Amenities Drive Urban Growth Growth

AMENITIES DRIVE URBAN GROWTH

TERRY NICHOLS CLARK* University of Chicago

with RICHARD LLOYD

University of Chicago KENNETH K. WONG

Vanderbilt University PUSHPAM JAIN

University of Maine

ABSTRACT: Studies of the city traditionally posit a division between a city's economy and its culture, with culture subordinate in explanatory power to work. However, post-industrial and globalizing trends are dramatically elevating the importance of culture. Cultural activities are increasingly crucial to urban economic vitality. Models to explain the growth of cities from the era of industrial manufacturing are outmoded. Citizens in the postindustrial city increasingly make quality of life demands, treating their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns. These practices impact considerations about the proper nature of amenities that post-industrial cities can sustain.

O ur classic theories of urban growth and decline are out of date. Not all need be scrapped but most need significant updating. Why? Because of globalization, the most

dramatic force restructuring our cities around the world. The power of the process is no less if we ignore it; we do so at great risk. Mayors, developers, political party leaders, and even social scientists need to rethink their paradigms about how cities grow, decline, and redevelop. It is painful for everyone.

This article briefly sketches the broader changes accompanying globalization then highlights the critical role of amenities and urban political choices about amenities, suggesting where and how they can dramatically shift urban growth dynamics. Data

*Direct correspondence to: Terry Clark, 1126 E. 59 Street, Suite 322, Chicago, IL, 60637. E-mail: tnclark@uchicago.edu

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 24, Number 5, pages 493±515. Copyright # 2002 Urban Affairs Association All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166.

494 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 24/No. 5/2002 come from our Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation project, an ongoing study of

35 countries and over 7,000 cities, and includes an in-depth study of one cityÐChicago. Why Chicago? Because Chicago is an outlier for many urban processes as it is heavily Catholic and has long preserved peasant traditions like strong neighborhoods and clientelist politics. These features make it more like cities globally than most US urban areas. Its strong hierarchical party tradition distinctly separates it from Tocquevillian democracy in the New England or Northern Italian model of Putnam (1993).

Yet a recent study by Markusen, Chapple, Schrock, Yamamoto, and Yu (2001) ranks Chicago number one in the US in the absolute number of high-tech jobs, ahead of Silicon Valley. Just a decade or so earlier, many observers were forecasting that Chicago, as part of the Rustbelt, was being driven like Detroit into a downward spiral of disinvestment and racial strife with investors and jobs moving to suburbs and the Sunbelt. How could the pessimists have been so wrong? Their paradigms were outmoded. Similar trends are occurring in many older US cities that demand reconceptualization. Amenities are a key to understanding the deficiencies in established theories of urban growth.

GLOBALIZATION: WHAT IS IT AND HOW DOES IT WORK? The last two decades of the twentieth century have seen profound transformations of

the political systems of the world. These political changes dramatically changed what we thought we knew about cities. Several events and trends have influenced the way we think about cities including:

. the end of the Cold War in 1989, and general global peace thereafter . the decline of major tariffs and trade barriers, and the rise of new regional trading

blocks, as well as global trade . the rapid increase in connectedness via new modes of communication: fax, Internet, fiber-optic cables, and digitalization of increasing quantities of information, etc. First seen among key elites, but soon thereafter by the broad public as the costs of own- ership dropped rapidly.

. the drastic expansion of education in much of the world, thus giving more citizens the

ability to read, a sense of self-worth and to form opinions on major public issues . the decline of agricultural and industrial work, and the rise of more professional, service-oriented, and technological jobs where computers and machines replace people for basic tasks

In much past work the term globalization was invoked to imply a simple capitalist or economic determinism. Globalization means more; it includes culture and amenities that can redefine economic rules. As used in this article, globalization has three distinct meanings. The first is the City as a Global Market Participant. This is the fiscal and economic production meaning, stressing global markets for capital and labor. A key idea is that as global markets rise, national quasi-monopolies and strong-state regulations fall. This is primarily a private sector process but it is also important for local governments as they often seek to encourage local economic development and production.

The second meaning of globalization is the City as an Entertainment Machine. Here the stress is on consumption, not production: CNN, MTV, and Hollywood movies are seen as bringing a standard world fare that may encourage more globally homogeneous consumption. It can raise and refocus economic aspirations by redefining consumption desiderata. But much of consumption is driven by local specifics: cafes, art galleries, geographic/ architectural layout, and aesthetic image of a city define its unique attractions (or blandness).

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 495 Tourism is the world's third largest industry, and attracting visitors has become big business

for local officials who in turn build new stadiums, parks, museums, convention centers, and similar facilities hoping to win visitors.

