5 Cities as Growth Engines

Ashima Sood

Introduction

In India, urban areas contributed 29% of GDP in 1950-51; 47% in 1981; 62% in 2007. By 2021, this proportion is expected to rise to a whopping 75% (Mohanty 2014:1). “Growth localizes in city regions,” Mohanty (2014:1) notes. In essence, cities capture the gains from agglomeration and proximity.

In this module, we consider the role of cities as hubs of economic growth. Although from a sociological, as much as an economic perspective, cities have always served as loci for economic growth (Molotch 1976), what is perhaps new is the enormous policy influence the cities-as- growth-engine lens has come to wield over the last few decades. It is thus worthwhile understanding its foundational assumptions.

Beginning with a brief overview of the economic understanding of urbanization and economic growth, this module presents key theorizations of growth-focused urban governance, drawing on the Indian and international literature. It ends with a critical analysis of an emerging corporate enclave mode of urban development. The next section however examines structural transformation and agglomeration economies based economic models of urbanization.

Section 2: Urbanization and Structural Transformation, Agglomeration

Urban economics is a vast and expanding field, and one that has had tremendous influence on the imaginations of policymakers. Two models of urbanization in particular have proved especially influential.

The first of these draws less from urban economics than from theories of economic development. The shift away from agriculture to non-agriculture and thereby from a predominantly rural to an urban economy is one of the best established stylized facts coming out of longitudinal studies of economic development, most famously the Nobel Prize-winning work of Simon Kuznets (World Bank 2009). These changes in the structure of the economy find a clear spatial correlate in urbanization, or the transfer of rural, agrarian populations to urban areas.

One of the most widely cited formulations of this structural transformation is to be found in the 1950s work of Nobel Laureate Arthur Lewis (see also Module 4.1). At the heart of Lewis’ model was a dualistic labour market, consisting of a high productivity ““capitalist,” “formal,” “modern,” “industrial,” or “urban”” sector (Fields 2004, 2), and a low productivity, rural or agrarian sector. Economic development then consists in the transfer of low productivity or even zero productivity populations from the agrarian to the capitalist sector (Gollin 2014, 72). In this paradigm, “within-country gaps in income and productivity, ie, dualism” (p 72) shape economic development, which is said to be completed when wages in the modern sector begin to rise, after a large enough population of workers has moved into it.

Economists in subsequent decades have challenged and refined many of the underpinnings of the Lewis model (Gollin 2014; Fields 2004), but it retains a tight hold on policy understandings of urbanization. Structural transformation closely couples the idea of economic development with urbanization, and the Lewis model suggests mechanisms by which this coupling may be set into motion. In this paradigm, the capitalist urban sector is necessarily the dynamic sector, with the ability to absorb savings and investments, and grow through capital accumulation, while the rural or traditional sector remains in the grip of stasis. Lewis-type models have been particularly influential in explaining rural-to-urban migration.

However, as we shall see, these ideas also inform panoply of space-based policies in contemporary India that willy-nilly shift workers from agriculture to manufacturing or more often services employment through spatial instruments such as Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and megaprojects.

Agglomeration Economies

If structural transformation accelerates the trend towards urbanization in growing economies, what determines the spatial spread of economic activity and employment? The operating principle underlying the rise of cities remains concentration of populations and industry, or in other words agglomeration. Mohanty (2014, 12) defines agglomeration economies as “benefits to firms and households from proximity between economic activities”. Agglomeration economies emerge from economies of scale such that the cost per unit of producing a good or service falls as volumes rise. Such economies of scale arise from heavy industry, high-technology sector as well as public utilities and high end financial and information services.

A second source of agglomeration economies are network economies. These occur when the value of consuming a good or service rises as more and more people use it. For example, up until a certain point, as more people visit a park or celebrate a festival, every individual’s enjoyment of it increases. This is also true of many kinds of social networks, whether online or offline (Mohanty 2014). The essence of agglomeration is thus density of people and economic activities. Up to certain levels, density reduces the costs of transport and information transmission (Mohanty 2014).

It should be evident that agglomeration economies have important implications for policy. Speaking broadly, it remains true that concentration of production in big cities at the expense of rural areas confers undeniable advantages. However, is that a tendency that should be exploited or countered? For one, spatial inequalities, across the rural-urban divide and between regions are the flipside of agglomeration. Proximity confers advantages, but equally distance from agglomerations also confers disadvantages.

Policy in places such as the Soviet Union and India during the plan period attempted to correct the tendency of economic activities to concentrate, and lead to “regional imbalance.” In India, for example, policy had a pronounced rural bias in the early decades post-Independence. Even as urban policy began to receive some attention in the 1960s, planners frowned upon megacity agglomerations and kept their focus away from investment in housing and infrastructure in these cities. Instead the emphasis was on new town building projects, which were seen as vehicles for regional development and dispersal of economic growth (Kennedy and Zerah 2008) (see also Module 6.5).

