What Does Urban Development Mean?
What Does Urban Development Mean?
The term “urban development” has always struck me as being hard to tie down to a definite, fixed meaning.
Partially, my confusion comes from my own personal experience. Over the course of my education, I encountered many different uses of the term development. In biology class development referred to the growth to maturity of an organism. In psychology it referred to changes in the relationship between children’s ages and their capacities to engage in certain behaviors. In international economics it referred to the processes that gradually transformed preindustrial national economies into "more developed" industrial ones. So, what does development mean in the context of urban systems?
A broad answer could be that urban development refers to a progressive unfolding and growth of a particular urban system’s structure. Urban areas would thus “develop” whenever residents and businesses move in, levels of living-wage-or-better employment increase, high-quality housing and infrastructure are built and maintained, public revenues and household incomes are plentiful, real estate values increase, public schools improve, and urban services get better. Urban development in this sense would be associated with improved economic competitiveness in a particular urban area, and a more a desirable built environment for increasingly diverse groups of people.
Well-developed urban areas would bring together human capital, promote socio-cultural equity and inclusion, advance environmental sustainability, and generally improve the quality of life for urban residents. Prominent examples of this sort of “urban development” in the U.S. might include the renaissance in cities such as New York, Nashville, and Boston.
But in the bigger picture there is more to urban development than this. Not all urban development is progressive. Most of it is highly uneven. For example, at the same time a renaissance has occurred in some American cities, in others, such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee, not to mention many of the smaller cities and towns throughout the United States, one finds disinvestment, shrinkage, and decay. Urban development does not always evolve progressively.
Uneven development is found not only between cities but also within them. Within New York, Nashville, Boston, or any other city, for example, one finds split populations of highly educated, well paid professionals on one hand, and a low wage workforce on the other. Even in the most “developed” urban areas one finds socially segregated neighborhoods, some prospering, others dealing with abandonment, violent crime, environmental contamination and the like. One finds urban cores doing relatively well, at least by some measures, while inner ring suburbs languish.
Not all urban development is progressive in part because no city, town or neighborhood is a self-contained, static unit independent of all others. Urban areas are dynamic and tied together by constantly changing flows of information, resources, people, finance, labor and materials, among other things. The flows were once contained within national borders. But despite recent trends caused by the global pandemic, national borders no longer constrain very many flows. Unevenness is unavoidable. The very same financial investments and flows of other resources that vastly improved New York, Nashville, and Boston were also ones that did not flow to Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee or elsewhere outside the U.S. borders.
Unevenness is a practically unavoidable outcome of the emerging global system of urban development. The reason for this is embedded in the basic tenets of our evolving system. These include the dominance of private property rights and the use of national governments to define and protect voluntary exchanges among legally free individuals and corporations. The production and distribution of most goods and services is achieved in our system primarily through the market mechanisms. Given these basic tenets—which by the way we believe are the most reasonable ones to make—investors will predictably seek locations that promise to maximize the return on their investment. These are the places that will attract investment and develop, writ small. And the places that promise the greatest returns are predictably the ones to which investment has been flowing in the recent past, not necessarily those most in need or deserving.
Accordingly, decisions and actions taken in the name of urban development, writ small, which is to say in single, selected cities or neighborhoods, will differentially affect one place relative to others. They will help one city but not another, an outer ring suburb or a central business district but not a central city neighborhood, a newer commercial area but not an older industrial area, a large city but not a small town, a booming and sprawling city but not a shrinking city, a city within one nation's borders at the expense of another city outside those borders. Those areas that do not participate in “urban development” by inclusion have no choice but to do so by exclusion, and many of the excluded ones have the greatest need. The unevenness is interconnected.
This is why the term urban development arguably has no fixed, definite meaning writ small. It gets used in too many contexts, and it’s meaning differs from context to context. Moreover, the many contexts preclude the possibility of any fixed and definite meaning applicable to all. It is also why the term is meaningful only in the bigger picture, in relation to entire urban systems of interrelated human settlements.
Unless urban policy makers insist on using terms with fixed, definite meanings, their communications are more likely to devolve into what Murray Edelman called pure “political language” (Murray Edelman, 1977, Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail, Academic Press). They will thereby be more likely to wittingly or otherwise make decisions about urban development that in the bigger picture have little meaningful effect beyond perpetuating the large and chronic inequalities already found within the global urban system.
Bill Bowen