Third is the City as a Global Democracy. Here the democratizing impacts of global leaders and non-government organizations press cities that lag. Human rights, which grew out of expanding citizens' civil rights, continue to grow in their extent and seriousness of applicationÐto women, children, Indian untouchables, the homeless, illegal immigrants, as well as physical entities that can assume human rights: trees, beaches, and endangered species of animals. One can envision, for example, a Boston non-profit organization arranging international trips for physically disabled persons to Costa Rica. After arriving at their destination, they might ask if there are corner cuts in the sidewalks for wheel- chairs. If the answer is no, they might ask if there is an organization that advocates for the disabled in Costa Rica. If not, they might insist that one should be created. This spreads Tocquevillian and Putnam-like principles and promotes civic and voluntary associations globally. As a result, citizen rights expand as organized groups and professionals develop new themes and specialties. This in turn adds new issues to local political agendas, leading political parties to embrace them or be challenged by other parties that champion these new political interest groups.

Globalization in all three areas illustrates the following: . More information about options

. Citizens' redefinitions of their ambitions as they see new options . More potential and actual contacts . More citizen incorporation or empowerment, thus illustrating what Adam Smith

called an increase in the extent of the market. . More competition in previous areas in which decisions were made by hierarchies or traditions

More important than the technology or the legal framework of constitutions are the actual rules of game by which people live and politics are played. National states with centralized power are being replaced by federalist systems involving shared powers among multiple units of government. Political rules are changing but not simply in response to technical and legal changes. A new conception of politics is spreading worldwide. We have termed it the New Political Culture, as it is more than democracy; it is a more specific set of rules about politics. It is readily identified by such leaders as former President Bill Clinton in the US, Prime Minister Anthony Blair in Britain, and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany. This New Political Culture contrasts with clientelism and class politics. Clien- telism is common in many less developed countries today and often seems more prevalent in an agricultural economy where social relations are tied to the land and endure over many years. Class politics arose with industrialization, led by labor unions and socialist parties, which opposed the hierarchy of industrial management.

Globalization is transforming local processes for public officials and research paradigms for urban analysts. Many global processes can be displayed as a simple box and arrow diagram, illustrating that globalization is not a single or unique cause but interacts with other factors like education and income to enhance their effects. As a result, clientelism and class politics are undermined. If we add global factors like the Internet and travel, it complicates the simple paths, thereby weakening the impact of the local (and national) economic base. These complications illustrate not only the impact of globalization but also the need to reevaluate our traditional theories of urban growth and decline. These relationships are displayed in Figure 1.

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Class Politics

Traditional Framework

Class Politics

Globalization Framework

FIGURE 1 Impact of Globalization on Political Processes

Beyond the Growth Machine Molotch's (1976) metaphor suggests that the city is a machine geared to creating

growth, with growth loosely defined as the intensification of land use and thus higher rent collections associated professional fees and locally based profits. Many urban economists, planners, and political scientists have made similar arguments (e.g., Bradbury, Downs, & Small, 1982; Mollenkopf, 1983; Stone, 1989). However, a quarter century later in the contemporary competition among US cities, the growth machine model has lost much of its power. More research makes it increasingly clear that the simple growth machine model has often been weakly supported. Perhaps most convincing are more recent works by Logan and Molotch. Logan, Bridges and Crowder (1997) reach this conclusion in reviewing some 20 years of studies on the growth machine, and Molotch, Freudenburg, and Paulsen (2000) embrace a multicausal approach to explain growth. Both stress amenities. Consumption and amenities are different from use or exchange value, which are broader traditional concepts.

The new economy has not spelled the demise of older central city areas, but it has changed the basis for urban economic viability. Traditional forms of capital give way to the primacy of human capital in the form of an educated and mobile workforce (Clarke & Gaile, 1998; Florida, 2002). An ideology of growth at any cost via land use intensification is not a given. In many locations, smart or managed growth strategies have replaced the growth machine as the driving civic ideology. Many locations have thus found consider- able success in competing for knowledge workers. For example, Portland, Oregon imple- mented ``a program of financial penalties designed to discourage excessive growth by one of its largest employers, Intel, Inc.'' (Florida, 2000, p. 24). Such policies run counter to political strategies in which the provision of manufacturing jobs and corresponding patterns of capital intensification are taken as quasi-automatically desirable. These illustrate the lessons from Economics 101Ðthat people maximize utility, not income, and that utility equals income plus amenities. Glaeser (2000a) suggests that non-market transactions, essentially amenities, have grown more important than market transactions in explaining urban growth and decline.

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 497 What are amenities? The concept comes from economics. Leading observers write:

``A pure amenity is a nonproduced public good such as weather quality that has no explicit price. In practice, previous empirical studies include some government services such as education and public safety'' (Gyourko & Tracy, 1991, p. 775).

