Abstract
Michael Storper has crafted a critical and theoretically engaged set of perspectives to shed light on the complex processes and conditions that combine and sometimes conflict to make and shape the development of urban areas. The author is a leading economic geographer who was a key participant in the so called ‘California School’ and author of Regional Worlds and The Capitalist Imperative. As well as demonstrating a notable cosmopolitanism, drawing on a raft of global examples throughout the book, Storper’s contribution, in keeping with his wider oeuvre, delicately balances the contextual approaches favoured by geographers with an awareness of the key technical foundations developed by economists (or, more precisely, ‘new economic geographers’ (NEG) and ‘new neoclassical urban economists’ (NNUE)). Indeed, Keys to the City clearly builds on earlier contributions developed with LSE colleagues, including Anthony Venables and Giles Duranton, serving to underscore the author’s credentials as a vital inter-disciplinary scholar.
Keys to the City is structured across four parts: economic context, institutional context, social interaction and political context. Through the book, Storper attends to classical problems within economic geography, while also taking the opportunity to insert his own perspectives and conceptual additions, in a style that blends rigorous theoretical overviews with breezy illustrative anecdotes. In doing this, a great deal of ground is covered, from framing the major drivers and patterns of urban economies to providing nuanced reflections on the continuing importance of face-to-face mechanisms. Underpinning the whole book, however, is an apparent desire to make progress, and advance debate, on what the author considers to be one of social science’s thorniest explanatory endeavours: the growth and development of city economies (Storper, 2011).
Four chapters (2–5) constitute Part I of the book. Chapter 2 is the book’s most ambitious and perhaps most contestable, as it seeks to address a key problem within economic geography – what comes first, jobs or people? With reference to the Sunbelt context in the US and associated manufacturing shifts, Storper challenges the increasingly popular assertion that amenity effects have shaped urban economic geographies over and above jobs and opportunities. Having sided in favour of jobs as critical, chapter 3 steers attention to the spatial dispersion of jobs and firms in the economy. Drawing on varying theoretical sources, rationales for both industrial concentration and de-concentration are set out, referencing, among other things, product heterogeneity, trade costs and technological change. Chapter 4 considers innovation and disruption as an explanation for the economic development of cities, contrasting with explanations based on equilibrium notions. Here, Storper, re-tracing his Roepke lecture (Storper, 2009), lays out the argument that typical Marshall–Arrow–Romer (MAR) mechanisms can be usefully split up to better explain local growth (splitting the local ‘M’ and ‘A’, from the global ‘R’), where local monopoly rents are time-limited within a spatial context due to eventual diffusion through imitation and replication. Storper’s explanation of uneven development hinges on a recursive process, noting how city development reflects not only first-mover actions, but the ability of places to hook into later, derived rounds of innovation and fashion these connections into localised M–A based advantages. Ending Part I, an intra-city perspective is taken in chapter 5, with consideration given to urban diversity as well as density versus sprawl debates, set within an overview of competing preferences, and the policy challenges these pose.
Through the first part of the book, Storper does an exemplary job of pointing the reader to the noise and complexity of city economies, as well as specifying the limitations of existing theories. Moreover, while Storper considers that existing economic theories provide a coherent explanation of the cumulative nature of economic concentration, readers are usefully reminded of the repeated blind spots as they concern a theorisation of the trigger, or first move, that gives rise to agglomerated spatial arrangements.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 form Part II, where institutional contexts take centre stage. At this point, equipped with a sense of the mechanisms undergirding city economies, the reader is led to consider the informal and formal institutions that inflect city development processes. Focusing on the informal, Storper draws on two dominant dualisms – ‘community’ versus ‘society’ and ‘building’ versus ‘bonding’ – to fashion his argument about institutional roles (whether enacted by civic associations or neighbourhood groups, for example). Reference here is given to information asymmetries, trust, transaction costs and rent seeking inter alia, in terms of the application or utilisation of forms of social capital that may support or constrain the achievement of particular development ends. Reflecting perhaps broader literatures called upon, however, and notwithstanding attempts by the author to provide linking examples, at some points the cities focus appears to drift into the background in this part.
