Economic geography,to what ends? From privilege to progressive performances of expertise

The struggle for Sydney, and for spaces of work

I write from Sydney, in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, a boom-and-bust city witness to inward capital and immigration flows, sustained economic growth and rampant real estate speculation and development (Rogers et al., 2017). It now hosts the world’s most active market for securitized home loans (Reuters, 2017) and has as many cranes operating on major development sites as there are in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Toronto combined (Letts, 2016). Novel planning mechanisms skewed in favour of development interests have been pioneered and normalized here, such as Unsolicited Proposals, a regulatory process that encourages the private sector to pre-empt privatization and real estate development opportunities, covertly arrogate land, sign undisclosed deals with landlords and concoct global financing schemes for infrastructure that the public did not know they needed, without government solicitation and behind commercial-in-confidence provisions. In consequence, many colleagues here in Sydney have brought critique to bear on the city’s transformation and its compromised planning system, especially drawing upon economic geographical theories about global finance, intermediaries and circuits of investment and investors (Legacy et al., 2018; Macdonald, 2018; Sisson et al., 2018). Such contributions have been key to disentangling and understanding the networks of actors, markets, policy ideas and capital flows that are reshaping the city. Nevertheless, as Brett Christophers (2015: 194) has argued in relation to the burgeoning literature on financialization, the risk is of ‘fatigue and jaundice setting in’ within the research field as multiple critiques, albeit astute, multiply. Audacious acts of unsolicited real estate speculation sanctioned by government proliferate in this city, with narratives of finance, real estate and urban transformation becoming ‘one sided, even teleological scripts of linear, uninterrupted, ineluctable development’ (Christophers, 2015: 194), against which it seems difficult to mobilize resistance.

In light of recent debates concerning economic geography’s fortunes, here I wish to reflect briefly on a personal experience of conducting grounded empirical research that had the effect of disrupting the city’s script of linear, uninterrupted, ineluctable development. Amid a phase of what might be described as ‘unsolicited urbanism’ (in which developer- and financier-led propositions for profound urban transformation are approved and proceed outside of the boundaries of regular planning process), at stake is what constitutes ‘expertise’ (and its performance), and what roles economic geographers might play in shifting the narrative. In Sydney, a rather more contained, policy-oriented economic geography research project in which I am involved (see www.urbanculturalpolicy.com) has in the past year become irretrievably embroiled in struggles over plans to rezone for financialized high-rise apartments a 20 km swath of suburbs along a transit-oriented corridor. Much of the land in question is currently low-rise residential – a mix of Victorian-era, turn-of-the-century and inter-war brick homes much loved by Sydneysiders. But it also contains significant parcels of industrially zoned land, featuring mostly nondescript factories and warehouses from the 1920s to 1960s, that nevertheless are densely occupied by a mix of enterprises across manufacturing, repair and maintenance, and cultural and creative industries. The research project in question (funded federally prior to the announcement of mass rezoning) sought to document such activities in the precinct and discuss potential progressive opportunities to reinvigorate local manufacturing jobs through interface with other sectors, including cultural and creative industries (see Grodach et al., 2017). We tracked jobs, interviewed workers and toured factories, keen to learn about how industrial precincts house inchoate mixes of old and new enterprises. But as growing conflict arose over planned high-rise residential apartments, our somewhat prosaic empirical study took on another level of significance in public debate.

Matters came to a head when a key industrially zoned precinct at the heart of our empirical research project became subject to a major AUD1.3 billion (US$1 billion) proposal by a Sydney-based developer, Mirvac, ¹ to house up to 20 towers of apartments, each potentially up to 35 storeys in height. The Carrington Road precinct lies in Marrickville, 6 km from downtown Sydney, in a corridor along an existing state-owned train line due to be converted to allow private providers to operate new driverless trains, ² and along which the NSW government announced in 2016 plans for mass rezoning in order to facilitate ‘value capture’ via transit-oriented redevelopment uplift (cf. Jones and Ley, 2016). The intention was to add 35,000 more housing units, overwhelmingly high-rise apartments. Carrington Road is among the oldest industrially zoned districts in Sydney, hosting manufacturing activity (and more recently, cultural production and creative industries) since the turn of the twentieth century. For decades, there were several such extensive areas of industrially zoned land in the inner city, between downtown, major port facilities and Sydney Airport. Since the 1990s, when Sydney was awarded the hosting of the 2000 Olympic Games, most of that land has been converted to ‘mixed use’ – in effect medium- and high-rise apartment towers with retail activities at ground floor. Within existing local environment plans, the Carrington Road precinct remains industrially zoned, and indeed was identified in earlier state government assessments as a strategic employment land parcel, given its central location, amid dwindling industrially zoned space. Nevertheless, when in 2016 the NSW government plans were announced to mass rezone the Sydenham–Bankstown rail corridor for high-rise redevelopment, Carrington Road was one of a string of precincts along the line targeted for ‘regeneration’. Moreover, as it turned out, one half of the Carrington Road precinct was already subject to an unsolicited redevelopment proposal being devised confidentially over two years prior to the announcement of the Metro rail line (and rezonings). A local landlord, backed by a partnership with Mirvac, had for decades steadily acquired factories along Carrington Road, enabling redevelopment when the NSW government announced developer-friendly rezoning plans.