Much has changed in the last half century. In prototypical industrial cities like Chicago we have seen a steady decline in manufacturing employment and growth in services, which was followed by more subtle high-tech and globalizing processes. This description is well known; but what drives these changes? Which locations attract new high-tech jobs while others fail? Displacement of manufacturing from central city space changes the class structure of large cities with political and cultural consequence. Workers whose social location renders them less adaptable to structural change suffer from chronic unemploy- ment or move into subsistence occupations in the service sector (Wilson, 1987). They occupy spaces of devastation within most large cities (Zukin, 1991). Nightmare landscapes of poverty are a feature of former industrial cities in the US, and they have been studied extensivelyÐethnographically and demographically.

Yet simultaneously, a new elite economy has emerged in these same cities featuring workers educated in finance, producer services, information technology, and media production. Castells (1989) termed them informational. They are educated and fluent at manipulating symbols, which lead Reich (1991) to term them symbolic analysts. Simi- larly, theories of economic innovation from Schumpeter, Jacobs, and Romer stress new ideas as driving jobs and economic growth (Glaeser, 2000).

Still, this leap of post-industrial production stressed by Castells and Reich, for example, is still not clearly joined to entertainment or consumption by them or most theorists who have long invoked primarily production-based interpretations to explain general urban processes. We thus stress the critical epistemological implications of our next conceptual step: the informational city implies the city of leisure. Some have described but few have interpreted implications of this shift toward consumption. For instance, Bennett (1999) documented the importance of new consumption-oriented strategies for several US cities, but did not locate them in a conceptual framework. Although Judd and Fainstein (1999) document the huge role of tourism in the world economy, the authors are still visibly struggling to interpret it. We believe that the research of Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz (2000) is the closest parallel to our approach.

To help systematize these changes in urban growth dynamics, we postulate several new components of change. First, there is a rise of the individual consumer in explanatory power, which follows from increases in citizen income, education, and political empowerment. This translates into more individualization and volatility of tastes, creating more numerous and complex niche markets. The growth of the more affluent as a new class, however, coexists with substantial numbers of structurally disadvantaged within the city. The development of the Entertainment Machine is structurally uneven in tilting toward the more affluent. Second, we note a decline in large bureaucratic decision-makers in both the public and private sector. In the past they produced large quantities of basic products inexpensively. But as tastes and niche markets differentiate, they are less nimble than small firms and individuals in adapting to rapid change. Third, there is relative decline in the explanatory power of classical variables affecting the economic base (like distance, trans- portation costs, local labor costs, and proximity to natural resources and markets) because air travel, fax, the Internet, and associated changes have drastically facilitated contacts among physically distant persons, globally. This shifts the mix of inputs for the location of households and firms, which increases the importance of more subtle distinctions in taste, quality of life concerns, and related considerations. Fourth, there is a rise of leisure

498 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 24/No. 5/2002 pursuits compared to work. As a result, the relative importance of new or more refined

occupations like tour guide or restaurant critic has increased and created differentiation among providers of personal services. Fifth, there is a rise of concern over the arts and other aesthetic considerations along with more traditional concerns about the spatial dynamics of cities. Sixth, these unique tastes and concerns create a new role for government and public officials as they respond to citizen demands. These demands are often for public goods (clean air, attractive views, pedestrian responsiveness) contrasting with more private goods (jobs, contracts, tax breaks to separate persons and firms) in the past. There is an increasing concern over zoning and construction of new public spaces, a rise in support for public art, and the introduction of a host of new considerations into urban political decision-making because judging the demand for competing public goods is more complex than for private goods. These last elements are elaborated here and tested using comparative urban data elsewhere (Clark, 1999). Our focus in this article is on detailing the dynamics of urban growth and decline and elaborating the profile of the postindustrial city. These changes are more profound for heavily industrial cities, but the fact that they emerge there also shows their pervasiveness and power. Globalization enhances many of these processes as international criteria and consumer demands via tourists are increasingly added to the local arena.

Decline and Renewal: Postindustrial Trends in US Cities Disinvestment and fiscal crises in large US cities during the 1970s led to a bleak

prognosis concerning urban fortunes. Many saw the growth of telematics and globalization as undermining the place boundedness of economic activity, which implied that the dense, central investment of capital in urban cores was no longer desirable. New information technologies are an advance with extreme potential impact on spatial organization: ``they represent the opportunity to conduct many more economic transactions at a distanceÐfrom an employee at home to a central office, from a consumer to a store, from one company to another'' (Atkinson, 1998, p. 134). The changes in the technological foundation of economic activity have been consequential for spatial organization. As a result, theories about these activities need to be revised. The central place theories that explain the grown and urban morphology of population in cities, as in Loesch and Burgess, were predicated on the centralized locational tendencies of manufacturing. This is no longer adequate given the rise of new information technologies (Gottdiener, 1985). Edge cities and deconcentration are instead the newer catchwords. As unionized manufacturing jobs declined in the old center cities, structural mismatch occurred between workers and jobs and between the built environment and new economic activities, produ- cing patterns of extreme poverty and blight.

