Urban Politics

by

New article on the racial dimension of income inequality in the DC metropolitan area

The Professional Geographer has just published an article written jointly with my former students Bradley O. Erickson and Katie L. Turner. In it, we report our findings from research launched after both of them had taken a General Education undergraduate course I taught back in 2016: “Researching Cities”.

Our analysis of spatiotemporal household income trends in the DC metropolitan area suggests that the U.S. capital’s growing prosperity and improved fiscal health in recent years have coincided with intensifying income inequality. We show that two alternative measures of neighborhood-level racial diversity—proportion white and an entropy score—account for substantial shares in this variation in household incomes, especially in DC proper. Our results illustrate a need for more effective policy coordination across jurisdictions as well as greater consideration of housing policy to help decrease residential segregation and support vulnerable residents in and around the U.S. capital.

by

Two new articles published: on Kabul’s political economy after the 2001 invasion; poverty/inequality discourses in development agencies’ annual reports

The year ends on a decidedly positive note: Urban Studies recently published my paper on post-2001 Kabul as a laboratory and launch pad for the liberal pipe dream of mutually reinforcing synergies between security, economic growth and democracy. In reality, post-invasion liberal “peace-building” and “state-building” orchestrated by international agencies have fundamentally altered the city’s political economy and widened the gap between politically connected economic elites and the urban masses, resulting in greater urban inequality of access, security, and other critical indicators of  human development. Another paper, co-authored with my former student Ben Williams (now a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs), is part of the Journal of Social Policy‘s first issue in 2014. In it, we leverage NVivo’s arithmetic and visual capabilities to compare frequencies of two alternative conceptualizations of poverty and inequality in three different document categories over time: the World Bank’s World Development Reports, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Reports and a set of white papers by bilateral donor agencies. In a second step, we visualize each document’s degree of contextual similarity in using the two conceptualizations of poverty and inequality with all documents in the same source category. Our findings suggest that the dividing line between ‘development’ and ‘clos[ing] the gap between the rich and the poor’ drawn by technocrats such as Jeffrey Sachs has been losing influence among policy-makers and that, as a result, there is reason for hope that debates on inequalities’ negative effects on human development globally are finally regaining traction among policy elites. Courtesy of Cambridge Journals, the complete article can be downloaded from my faculty website.

by

Beginning to fully analyze the data on urban resilience in Juarez

After wrapping up a busy semester, I have finally been able to start digging into the survey data that I collected in Ciudad Juarez late last year. I presented a first cut at LASA last week; now at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, I am beginning to get a sense of the depth, dimensions and drivers of urban resilience amid violence in Juarez. I will report in greater detail once I’ve completed the statistics; a first glance is online on American University’s blog on Latin America (AULA). Thanks again to the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Drugs, Security and Democracy for supporting this project!

by

PBS interview on “Collective Action Against the Violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008-2012”

Local PBS station KRWG just aired a 15-minute interview on my research on “Collective Action Against the Violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008-2012,” a project supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Foundations and IDRC Canada. KRWG also posted a recording on YouTube. Thanks to Anthony Moreno for making my work available to the wider public!

KRWG

by

New article in Journal of Modern African Studies: how donors make urban politics

One of my papers just got published in the current issue of the Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge; 8/66 in Area Studies). In “‘When we launched the government’s agenda…’: aid agencies and local politics in urban Africa” I challenge the argument that the main cause of political impasse in African cities governed by opposition parties is incomplete decentralization, whereby a devolution of responsibilities is not matched by a downward reallocation of resources. Instead, I posit that we need to look beyond the national scale to uncover drivers of institutional change. I show how this dynamic has played out in Freetown where urban politics were shaped by global aid discourses translated into local policy frameworks through interest convergence between international and national actors. At the same time, the case of Freetown case also demonstrates how local politics successfully challenged the technocratic, apolitical reinvention of urban governance perpetuated by the international aid industry.

by

How the World Bank Institute spin-doctors urban development

In June, I attended a new event format launched by the World Bank Institute (WBI). The Innovative Cities: Global Dialogue brings together mayors, corporate interests, some fig-leaf activists and a large number of Bank staffers (and presumably academic researchers as well, though I saw very few) to discuss urban development challenges and opportunities. UN-Habitat and the Bank’s own Cities Alliance have been organizing similar gigs for years, so WBI is a little late… but better late than never.