The first disruption to this agenda occurred when, not long after the NSW government’s Metro rail strategy and accompanying rezoning plans were released for public comment, Mirvac’s bold plans were leaked to the media. Rapid escalation of community opposition followed, to both seemingly ceaseless densification across Sydney, and to Mirvac’s plans in Marrickville specifically. An existing activist group opposed to the Sydney Metro rail line conversion/privatization and accompanying rezonings was augmented by the emergence of suburb-specific activist groups along the corridor. Beyond constrained formal consultation arenas, the campaign galvanized antagonisms ‘against both neoliberalisation of cities and its governance, and the loss of public control of the city and its processes’ (Legacy et al., 2018: 177), during a time of sustained criticisms of high-rise apartments (and their developers) in which ‘overdevelopment’ became Sydney’s key electoral issue. From an initial resident action campaign evolved overt opposition to global finance-backed developers and landlords.

Unbeknown to the developers and landlord, our research team was also already active in the precinct, documenting enterprises and jobs in Carrington Road’s concrete spaces of work as part of our pre-existing and more prosaic, policy-oriented project. The precinct was previously well-known to the researchers, and to inner-Sydney residents, as a distinctive industrial estate accommodating an eclectic mix of manufacturers, repairers, food processors, theatre props and stage set makers, and recording, art and photography studios. A matter of weeks before Mirvac’s massive redevelopment plans were leaked to the media, our team undertook field visits on Carrington Road, documenting present enterprises, observing occupied buildings and workshops and pods within existing larger factory complexes. Compilation and release of an interim report of our findings (Gibson et al., 2017a) then coincided with the leaking to the media of Mirvac’s plans. The report detailed over 200 enterprises and 1,000 jobs in the precinct, as well as previously undocumented functional connections between enterprises across seemingly disparate sectors. With the support of the university’s central media team, a related opinion piece in a popular national news outlet was penned (Gibson et al. 2017b) and subsequently widely shared on social media, leading to further interviews and news coverage by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, major newspapers and commercial television channels. Our team sought to present an alternative voice on debates about the city’s future, informed not so much by local activists’ reactions (though we shared many of their concerns), but as economic geographers discussing matters related to our report and its findings. The explicit aim was to provide expertise within boundaries delimited by the empirical work, marshalling economic geographical knowledges of extant local circumstances to counter seemingly hegemonic narratives about the ‘inevitable’ densification of the city via financialized real estate speculation.

The economic geographical knowledge generated by our report thence proved more useful than initially intended, among activists, and with municipal and state decision-makers. Public walking tours of Carrington Road were organized by local arts and heritage advocates in collaboration with academics from our team, and were broadcast through podcasts (Lyons et al., 2018). Residential activist groups’ tactics evolved from opposition to densification towards fighting for retention of an important industrial district and the local jobs it housed – a politics of space and work as much as an antagonism over planning decisions (cf. Purcell, 2001). Meanwhile, data-hungry planners and politicians – from lower level analysts to senior decision-makers at both municipal and state levels – welcomed the research report and its findings, in the midst of what was otherwise an ‘information desert’. The NSW Department of Planning and Environment – who presided over the Sydney Metro plan and its accompanying rezoning – had, following the seeming withering of their internal research capacity, commissioned consultancy firm AEC to investigate employment impacts of proposed rezonings throughout the corridor, including the Carrington Road precinct. But typical of reports that accompany such proposals, no primary empirical investigation had been undertaken by AEC of actual enterprises, employment or functional interconnections within affected industrial precincts. Instead, ‘gathering of market intelligence’ had merely been carried out ‘at a desktop level’ (AEC Group Ltd, 2016: 3). In effect, until our report’s release, no one in government previously knew what actual enterprises or jobs existed in the precinct under the cloud of rezoning and speculative redevelopment. No one had asked existing enterprises and workers about their space needs, or whether to-be-dislocated firms and workers had other proximate relocation options. By drawing attention to economic activity otherwise hidden in plain sight, our economic geographical research rendered workers and livelihoods visible within concrete industrial spaces that had been inaccurately tarnished as ‘in decay’ and in need of renewal. To recast a phrase from Gertler’s (2003) often-cited paper on proximity and tacit knowledge, economic geographers were able to inject critical insights into circulating policy narratives about the city’s future as a ‘benefit of simply being there’.

