to be successful, they must adopt an explicitly entrepreneurial set of goals and practices (Bendick & Egan, 1991; Berger & Steinbach, 1992; Pierce & Steinbach, 1987; Taub, 1990; Tholin, 1994; Vidal 1992, 1996). Further, many of those within the community development movement have dened and promoted themselves as capitalists. The Ford Foundations denitive report on CDCs (Pierce & Steinbach, 1987) was instructively entitled Corrective Capitalism, and Taubs work on the South Shore Bank of Chicago (the model for many community development nancial institutions nationwide, and a large recipient of capital from the federal CDFI fund established by the Clinton administration) is similarly called Community Capitalism (Taub, 1988). There are clearly problems with this individualist, entreprenuerialist turn in CDCs. First, market-based CDCs reproduce the power relations that had produced the inequities and exploitations that the CDCs emerged in response to. And the free market, once recognized generally among community organizers as a primary source of the problems of poor communities, becomes transformed into the solution to all problems. Second, and similarly, if the market is the mechanism for organizing, than the production of the communities (or localities) is still controlled by the market, and not by those within the communities. But there are community-based local economic development organizations that are rejecting the entrepreneurialism of the NUP in either its city government or CDC forms. It is these organizations that offer the potential for the realization of local autonomy, and it is towards a discussion of these organizations that this article now turns.

Finding autonomous development While the majority of city governments and community based organizations have responded to the current mobility of capital by creating conditions deemed appropriate to attracting it, alternative forms of development have been constructed that are

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organized around the goal of reclaiming that capital by limiting its potential mobility by anchoring it within localities (Bruyn & Meehan, 1987; Douthwaite, 1996; Gunn & Gunn, 1991; Shavelson, 1990; Shuman, 1998; Wilkenson & Quarter, 1996). This has been done in a variety of ways, including community ownership of the means of: production (in worker and community organization cooperatives), reproduction (in Community Land Trusts and Mutual Housing Associations), and exchange (both by control of credit through community development credit unions, and by community ownership of retail stores). At the heart of all of these strategies is the creation of institutions of capital accumulation that are locally owned and controlled (not simply owned by individuals who happen to reside or do business within the locality). These institutions of local ownership insure greater local control over the processes of investment and disinvestment, and therefore offer the potential for greater control over the production of the locality. This article will only briey discuss each of these forms, as they each merit more space than can be provided here. While worker owned co-operatives have long been a part of the American industrial landscape, they began to take on new meaning in the 1970s and 1980s as plant closings and relocations became commonplace in the economic geography of the older industrial regions in this country. Worker-ownership has been transformed therefore, from just a process of workplace relations, to one which has foregrounded community economic development (Olson, 1987; Megson & OToole, 1993; Wilkenson & Quarter, 1996; Wills, 1998).3 Threatened plant closures have been met by attempts by the union local or the community to buy the condemned factories. Even when the community is relatively uninvolved, employee-ownership can serve to maintain the importance of place in the decision-making process. Workers are simply more place dependent than the business might otherwise be, and while individual workers may relocate or move, the entirety of the workforce of a factory is clearly not likely to do so. Similarly, some community organizations have created factories, sheries and other forms of production as start up businesses owned by the organizations themselves (Shavelson, 1990). In these facilities, the workers are also members of the organizations, and so their ownership is less direct. While community ownership of the means of production is rather limited in magnitude, there has been more progress with regards to housing and the means of reproduction. There are currently over 100 community land trusts (CLTs) in the United States (Institute for Community Economics, 1997), most of them created in lowincome urban communities being threatened by the displacement that comes with gentrication. In a CLT, a community organization owns and manages the land, while the residents own only the housing units located on the land. This community ownership is structured to protect the long-term affordability of the housing units in trust, and to insure the community is in control of decisions made about the investment or disinvestment in the housing stock within the community. Mutual Housing Associations (MHAs) are similar to CLTs, but in this institutional arrangement the

3 Perhaps the best evidence of this transformation is the 1995 addition of concern for community to the principles adhered to by the International Cooperative Alliance (Hoyt, 1996).

