What do you understand by urban political economy? Discuss.

 Urban political economy emerged as a critique of the urban ecology paradigm, particularly the latter’s explanation for the growth and structure of cities and regions. By emphasizing the spatial competition for resources by individuals, groups, and institutions, urban ecology has viewed political hierarchies, economic actors and laws, and other social institutions as expressions of more fundamental and pre conscious forces.

Its corollary that city governments, local business elites, urban planners, or racist neighborhood associations, for example, are not the “real” agents of urban structure and relations had long struck a cadre of conflict oriented urban sociologists as a problematic denial of social power.

By the 1950s and 1960s, urban ecology’s inability to understand critically the problems of white flight and urban poverty in the US as well as urban and political unrest throughout the world created a breaking point for many urban sociologists. Consequently, a first generation of urban political economists began to emphasize the role of economic structure and social power in explaining urban relations.

Urban political economy updates the theoretical legacy of Karl Marx around the urban condition, a topic he did not address extensively in his nineteenth century writings. First, neo Marxians explained the city’s evolution as structural expressions of historical relations of production. 

Beginning in the early twentieth century, their argument goes, industrial capitalists promoted the flight of manufacturing to the urban periphery and the growth of residential suburbs to advance their class interests in, respectively, avoiding the costs of aging and inflexible urban infrastructure and dispersing urban hotbeds of labor unrest.

Industrialists promoted these interests in the political and cultural realms via federal policies and cultural sentiments promoting homeownership, suburban development, and the encouragement of growth in America’s “Sunbelt region (where the union tradition is much weaker than in the older “Rustbelt’).

In urban sociology, these early neo Marxian claims appeared in the 1970s and 1980s alongside other intellectual agendas that, although not necessarily sharing the same conflict orientation, put urban class relations at the forefront of the field.

Research on dual labor markets, immigrant entrepreneurs, ethnic niches, and related issues have all benefited from the neo Marxian insight that economic forces do not merely express social relations but in fact drive them as well.

Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)