Local–global interactions and how they shape city economies is in focus in Part III (chapters 9–13) and Storper again seeks to disentangle thorny mechanisms. For example, in chapter 9, the author explains how feedback loops between trade and transport costs work in perhaps non-intuitive (‘paradoxical’) ways to continue to reinforce urban roles (through the interaction of short and long distance economic processes). Storper moves on to provide a typology of seven ‘C’s’ to consider the geographies of innovation (codes and communication; channels; clustering; communities; context; coordination; and competition). In delineating each factor, the author appears to suggest that the development opportunities that may be reaped at a particular place will stem from the balance struck across the seven ‘C’s’. Chapter 10 touches on further local–global interface issues, through an examination of the role of local context. However, the chapter appears somewhat abbreviated, and little scope is given, for example, to consider multi-national firms and how contexts mediate their integration at places (see Iammarino and McCann, 2013). Chapter 11 focuses on the ongoing importance of face-to-face communications through the distinction of codified versus non-codified (or tacit) knowledge. Considering relationships with ICTs, Storper shows how, across different technology modes, variable substitution and complementarity effects arise. Linking to notions of ‘buzz’ and Jacobs-style urban serendipities, Storper offers potent arguments to defeat ‘flat world’ conjectures and explain the durable nature of spiky and uneven economic geographies.
Part IV brings the political contexts of city development into full glare. Chapter 12 starts off with a useful comparative lens, looking at the US and EU as concerns innovation performance, skills retention as well as the varying spatialities of scale economies. Storper points to the larger, highly specialised but more isolated agglomerations in the US vis à vis the smaller, more diverse but closer and more connected conurbations in the EU. The chapter then sets out a compelling overview of the different processes underpinning community formation as well as, in some instances, the apparent Darwinian struggles between cities in the US engendered by decentralised fiscal structures. On a more micro matter, it was perhaps surprising that no references were given when the author points to consultants and scholars making assertions about the optimal configuration of city-systems based on scant evidence (p. 186). Storper’s coverage of justice, in chapter 13, is a welcome addition to the economic geography literature, which, hitherto, tends to skirt around core principles. Here Storper picks apart the implicit justice implications of Glaeser’s utilitarian argument. Moreover the author’s coverage of Rawls, Dworkin and Sen provides interesting perspectives that, first, contrast with certain streams of welfare reasoning in the economics literature, and, second, from a practical point of view, offer insights for those interested in the experimental economic development mandates emerging for local authorities in the UK (where key questions may arise about how local ‘city deal’ success and failures will be treated by central government).
‘Dear Policymaker: some keys for you’, the book’s conclusion, is a chapter that may have benefitted from further development, as it leaves some of the deft policy insights provided in earlier chapters somewhat fractured and un-collated. Reading more as a set of fundamental laws not to violate than a sequence of directions to follow, the few pages are short on policy specifics. However, Storper’s final suggestion that ‘a national conversation about the urban system and cities’ (p. 228) should be engendered, is astutely made (and germane in the UK context where ad hoc ‘City Deals’ are of central focus). Indeed, it would be interesting to learn more about through what incentives, and on what terms, Storper would propose that such a conversation is held.
In summary, the Keys to the City is an output that does justice to the amassed wisdom of a lively and well respected economic geographer who moves past disciplinary parochialism. The book does not shy away from complexity and covers a wide terrain, while expression is clear and considered throughout. Avoiding the triumphal tone of Glaeser (2011), and the ‘fast policy’ (Peck, 2005) transfer of Florida (2002), Keys to the City will be an important text for postgraduates and academics interested in the nuances and complexities of city development, as well as research-minded policy officials.
The book is dense and technical in parts, and this is signposted by the author, so some readers may find it helpful to consult the online LSE lecture as a starting point (follow the link at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/eventsHome.aspx).