But these theories, based on trends for most of the twentieth century, have been disconfirmed by recent change. The most dramaticÐempirical results have refuted pre- dictions of the center city's demise. Contrary to most theoretical expectations and wide- spread policy discussion, the 1980s and 1990s saw growth in the density of economic activity in many of the world's leading central business districts, even as the importance of globalization and telematics increased. This is the opposite of what futurists of the wired city had predicted. While a few urban researchers documented elements of these processes, almost no theorist has seriously sought to address the deeper implications for urban modeling of this major turn-around from decline to growth of central cities. One partial exception is Sassen (1994) who noted,

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 499

This explosion in the number of firms locating in the downtowns of major cities during that decade goes against what should have been expected according to models emphasizing territorial dispersal; this is especially true given the high cost of locating in a major downtown area (p. 2).

Sassen (2001) points out that central cities have enjoyed renewed vitality as postindustrial production sites. But why? Her focus is the world cities interpretation, based more on production than consumption.

A related view is that cities are important milieux of innovation in the information or knowledge economy. Postindustrial production differs from industrial production in key ways. In particular, it is design intensive and highly flexible versus the long-term durable assemblage of traditional industrial production (Lash & Urry, 1994). The proliferation of media provides the content for one such postindustrial activity because the production of media images is an activity significantly concentrated in urban cores, along with finance and elite producer services. Reich, Castells, and Lash and Urry and others highlight the symbolic and expressive content of these activities and the distinct competencies of their most valuable workers. The question as to why some such activities continue to cohere in what were industrially based city spaces is one of the most crucial puzzles of the contemporary city. The entertainment machine provides a key piece of the puzzle not explored by the above theorists.

Contemporary consumption practice extends to the consumption of space. The lifestyle concerns of social participants are increasingly important in defining the overall rationale for, and in turn driving, other urban social processes. Quality of life is not a mere byproduct of production; it defines and drives much of the new processes of production. It has been advanced to explain the population shifts from the Frost Belt into the more (consumption-friendly) climates of the southern and western US. Castells (1989) questions this order of causality, positing the opposite more traditional view: ``so, the `quality of life' of high technology areas is a result of the industry (its newness, its highly educated labor force) rather than the determinant of its location pattern'' (p. 52). His interpretation seems to reflect an earlier reality. It is important that in many urban locales migration patterns of residents, especially elite participants in postindustrial growth sectors, are driven by new quality of life demands. How do we know?

In City Money, Clark and Ferguson (1983) argued that urban job growth increasingly turned on citizen's consumption patterns and tastes, not on production, and showed that certain past migration and job growth studies could be productively reinterpreted in these terms. Simultaneous equation studies of job and population growth measured the relative impact of each on the other. They were both strong and roughly equal in some estimates. This suggested that migration to a city or to a job was about equal in importance for all American migrants. Evidence of such patterns has mounted in the subsequent decade and

a half, such as in the suggestive studies of Bennett (1999), Judd and Fainstein (1999), Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz (2000), and Florida (2000). This article furthers the clarification of the analytical logic behind the earlier (mainly statistical) results and illustrates key points with new, mostly ethnographic evidence.

The increasing importance of tourism and convention dollars to central city coffers, both public and private, raises the stakes in the lifestyle game. Talented high-tech staff, who can locate where they choose, are often courted by cities that compete for them with public amenities. This is a reversal of smokestack chasing, which was the leading policy of US cities for decades (a policy characterized by the need to offer larger incentives to an individual firm than competing locations). Such private goods competition is far more costly to cities and their taxpayers than the public goods of amenities.

500 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 24/No. 5/2002 Residential patterns since the 1980s have run counter to bleak expectations for some

older industrial cities. The concentration of poverty documented by Wilson (1987) as a response to de-industrialization coexists with revalorization of some former slums by black, brown, and white residents. Gentrification trends indicate that affluent workers, particularly the young, are finding the city not simply a clear destination for work but also

a desirable place to live and play. These changes in the residential profiles of urban neighborhoods are treated by some as indicators of postmodern consumption trends (Harvey, 1990); but many post-modernist interpreters like Harvey still rely heavily on finance or jobs. For instance, Smith (1996) notes,

systematic gentrification . . . is simultaneously a response and a contributor to a series of wider global transformations: global economic expansion in the 1980s: the restructuring of national and urban economies in advanced capitalist countries toward services, recreation and consumption: and the emergence of a global hierarchy of world, national, and regional cities (p. 8).