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community directly owns the housing units themselves, not simply the land. There are currently more than 30 MHAs nation-wide (Krinsky & Hovde, 1996), and this number has grown signicantly in the last ten years. What CLTs and MHAs have in common is that not only is the property owned by the community, but resident and community control are written into their governance structures. There are currently between 300 and 400 community development credit unions (CDCUs) in the United States (National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, 1998), and their primary goal is to bring basic banking services to communities where the market is not providing those services. Like all credit unions, they are member-owned co-operatives, that require a recognized commonality among members. But unlike the majority of credit unions, they are organized in low-income communities, often centered around a church-based organization, and the commonality is the desire for the community to control the ows of investment and disinvestment which are central to how the community is produced. Finally, many local organizations have turned to ownership of stores and thrift shops as a way to nance their other, nonself-sustaining programs. Community owned-stores also offer the potential to create employment and provide consumer goods often not furnished by the private market (such as supermarkets). In New York City alone, there are almost two dozen community-owned retail stores currently running protably and sustainably (Deasy, 1998). None of these forms of local economic development seeks autonomy through cutting off the localitys relationships with the rest of the world. All of these institutions are very much inside the capitalist political economy, and plant closings, store closings, and credit union failures are all very real occurrences (Deasy, 1998; Gunn, 1992; Wilkenson & Quarter, 1996). Control over the decisions made within that economy, however, is fundamentally altered, and the seemingly placeless and non-corporeal logic of the market is transformed by locally-based organizations at the nexus of control over investment and disinvestment. But the market is not placeless. This appearance of placelessness is due to the fact that many circuits of capital investment exist at geographic scales larger than any single locality, region or country. What local ownership does is it transforms the codication of the power relations that constitute investment decisions. The market is not rejected, but the power relations that constitute the market are restructured. In so doing, it alters the scale of ownership and renders the capitals place dependent when they otherwise would not be. Since the organizations engaged in the different forms of community ownership dene themselves by their physical location within communities (and thereby work to construct those communities) they are virtually immobile, and therefore extremely locally dependent. But the possibility of local autonomy is greater than just the control over capital investment sought by organizations creating these forms of community ownership. These organizations, by having community-, worker-, resident-, member-control structured into their governance, and by claiming their identity as spatially embedded in the place of the community, are often part of the process of creating those communities. In a vain similar to the argument in political philosophy that people learn and create democracy by practicing democracy (Pateman, 1970), places are often dialectically created by people organizing around those places (see de Souza Briggs, Mueller, & Sullivan, 1997; Medoff & Sklar, 1994 for useful case studies of this

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process). Using the framework we have established, as these place-dependent communities have organized around local economic development, they have transformed the common sense that, in turn, partially constructs and denes the localities. This is where the potential for the realization of local autonomy can truly be found; in local economic development organizations that have recognized the relationships and institutions that connect their locality with the rest of the world, have enacted institutional change to increase their control over those relationships, and have created new localities in the process.

A voyage to Lilliput? But this all seems a bit too easy, and there are clearly problems with the model that I have been discussing in this article, and which some activists/writers have come to refer to as the Lilliput Strategy (Brecher & Costello, 1994; Shuman, 1998).4 These problems take two forms: those of the possibility of local autonomy, and those of the merit of local autonomy. That is, is local autonomy possible, and, if so, is it desirable? We will conclude by addressing these issues and limitations. The possibility of local autonomy These organizations are, at this point, very limited in their size and impact on the hegemonic, neo-liberal, American political economy. While this is a problem that can theoretically be overcome through their growth and reproduction, the reality is much less promising. While local ownership creates a set of institutions that allow investment decisions to be controlled locally, and therefore alters the power relations through which those decisions emerge, they still exist in a larger set of economic relations. Simply put, a worker-owned factory needs to be protable to survive, and that protability, or lack thereof, is often a function of processes beyond the control of the factory. Similarly, mutual housing associations can construct a framework for housing provision that allows the communities to have more control, and prevents displacement or abandonment, but they are often dependent on initial investments from without to acquire the properties in the rst place. Finally, CDCUs might be member-owned and controlled, and lend only to members, but they also need nonmember deposits in order to attain the level of assets necessary to provide their members with adequate service. In short, the potential of localities to realize autonomy through local ownership is incredibly constrained in places where past economic relations have been largely those of capital ight. And these are, of course, precisely the places where these efforts are being undertaken. The solutions to these limitations are, logically, found in the creation of a set of

4 In this metaphor, the global economy is Gulliver, and the local-scale initiatives are the Lilliputians. What is interesting is that Shuman uses this metaphor without any apparent knowledge of its use by Brecher and Costello.