I just finished watching the short clip on the event produced by WBI and circulated among participants earlier today. I am aghast…  the Dialogue that I went to in June produced few new substantive insights.  It did not, for instance, shed much light on concrete success factors to truly sustainable (triple bottom line?) partnerships. Nor did it raise the critical question to what extent, if at all, these can be generalized across regions.  And what about urban democracies versus corporate machine politics?

Instead, almost all of the hand-picked panelists proclaimed ubiquitous urban win-win scenarios.  Except for some of the mayors (thankfully!) and, if I recall correctly, two comments from the floor, speakers eclipsed the trade-offs inherent in urban economic growth–especially in the poorest countries that the Bank is allegedly so concerned about–by assiduously ignoring a wealth of empirical studies documenting challenges faced by urban micro initiatives that campaign for more equitable access to social services, some of which result directly from the elitist quest for “economic growth” (or is this now being used as a politically more digestible proxy for employment generation?).

During lunch break, I heard several critical voices whose concerns are echoed in my critique above. I was also approached by a fellow with a video camera who asked me for a 30-second statement on the morning session. I told him that my comments would not be too charming and that he might want to seek out more benevolent interviewees. No, he replied, critical perspectives were “exactly what [we] want to hear” in order to “produce a more balanced documentation.” Needless to say, I guess, that for some strange reason they aren’t featured in the clip.

All in all, an opportunity missed. Or maybe not: lunch was great. And economic growth, WBI-type, rules.

by

Gary Gaile Development Geographies Pre-Conference in DC

The Development Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG is delighted to present the “Gary Gaile Development Geographies Pre-Conference” in Washington, DC, a one-day event in April 2010 which is themed around innovative policies and approaches emerging at the interface of research and practice.

Merging debate around cutting edge research and acute practical challenges, the format and scope facilitate lively discussion and cross currents between academia and the policy world. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Robin Mearns, Lead Social Development Specialist at the World Bank.

The conference, co-chaired by Prof. Brent McCusker (West Virginia University) and Prof. Daniel Esser (American University, DC), is dedicated to the late Gary Gaile who was very active in translating academic practice into real world action and who co-founded the specialty group.

Please access the Call for Papers here. The deadline for all abstracts is February 15, 2010.

The pre-conference will be held on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center’s suburban campus, just one mile from Washington, DC in Chevy Chase, Maryland (www.4hcenter.org; 7100 Connecticut Avenue, phone: (301) 961-2801). The Center is conveniently located near bus lines for quick transportation between the pre-conference and other AAG conference venues. Free on-site parking is available as well.

by

New Article in Critical Planning

The key questions that I am posing in this article are: how can we explain city-level politics in two countries located at the very fringes of global capitalism, and how can a resulting reconfigured theoretical framework be integrated into an international comparative urban research agenda.

Contemporary Sierra Leone and Afghanistan present major structural differences compared to highly industrialized settings, as their main cities have not been sites of capitalist production. At the same time, both countries have recently experienced major international interventions in the context of intra-state wars. I show how these two characteristics render the explanatory power of established theories of urban politics deficient.

I then examine key features of recent political restructuring in Freetown and Kabul. I pay specific attention to the incentive structures that have resulted from recent international interventions and how they shape urban politics. I illustrate how these incentives steer resource flows and forge new poles of accumulation and control—both within the respective settings and outside of them—to the detriment of local policy space.

I thus show that while the starting point for theory reformulation remains the urban context, a crucial conceptual challenge is to capture the alliances between national and international institutions and organizations, and to examine how they influence city-level politics. I ultimately argue that multiscalar governance as a theoretical approach is applicable to cities in conflict zones only if it integrates an analysis of international politics as a major determinant of local urban politics.