Abstract
Over the years, Michael Storper has made a number of significant theoretical and empirical contributions to knowledge of urban and regional development. His previous collaborations with Richard Walker on the spatial imperatives of capitalist development stand out, as does his monograph on The Regional World (Storper, 1997). Storper has consistently delivered a message about the formative role of space in shaping economic activity. This makes his work particularly valuable for human geographers. Keys to the City deepens and extends this high standard of scholarship and should be essential reading for students of the economics of urban and regional development.
In Keys to the City, Storper does not attempt to construct a dialogue with the geographical literature on urbanization and urban development. Instead, the book represents an engagement with neoclassical and heterodox approaches in economics, which claim to offer explanations for urbanization and the development of regions. Revealing an impressive knowledge of the literature, Storper is at pains to outline and then take apart arguments in the New Neoclassical Urban Economics (NNUE) relating to urban and regional development. His ultimate goal is to highlight the social institutions and spatial interactions that shape urban development. In so doing, he carefully negotiates an intellectual pathway between general theories of urban agglomeration and the contingencies and contexts surrounding urban and regional development.
After a short introduction to the role of cities and regions as workshops of the global economy, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1 examines the economics of urban and regional development. Concepts familiar to economic geographers, such as equilibrium, clustering, innovation and agglomeration, are subject to critique. Storper then puts forward his own ideas about the role of economics, institutions and social conventions in shaping urban development. Occasionally the arguments are embellished with personal insights. To take an example from later on in the book, Storper refers to his Franco-American godson’s experiences as a chef in order to explain the differences between New York and Paris in terms of culinary innovation. His six-stage explanation highlights the role of supply chains, the control of prices and costs by suppliers, proximity to alternative markets for ingredients, differences in economies of scale and scope, the importance of local knowledge, and different urban cultures of innovation (pp. 155–60).
Chapter 2 examines cities as ‘workshops of the world economy’. This chapter takes issue with the NNUE’s interpretation of the rise of growth regions, such as the Sunbelt in the USA. The NNUE explains urban and regional growth as the outcome of the locational preferences of firms, individuals and households. Storper counters such preference-based models of urban development with a sophisticated account of the path-dependent dynamics of urban system development, using this to challenge naïve assertions to the effect that jobs follow people, who in turn act upon their preferences for urban amenities. Emphasizing the historical dynamics of specific industries, sectors and cities, Storper demonstrates how a combination of factors encouraged skilled labour to relocate from the Frostbelt to the Sunbelt after the Second World War. Specifically, declining rates of regional productivity interacted with factors such as regional labour laws and economic development incentives to set in motion a sequence of events which eventually made Sunbelt cities more attractive to growth and employment in certain sectors than their Frostbelt counterparts. Storper further highlights the importance of ‘disruptive innovation’ as a motor of urban development (Chapter 4). The disruptive capacity for cities to innovate explains why, in spite of high rents and wages, already-successful cities continue to be attractive to development, reinforcing their privileged economic status.
Part 2 looks at the role of institutions in urban and regional development. It includes a useful discussion of how and why institutions of regional governance emerge in response to the fragmentation of government and power across city-regions. Building on a critique of public choice theory, Storper provides a finely-tuned discussion of the trade-offs between governance fragmentation and integration. If regions with fragmented governance structures can compensate for higher transaction costs by developing structures of regional collaboration, those with more integrated structures can more easily implement large-scale infrastructure projects (p. 99). Referring to the effects of ‘bonding, bridging and economic performance’ (pp. 120–5), Storper demonstrates the importance of collective action in urban economic development. He argues that successful city-regions need to develop strong community-based regional institutions for resolving conflicts between economic actors. Whilst I found myself in agreement with many of the arguments in this section of the book, I felt that specific examples of regional collaboration would provide firmer empirical grounding for some of Storper’s ideas.
Chapter 10 addresses the creative potential or ‘genius’ of cities. A central consideration is why it is that cities generate different products even when global production has become standardized and products are substitutable. Thus restaurants in Paris are different to those in New York; likewise cars in Los Angeles are different to those in Frankfurt. But what makes for these differences? Storper argues that specialization and context are interrelated; the socialization of institutions and actors in specific city-regional contexts explains how cities specialize and generate different products (Chapter 11). Whilst Storper has clearly moved on from his earlier work on the role of labour in capitalist development, he has a tendency to treat labour as a cost variable rather than a creative force. Yet the aforementioned chef example indicates that without the exploitation of labour’s creativity, cities would not generate innovation.
Part 4 examines the political context of cities. This section has a welcome discussion of regional business elites, comparing the family dynasties that have ruled urban-industrial regions in Europe (e.g. Milan and Turin) with the absence of entrenched elites in US urban regions. My sense is that aspects of this discussion could be pushed further in respect of the role of conflicting cultures of urban and regional governance in shaping the regulatory structures of cities and regions. Nevertheless, Storper is able to provide a fascinating examination of the politics of distribution and collective memory. The absence of a class politics of distribution in the USA is attributed to the weakness of national trade union structures and intense competition between urban elites for investment due to forces of fiscal decentralization. Unable to forge distributional coalitions with other cities and regions, US cities are often responsible for managing their own decline. The book concludes with policy recommendations in the form of a report to an imaginary ‘Commission on Urban and Regional Development’ in which Storper sets out the keys to unlocking urban and regional development. He recommends that ‘inequality surpluses’ should be redistributed between urban territories based on generally agreed criteria. Nonetheless, Storper is not optimistic about the prospects for social justice given current global territorial dynamics.
Keys to the City is a valuable contribution to the literature on the economics of city-regional development. If conventional economics tends to eschew careful analysis of urban and regional institutions and politics, Storper exhibits a deep understanding of the relationship between collective action, economic specialization, and the development of cities and regions. Readers familiar with his earlier work might have some misgivings about how Storper’s ideas have become more closely aligned with those of heterodox economics. Yet his arguments remain eloquent, persuasive and forthright. If there has been a propensity in the mainstream literature to separate the economics of city-regional development from its institutional and political context, Keys to the City reminds us that ultimately the spatial context does matter.