Our view is that we should focus more directly on the changing preferences of citizens and workers. They are choosing where to live and choosing to change jobs on average every 3.5 years (Florida, 2002). The gentrified neighborhood as a distinct type of urban community differs considerably from the neighborhoods studied in past classics of urban sociology, for example Gans (1962) or glorified by Putnam (2000). The important local amenities are no longer schools, churches, and neighborhood associations, as in the urban mosaic of the old Chicago school. A residential population of young professionals with more education and fewer children creates a social profile geared toward recreation and consumption concerns. They value the city over other forms of settlement space because of its responsiveness to a wide array of aesthetic concerns because it can become a cultural center offering diverse, sophisticated and cosmopolitan entertainment lacking elsewhere.

In the new economic geography of entertainment, cities like Seattle and Portland become central locations for the development of information technologies. A common explanation for the location of a large firm is: it was the personal choice of the top executive. Such might have been the case for Bill Gates' selection of Seattle for Microsoft's headquarters. The conceptual fallacy here is in implying that the top executives are merely idiosyncratic, simply wrong, or personally selfish because they did not select a lower-cost or more production-driven location. But this may just be conceptual tunnel vision by the observers. Behind it lies a key to reinterpretation: the top executives may have had in mind not merely themselves in locating in attractive places but a concern to attract top talent. Provision of lifestyle amenities has become a key feature of urban development that we must recognize conceptually. These two cities, however, are extremes because they are leaders in smart growth strategies and have experienced recent dramatic growth.

The absence of children suggests that yuppies will be less interested in local schools and perhaps churches as relevant amenities. Rather, they are excited by opportunities for recreation (e.g., Chicago's refurbished north shore lakefront, which provides bicycle paths, beaches, and softball fields) and by fashionable consumption opportunities in the hip restaurants, bars, shops, and boutiques abundant in restructured urban neighborhoods.

Note a particularly provocative recent finding of several economists and policy analysts (Black, Gates, Sanders, & Taylor, 2002; Florida, 2002): cities with more gay men have far more amenities than other cities, and amenities and gay men are among the strongest predictors of growth in high-tech jobs in multiple regressions controlling about a dozen

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 501 other variables. What is unclear without more direct evidence is the relative explanatory

power of: 1) tolerance for diversity as associated with intellectual exploration, the type of favorable production climate that a Bill Gates or Schumpeter might imagine; 2) the amenity or consumption rich location that attracts persons whose work may not be the first consideration in selecting the location; and 3) the joint influence of tolerance for diversity and the amenity or consumption rich location. Our sense is that many decisions are joint, but how much weight to assign to each factor is not clear. Much past research has assumed that we have limited evidence to sort out these competing explanations. Some of the best are the simultaneous equation studies of job and population growth, but the results shift according to the specific controls introduced (Clark & Ferguson, 1983).

New Political Culture

Most of the above analysis is based on private sector dynamics, involving jobs, work, lifestyle, etc. But cities are also driven by public policy, which interpenetrates private decisions. How and where does leadership enter? The key is public leaders who recognize the importance of amenities and use them to attract new residents. Which do and why? This is a key question in the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project (Clark, 2000). We completed a national survey in 1984 and 1996 of mayors in all US cities with populations over 25,000. Results suggest the national importance of a leadership pattern that we termed the New Political Culture (NPC), which is distinctly responsive to consumption rather than just production. It is found in increasing numbers of cities and countries, even if empirically many cities retain elements of clientelism and class politics. The New Political Culture includes these points:

. The classic left-right dimension has been transformed. People still speak of left and right, but definitions are changing. Left increasingly means social (primarily consumption) issues and not traditional class politics focusing on jobs and related economic issues.

. Social and fiscal/economic issues are explicitly distinguished. Positions on social issues like abortion or women's roles or the environment cannot be derived from their positions on fiscal issuesÐfor citizens, leaders, and parties.

. Social issues have risen in salience relative to fiscal/economic issues. . Market individualism and social individualism grow. The NPC joins market liberal-

ism (in the past narrowly identified with parties of the Right) with social progressive- ness (often identified with parties of the Left). This new combination of policy preferences leads NPCs to support new programs and follow new rules.

. Questioning the welfare state. Some NPC citizens and leaders conclude that governing in the sense of state-central planning is unrealistic for many services. While not

seeking to reduce services, NPCs question specifics of service delivery and seek to improve efficiency. National governments decline and local governments grow in importance.

. The rise of issue politics and broader citizen participation and the decline of hierarchical political organizations. The NPC counters traditional bureaucracies, parties,

and their leaders. New social movements and issue-politics are essential additions to the political process. By contrast, traditional hierarchical parties, government agencies, and unions are seen as antiquated.

. These NPC views are more pervasive among younger, more educated and affluent individuals, and societies. Public leaders respond to citizens with these new views.

502 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 24/No. 5/2002 The NPC emerges more fully and forcefully in cities with less hierarchy, and where

citizens have more resources, such as more education, higher income, and more professional and high technology service occupations. These defining elements and propositions elaborated in Clark (1994, 1996) and Clark and Hoffmann-Martinot (1998).

