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Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, Boston, April 5-9, 2017
Guns, God, and Growth: Geographies of Illiberal Economic Development
Session Organizer: Jason Luger (University of California, Berkeley and University of San Francisco)
If interested, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to Jason Luger at [log in to unmask] by Friday, Oct 14th.
In North Carolina and other US states, conservative lawmakers have pushed back against so-called ‘creative city’ approaches to economic development (Florida 2002b, 2005) which emphasized the need for, among other things, ‘tolerance’ for alternative lifestyles. Florida’s (2002b) ‘gay index’ linked economically successful cities with higher proportions of same-sex households and, while controversial and theoretically debated, the ‘creative class’ urban policy agenda has become mainstream not only in the United States and Europe but also places like South East Asia, where, according to a research interview, ‘Richard Florida’s book was required reading’ [for economic development officials]. Other economic geographers such as Porter (1990), Grabher (2002) and Storper and Venables (2004) have linked the social / economic clustering and ‘buzz’ of talented individuals with economic growth, with the focus often ‘progressive’ city-regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area.
Yet Florida’s theories have lost traction – or failed to ever gain it – in places like North Carolina’s legislature, where ‘House Bill Two’ (a discriminatory measure against the LGBT community) has resulted in companies ranging from Deutsche Bank to PayPal to the NBA cancelling expansions and events in the state. This breaks precedent with the tradition of the ‘New South’, which, since desegregation, has projected an image of being open for business, more concerned with job creation than old - fashioned social values
But North Carolina is only one place where economic development approaches have not taken on-board Western-liberal approaches to linking progressive outlooks with growth. From Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the similarly autocratic Central Asian developmental nations such as Kazakhstan, to the Arabian Peninsula, to South East Asia and beyond, economic development policies have formed complex hybrids, taking on-board some global ideas on attracting the ‘knowledge economy’ and discarding others to fit with local context, rooted in religious traditions or authoritarian restrictions to free speech and civil liberties.
And yet, these illiberal geographies of economic development are in some ways turning accepted theories upside down: North Carolina, Texas, and other conservative-led states continue to lead in job and population growth; places such as Singapore and Dubai continue to display robust growth despite varying restrictions on free expression and Western-liberal lifestyles, including LGBT rights. In Central Asia, cities run by autocrats such as Astana rise like cathedrals in the desert; meanwhile, illiberal governments have gained influence all over the world, from China’s increasing reach to newer far-right movements in places like Trump’s USA and Brexit Britain.
Thus, this paper session engages with four main theoretical strands. One, it revisits, critically, the epistemological shortcomings of ‘creative class’ ideas by inviting a range of cases from around the world with very different outcomes. Second, this session responds to the literature on global ‘policy mobilities and assemblage’ (see McCann, 2012) by opening the door to the possibility that Western-liberal approaches to urban policy and economic development are not penetrating as dominantly as might be assumed, and indeed, are being influenced by ideas generated in illiberal places. Thirdly, this session engages with the debate on comparative urbanism, seeking to ‘world theory’ (see Roy and Ong, 2011) and decolonize conceptions of diverse, context-dependent approaches to urban economic development. Finally, this session seeks to continue the task of deconstructing and better understanding ‘authoritarianism’ as a highly diverse, multi-layered, poorly-theorized globalism, too often divided into neat regional or ideological categories but found in different forms almost everywhere (P. F. Landry, 2008).
This paper session invites contributions from researchers exploring the varied approaches to economic development under illiberal / authoritarian / conservative regimes, in the United States, Europe, the Global South, and anywhere else in the world. Papers are especially welcome that critically approach existing theories on the urban economy and urban governance; that are comparative in scope; that stem from atypical or under-studied cases; and that have used any range of qualitative, quantitative, or ethnographic methods.
References
Florida, R. (2002b) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
Florida, R. (2005) The Flight of the Creative Class: The Global Competition for Talent. Toronto: Collins
Grabher, G. (2002) Cool projects, boring institutions: temporary collaborations in social context, Regional Studies 36,205-214.
Storper, M. and Venables, A. (2004) Buzz: face to face contact and the urban economy, Journal of Economic Geography, 4(4), 351-370.
Landry, P. F. (2008) Decentralized Authoritarianism in China. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCann, E. (2011) Veritable inventions: cities, policies and assemblage. Area, 43(2), 143-7.
Porter, M. (1990) The Competitive Advantage of Nations. New York: Free Press.
Roy, A. & Ong, A. (2011) Worlding Cities. London: Wiley-Blackwell.