In late 2017 and 2018, events further unfolded. Local council planners cited our research report in a decision to reject an initial notification of intent for the precinct from Mirvac, while key players at the state level had new information on the strategic importance of retaining industrially zoned land for future employment growth. A final Metro corridor strategy and accompanying rezoning plan, expected in December 2017, failed to materialize. Then, on 27 July 2018, the NSW government handed back decision-making over rezoning in the Sydenham–Bankstown Metro corridor to the local municipalities (Canterbury–Bankstown and Inner West Councils) presiding over the affected precincts. Local activist groups claimed a ‘colossal win for the community’ (Save Marrickville, 2018). Opposition politicians and local councillors restated their opposition to unsolicited and audacious densification and, citing our report, vowed to preserve local industrial land and jobs. And, most recently, in late October 2018, the Greater Sydney Commission – a body who do not ultimately approve or reject major proposals, but that is charged with setting strategic planning visions for the city – released a major report recommending cessation of real estate speculation on industrially zoned land, and a new strategic approach to the preservation and appreciation of industrial precincts as mundane, but vital, spaces of work in the city (Greater Sydney Commission, 2018). Mirvac issued a statement that they were still keen to press ahead with a revised plan for Carrington Road, but they now face a re-empowered, and much more hostile, local council, and less likelihood of straightforward approvals at the state government level, given the Greater Sydney Commission’s strategic positioning. Inner West Council mayor, Darcy Byrne, went on the public record as saying ‘The Carrington Road proposal from Mirvac was entirely predicated on that site being rezoned under the Sydenham to Bankstown Urban Renewal Corridor Strategy. That strategy will now not be gazetted and has no legal status. The existing Marrickville Environmental Plan which is an industrial zoning is the law. Mirvac’s Carrington Road proposal is dead’ (quoted in Save Marrickville, 2018). The result was hardly a revolutionary overhaul of the power of global capital, but it was a victory nonetheless, both for local actors seeking to resist the omnipresence of finance and property capital in shaping city affairs, and for economic geographers seeking to perform expertise strategically in service of counter-hegemonic narratives.

Economic geography towards transformative ends?

Accompanying recent Exchanges debating economic geography’s fortunes, masculine privilege and ‘who speaks’ for the subdiscipline are ongoing questions of how expertise is marshalled and performed, and to what ends it serves. Whether economic geography emanates from geography departments or business schools is less significant, it seems to me, than the integrity of our underpinning values, and how these are brought to bear on our practice, the ‘products’ of our labour (reports, papers, etc.) and on our performance of expertise (such as in public commentaries). Much contemporary economic geographical research on production networks, innovation, learning regions and clusters, for example, seems persistently opaque about the ends it serves, especially among a more orthodox ‘core’ of well-established, tenured scholars. While there may well be practical translations of economic geographical expertise on such topics for improved economic planning, in the absence of a transparent transformative agenda, their contributions simply reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo (cf. Barnes and Christophers, 2018). Yet, at risk of Pollyanna-ish optimism, a growing and eclectic corpus of critically engaged economic geographical work is blossoming across knowledge fields, especially among a younger generation adopting a hardened tone fitting for the times (Cockayne et al., 2018; Pugh, 2018). Feminist economic geography, political ecology and labour geography are just some of the boundary-crossing spheres in which a clearer transformative agenda is matched with grounded empirical documentation of extant processes and effects (Carr, 2017; Kay, 2018; Warren, 2018).

In our case, quite orthodox empirical economic geographic research proved useful to activists and sympathetic government decision-makers, generating counter-knowledges where none existed previously. For sure, a degree of luck and good timing was involved, and our experiences may not prove replicable elsewhere. Nevertheless, the experience highlights how credible empirical work coupled with the public performance of expertise is able to shed light on existing qualities of sites threatened by the large-scale plans of capitalist interests. In the face of powerful forces and increasingly technocratic circles of policy expertise, even rather ‘dry’ empirical studies that on the surface do not declare radical intents can provide crucial information helpful to allied planners and activists. Amid the pressing need to reform the subdiscipline’s (neo)colonial structure, norms and gender relations (Pugh, 2018), economic geographers of diverse stripes are getting on with the task of generating critically engaged knowledge and performing expertise strategically to valorize threatened spaces, lives and livelihoods.