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larger-scale institutions, or intermediaries as they are often referred to, that provide technical support, advice, and capital, to local organizations engaged in these efforts. Such institutions exist for each of the kinds of local ownership discussed above (and see The Communities Directory, 1996; Shuman, 1998, for comprehensive lists of these institutions). These are the institutions that can theoretically provide the ropes to connect the local groups and tie Gulliver down. What is so appealing about these intermediaries is that they can potentially offer the support that is needed, without necessarily transforming the local organizations and the emergent power relations that they are a part of. These intermediaries operate at national, and often, international (if not quite global) scales, and therefore offer an alternative global strategy to the neo-liberal constructed globalization. The argument is then recast from, globalization or localization (or the almost completely disempowering, think globally, act locally) to, what kind of globalization, who is going to decide, how and what will be the role of local scale activities and institutions. Unfortunately, when these larger institutions make loans to local organizations they usually do so with controls over how the money can be spent, and seldom give technical support and advice without advocating for their model to be implemented. In such relationships, the ability of the local groups to control their own development and realize autonomy, can become signicantly limited and constrained. The problems with the limited magnitude of local ownership extend further than just this. For while it is necessary to create alternative institutions to affect the changes in power relations that these organizations desire, constructing these alternate institutions can often mean that the hegemony of the neo-liberal political economy goes unchallenged. In fact, the current status of local ownership is one of a thriving, but largely marginal, existence. This model of local autonomy is thriving in that the numbers of localities engaged in one or more of the kinds of ownership is growing rapidly, but at the same time, because these groups rarely confront capital or the state directly they are largely off the radar of the hegemonic political economy. In fact, their growth has been largely facilitated by the absence of confrontation, as local governments have often been very supportive of their work. In Boston, Mayor Flynn even went as far as turning over the citys power of eminent domain to a local CDC so it could acquire large tracts of property and turn them into a land trust (Medoff & Sklar, 1994). This dual status of thriving but marginal is not sustainable, and sooner or later, the new institutional framework that these organizations are building will eventually need to confront the hegemonic political economy if it is going to construct an alternative to that hegemony. Should local autonomy be the goal Even if the barriers to local autonomy can be overcome, we need to be very careful about assuming local ownership and control will mean a more just process of urbanization. There are two primary considerations that must be addressed to deal with this issue, and they both are questions of scale. The goal here is not to solve these problems, but instead to raise them as such, so that future researchers, planners, and activists can confront them in, hopefully, productive ways.

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First, why should we assume that local control is going to mean a diminution of unequal and unjust power relations? If we take Foucault seriously, then we must recognize that power relations within the scale of the locality might be just as oppressive as those between a locality and the supra-local world. As Sennett, in response to the community control movement of the early 1970s, argued, Localism and local autonomy are becoming widespread political creeds, as though the experiences of power relations will have more human meaning the more intimate the scale (Sennett, 1977: 339). This point is well-taken, and it was the recognized oppression that existed within cities, and not between cities and the extra-local world, that led to the community control movement in the rst place. Also, not only can localities and communities oppress certain groups and individuals within them, but they can also construct themselves in exclusionary ways. In fact, the localities that come closest to realizing local autonomy might be the white rural militia communities in Montana (and elsewhere), or the ex-urban gated communities that dot the landscape in Orange County, California. These are clearly not the models we should be looking to. But even if local autonomy is realized in ways that are not oppressive to groups within the localities, and (somehow, through intense struggle) becomes the hegemonic framework of American society, it is not clear that the relations between places will be any more equitable because of it. If the inequities of the market fall hardest on individuals (even if it does so because of the structural position of those individuals), then there is the real possibility that local autonomy might simply move the inequities up a scale from the individual to the locality. That is, what these organizations are organizing is really a form of locally-owned market socialism in which the market remains, but the investment process is collectively determined at the local scale. This framework bears a resemblance to the form of market socialism attempted in the former Yugoslavia, and one of the primary results of that effort was an increase in the disparities and inequities between localities and regions (Drulovic, 1978; Schecter, 1994). Simply put, if the market continues to act as one of the primary sets of relationships in society, then there will continue to be those that benet and those that suffer. All local ownership might do is transform the how winning and losing are experienced.

Conclusion The NUP has argued that the mobility of capital has rendered localities either virtually powerless or newly empowered. This article has argued that both of these positions are untenable. Localities are not static, pre-given, entities, but are, instead constantly being produced and reproduced by the relationships they are embedded in. Similarly, local autonomy, instead of something that localities have or do not have, is realized by those within localities by their ability to control the very relationships that produce the localities. Accordingly, this article has advocated forms of local economic development that allow localities to realize autonomy by placing the structures and institutions that connect the locality with the rest of the world under local control. These forms of local ownership do not mean complete autonomy, as

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such a goal is unrealizable, but they do create a framework in which localities are more empowered to control their own destinies. There are some basic problems with this model however, and they are both of a practical political nature, and of a normative philosophical one. But these notwithstanding, autonomy has to be a goal for low-income communities struggling against disinvestment they cannot control and which robs them of decent affordable housing and stable employment, or, conversely, reinvestment from without which comes in the form of displacement, gentrication, and the war against the poor. The institutions, structures, and ideas of local autonomy can be, must be, and already are being, constructed. Unfortunately, the NUP has not been able to recognize them because it hasnt even looked for them. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Bob Lake, John OLoughlin, and three anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments on earlier drafts. References
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