A second process persists in other cities and neighborhoods: class politics, especially in working class unions and socialist parties. Even if socio-economic changes in cities erode this older working-class base, strong parties may continue these programs and politics even if citizens change their preferences. How much parties buffer political leaders in this way is a critical intervening variable. The US institution of primary elections, where citizens vote on candidates for the party, is one illustration of the weak and citizen- dependent US party system. Thus, where and how urban innovation occurs, and in particular how NPC patterns arise, depends heavily on parties. Traditional class cleavages focus on jobs and deflect concern away from amenities, entertainment, and other new issues to which citizens are increasingly sensitive, thus, fueling demands for more citizen responsiveness worldwide.

To illustrate the NPC patterns in urban development policies, we examined several major US cities whose policies in recent years were shaped by NPC mayors: Michael White in Cleveland, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Rudolph Guiliani in New York, Edward Rendell in Philadelphia, and Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis. Richard M. Daley of Chicago is discussed in more detail. Most of these mayors governed in the 1990s and set the tone for national urban leadership. These six mayors exemplify the efficient management of city government through contracting-out (Miranda, 1992). All focused on quality of life issues and attempted to attract the middle class and businesses to the city (Wong, 1992). These mayors had no strong party affiliation and revealed a keen interest in public education (Wong, Dreeben, Lynn, & Sunderman., 1997). These mayors met regu- larly and exchanged ideas in an informal network (Beinart, 1997). Five were re-elected by wide margins. Their management styles are similar and reflect many common elements.

Michael White, from Cleveland, is a black Democrat and son of a union activist. He contracted out garbage collection, road maintenance, and other city services, making city workers compete against private firms. Mayor White moved the city toward more efficient management, citing an instance when the city's road repair unit outbid a private contractor. He also strongly supported Republican Governor Voinovich in introducing school vouchers in Cleveland to pay for parochial and private schools. White also insisted on holding down taxes.

In Los Angeles, Republican Mayor Richard Riordan also contracted out several city services. He required the head of every city department to establish quantifiable goals for the year, strategic priorities for the next three to five years, and tied employee pay to achievement. He distributed a concise budget patterned after private sector corporate reports. He also strongly supported affirmative action, gay rights, and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein.

In New York, Republican Mayor Rudolph Guiliani cut the budget in most city agencies and contracted out several city services, feuding with the powerful unions over these decisions. He endorsed Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo for reelection and defended welfare rights of illegal immigrants. Guiliani's community policing efforts (the broken windows program) focused on quality of life issues such as aggressive panhandling, public drunkenness, vandalism, and disorderly conduct. His handling of the World Trade Center attack earned him global visibility.

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 503 All of these mayors personify the NPC patterns. They all broke with their city's political

pasts of the New Deal with its left-right rhetoric, dominated by jobs and work. To add more subtlety, consider the growing dominance of the NPC in Chicago, classically known as a blue collar Democratic city, long incarnated by its mayors named Daley.

HOW CHICAGO ILLUMINATES THESE PROCESSES

Chicago's main industry in 2000 was entertainment. The mayor gave speeches about trees, floral landscaping of bare rooftops, and defended gondoliers singing arias on the Chicago River against the barge haulers who claimed the gondolas obstructed traffic. The mayor added that he wanted the Chicago River to become as lively as the Seine in Paris.

Between the eras of Mayor Richard J. Daley and Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago underwent epochal change. The reasons behind these changes are important for Chicago and other governments worldwide. Few governments have changed as fundamentally and as rapidly as Chicago's without a visible or violent revolution. During these years, Chicago's economic base, culture, and politics were revolutionized in ways similar to the revolutions occurring in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia during the same period. Govern- ments can learn important lessons from one another about innovations of this magnitude.

Chicago's changes are paradoxically camouflaged by an outdated image that the city, its citizens, and especially its leaders, are conservative. What has changed? Carl Sandburg's ``City of the Big Shoulders'' continued through the period of Richard J. Daley (1955 to 1976). Its lifeblood was heavy industry, production, and growth; its citizens were mostly blue-collar. Today, Chicago is a postindustrial city focused on consumption and amenities. Its political life was once dominated by clientelism, patronage, jobs, and contracts. Battles were fought in what game theorists call a zero-sum game, where one person's gain is another person's loss. It was zero sum because jobs and contracts are private goods that only one participant consumes. If Alderman X got a job, Alderman Y lost it. There is an obvious residue of these concerns in Chicago. There are always some private goods, but the news is that politics increasingly involves more public goods, like lakefront aesthetics, which any visitor can enjoy. The view is not consumed by just one person as is a job. Other new concerns are multi-culturalism and efficient service delivery, which also broadly affect all residents not just a limited number of political victors. Coalitions today can accord- ingly be broader with more participants and more beneficiaries because everyone can consume a public good, but only a select few can receive patronage jobs. Instead of zero- sum games we can have more positive-sum games with many winners. Politics is no longer necessarily about conflict among subgroups.

Another major change: the average citizen is no longer conceived of as a mere cog at the bottom of a huge machine, voting as instructed by his precinct captain. Citizens are emerging instead as the ultimate concern, and citizen preferences are key criteria for winning elections, evaluating policies, and promoting or firing leaders in city hall and in Chicago businesses. This theme emerges repeatedly in presentations by the mayor and top staff and in policy changes in Chicago. These are deep shifts affecting cities generally (Clark & Hoffmann-Martinot, 1998). To probe these changes in Chicago, I interviewed leaders for 17 years as part of an oral history.

Three causes drive this transformation: 1) the transition from industrial to postindustrial society; 2) the shift from local and particularistic social relations to more global and impersonal patterns, heightened by education and electronic communications; and

3) decentralization (even fragmentation) of political leadership and the rise of the citizen/ consumer. These dynamics are at the heart of the New Political Culture. These general

504 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 24/No. 5/2002 transformations occur in many cities but details vary in each location. The specific social,

cultural, and political context shapes the precise changes. Every city, including Chicago, is unique in its distinct combination of general elements. We can dissect the uniqueness by identifying how and why more general processes work in Chicago.

Just as important as new jobs and new technology for postindustrial society is the diminution of authoritarian social relations in favor of more collegiality and egalitarian- ism. These follow as people are better educated and perform more professionally. Workers at all levels are increasingly expected to act like professionals. The postindustrial market- place is more abstract and cosmopolitan than that found in the old industrial era. There is more contracting-out of tasks, more provision of services over a distance, and sales to far-off world marketsÐall made possible by computers, faxes, inexpensive air travel, the Internet, etc. Evidence on the transformation of America's 100 largest corporations in this direction is explained in Clark and Hoffmann-Martinot (1998).

Industrial organization was built upon practices such as strict seniority, few pay differentials by individual achievement, and promotion from within. Post-industrialism is built upon completely different premises. Rising national and global competition and precise communication make possible the contracting out of tasks and production to small firms worldwide. More abstract and distant relations often replace local and intense personal relations. This transition is also deeper for most Catholics than for most Protes- tantsÐconfession, parochial schools, and parish life traditionally taught more social skills and respect for personal authority.

But these are production concerns. The most revolutionary change in the ``City that Works'' was that it could do more than work. For example, note the following:

. The city's number one industry is now entertainment, which city officials define as including tourism, conventions, restaurants, hotels, and related economic activities (see Tables 1 and 2). Tourists rose from 32 million in 1993 to 42.9 million in 1997, with the average business or convention traveler estimated to spend $242 per day. This implies that the Chicago economic zone took in $16 billion in 1997 and indirectly $29 billion (Shifflet, 1997).

TABLE 1 Attendance at Popular Chicago Attractions

Attraction

19961995 Navy Pier

4,500,000 3,000,000 Lincoln Park Zoo

4,000,000 4,000,000 John G. Shedd Aquarium

coming soon

1,775,765 1,844,927 Museum of Science and Industry

1,760,813 2,012,284 Art Institute of Chicago

1,669,842 2,248,576 Field Museum of Natural History

1,212,475 1,263,453 Sears Tower Skydeck

N/A 1,441,966 Chicago Cultural Center

coming soon

565,882 486,521 Museum of Broadcast Comm.

coming soon

200,000 180,000 Chicago Children's Museum

coming soon

600,000 N/A Adler Planetarium

coming soon

458,357 430,502 Chicago Symphony Orchestra

453,059 422,790 DuSable Museum

coming soon

N/A

147,336171,186 16 8,392 247,502 220,000 Chicago Historical Society

176,015 150,000 Source. Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, Mayor's Office of Special Events.

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 505

TABLE 2 Top Ten US Counties for Overnight Group Meeting Travel

Ranking County

City 1998 1 Cook

State

Chicago 4.53 2 DeKalb

GA Atlanta 3.52 3 Orange

Orlando 3.3 4 Clark

Las Vegas 2.94 5 Dallas

DC Washington 2.8 8 Los Angeles

CA Los Angeles 2.63 9 San Diego

CA San Diego 2.17 10 San Francisco

CA San Francisco 2.07 13 New York

New York 1.56 Note. These are millions of person-trips per year. Chicago ranked #1 with 4,530,000 person-trips in 1998. It has been

ranked first since 1995. Data from Shifflet, 1998 and available from Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau.

. The most visited park in the entire US is the Chicago Lakefront. It has far more visitors than the Grand Canyon (which had five million visitors in 1997), although many are from nearby. The visitor can admire a clear view of the city because the skyline stands a quarter mile from the waterfront of Lake Michigan (thanks to the Burnham Plan). Much was totally rebuilt in the 1990s, including new marinas, walk- ways, fountains, and beaches surrounding harbors filled with yachts. Cyclists, joggers, and rollerbladers heavily use the lakefront path, which runs the length of the city. Picnickers abound.

. Mayor Richard M. Daley proudly claims to have planted more trees than any mayor in the history of the world (city hall estimates this figure to be around one million) as a

commitment to environmental and aesthetic sensitivity. Flowers and shrubs, new pavement, street lights, benches, public art, wrought iron fences, and related landscaping were added in thousands of locations around the city in the 1990s.

. The city is a leader among US cities in devising ways to convert polluted land areas (brownfields) into usable property, which new industries and housing can develop

productively. Our analysis considers five key components of political culture as these have shifted

with leadership patterns. We follow the changes in Chicago in the last half of the twentieth century by assessing six mayors according to these five components. The most significant changes illustrate movement toward the New Political Culture. Table 3 summarizes the key points. These five dimensions define change over time toward five core elements of the New Political Culture. The more general ideas draw from research that charts the rise of the New Political Culture (Clark, 1996; Clark & Hoffmann-Martinot, 1998; Clark & Rempel, 1997; Hoggart & Clark, 2000).

In many US cities business leaders have been reputedly powerful in affecting decisions directly or indirectly through a business-oriented regime (Stone, 1989). Common interpretations stress either the economic or materialist base of politics from Karl Marx onward or the specific importance of business leaders. Both interpretations are outdated. It is quite possible for a mayor or restaurant entrepreneur to seek to use consumption and amenities to maximize the material wealth of the city or restaurant. This may be direct and short-term or more indirect and long-term. By limiting density and population growth,

TABLE 3 JOURNAL Key Components of Leadership and the New Political Culture in Chicago

Components of the New Political Culture

Rise of Public Goods, URBAN Support of Social and

Independence From

Managed Growth, and Mayor

Fiscal and Managerial

Organized Political

Empowerment of

Aesthetic Issues

Efficiency

Groups

Individual Citizens

Consumption AFFAIRS

Richard J. Daley The common man as hero; Low taxes; moderate growth Classic New Deal in gen- De-emphasize citizens com- Reform as official policy for 1955 to 1976

no clear attention to most in spending after first few eral; the Democratic Party pared to neighborhoods areas like schools; patron- later social issues; casual years

age for insiders; city that racism; authoritarian/patri-

was main electoral tool

and ethnic groups

works

achal governance style Vol. Michael Bilandic

Sought to be similar to Classic New Deal in gen- De-emphasize citizens com- Reform as official policy for 24/No. 1977 to 1979

Daley but lacked the per- eral; the Democratic Party pared to neighborhoods areas like schools; patron- sonal loyalty of followers;

works 5/2002 business leaders in many

age for insiders; city that sought to develop civic and

was main electoral tool

and ethnic groups

speeches and policies Jane Byme 1979

Ligitimated women's issues High spending First mayoral candidate to Turned her back on reform Constantly changing poli- to 1983

cies Harold Washington The

defeat machine

groups that elected her

Works High spending only in last Mobilization of anti-machine CDBG funds spent by Reform as new policy; 1983 to 1987

City

that

Together; multicultural reform two years

groups

neighborhood organizations neighborhood economic development

Eugene Sawyer Little new policy

higher Was between machine and No empowerment pursued Little new policy 1987 to 1989

Pushed

through

property taxes

reform forces

Richard M. Daley Continued multiculturalism; Moderate spending; more Media campaigning; legitim- Emphasis on individual Public goods; managed 1989 to present increased

growth; aesthetic concerns; diverse groups

tolerance for on culture and amenities

ization of groups independ- citizen

ent of Democratic party such

promotion of consumption

as gays

issues

| Amenities Drive Urban Growth | 507 it is assumed that the land value of a less-congested area will grow more valuable.

Additionally, the specific role of business surely varies by issue area and the leadership capabilities of individual firms.

In some issues, where most citizens and groups have minimal involvement, active business interests may sway policy decisions such as the allocation of public contracts. In the past, political decisions would be openly discussed by aldermen and others in Chicago. But as over 26 aldermen have gone to jail since 1971 for accepting bribes and similar offers (Simpson, Adeoye, Feliciano, & Howard, 2002), such directly targeted contributions have grown more rare. By contrast, firms may legally contribute to a leader's campaign as long as they are not given a specific benefit. Under such conditions, some firms contribute to many candidates if they are unsure who will win, hoping to have at least more access. This is referred to as pinstripe patronage, engaged in by law, accounting, banking firms, and developers. Such patronage has allegedly mushroomed in the 1990s in Chicago.

Amenities Drive Urban Growth Growth