If policies encouraging dispersion had mixed outcomes in economies like post-colonial India or the Soviet Union, the pendulum has swung the other way in recent decades. As the sections below describe, city-centric growth strategies have come to dominate policy toolkits across most of the world.

The economic orthodoxy underlying this strategic shift was best described by the World Development Report 2009, which matter of factly stated that: “economic growth is seldom balanced” (p 5). The WDR posited three dimensions of this policy framework, relevant at the local, national and international planes.

While density is the corollary of agglomeration at the level of cities and towns and their hinterlands, distance to density shapes the economic geography of nations. Thus areas close to agglomerations, such as the Thane-Pune belt in Maharashtra benefit from being in the right neighbourhood, whereas places distant from large agglomerations, such as Vidarbha or rural Jharkhand lag behind.

The same process plays out internationally, where highly integrated areas such as North America or Europe serve as the core, and peripheral areas fail to catch up. The  barriers here are not only physical distance but also political, and cultural. These may come from barriers to labour mobility, or from differences in exchange rate regimes.

Although the WDR sketches out the growth and policy implications of these dimensions in considerable detail, a few points can be noted here. First, if agglomeration is the driving force of economic growth, rural and peripheral regions of the world can fast-track growth by reducing distance and divisions with the most developed regions nationally or internationally. The imperatives of globalization follow naturally from this view of economic growth. Hence the advice to smaller and less developed countries to bridge distance and break down divisions to trade and financial flows. Integration with the global economy is seen by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank as the path to economic growth.

Section 3: The Neoliberal City

The valorisation of the city as growth engine was not simply an uncomplicated outcome of increasing understanding of agglomeration economies. Instead it appeared at a specific historical juncture, when technological advances and seismic shifts in geopolitics owing to the increasingly inevitable fall of the Soviet Bloc collided with a changing view of the state’s role in economic growth. The policy corollary of these shifts was the rise of neoliberal policy regimes that emphasized the importance of markets forces and frowned upon undue state direction of economic development. Instead, the state’s role came to be primarily facilitative, supporting and assisting private profit-maximizing enterprises in their quest for growth.

The rise of neoliberalism has been attributed to various causes, among them the crisis in Keynesian policy regimes revealed in the recession of the 1970s. In this section, the intent is not to analyse the historical or philosophical antecedents of neoliberalism, but instead trace its effects on urban policy and outcomes. In particular, this section asks: if agglomeration economies are the primal source of economic growth, in what ways have cities be prepared to maximize economic growth? This question speaks ultimately to questions of urban governance, i.e., the local institutions and processes that exist to manage the city’s needs and promote its interests. Urban governance in the era of neoliberalism has seen tremendous change. Two paradigms that seek to explain these shifts are David Harvey’s notion of entrepreneurialism and the concept of state rescaling.

Entrepreneurial Urban Governance

Coming from an avowedly Marxian perspective, Harvey’s work provides a highly influential and incisive analysis of the transformations that have swept cities first in the developed West and increasingly around the world since the 1980s. Harvey (1989) argues that over the 1970s and 1980s, a series of city scale transformations fostered the rise of entrepreneurial forms of urban governance focused on economic development and employment growth. This represented a vast shift from the traditional emphasis on managerialism, i.e., service provision for city populations.

Underlying this shift in the West were a combination of economic and political factors: one, the 1970s recession which resulted in a prolonged economic slowdown, and second, the ascendance of neoliberal market rationalities. Yet, the shifting scales at which state agency could operate also contributed to the rise of entrepreneurial urban governance (Harvey 1989: 5)

The greater emphasis on local action to combat these ills also seems to have something to do with the declining powers of the nation state to control multinational money flows, so that investment increasingly takes the form of a negotiation between international finance capital and local powers doing the best they can to maximise the attractiveness of the local site as a lure for capitalist development.

It is interesting here to note the ways in which Harvey anticipated later literatures such as those on state rescaling and speculative urbanism that are discussed below.

In Harvey’s view, inter-city competition is the cornerstone of urban entrepreneurialism. Cities compete with one another on a limited set of parameters defined by the logics of capitalist growth and that in turn enforces a homogenizing discipline over their trajectory overtime. One consequence is the “reproduction” worldwide of the same architectural icons and visual vocabulary – whether world trade centres or waterfront developments. Entrepreneurialism is thus deeply implicated in the rise of megaproject driven -development.

Taking the case of Baltimore, a city in the eastern United States, Harvey analyses how entrepreneurial governance is achieved through the instrument of the public-private partnership (PPP). As he notes, although actors such as builders and “business leaders” have always been invested in an entrepreneurial approach, what is new is the incursion and rapid rise of these objectives within local governments. The PPP functions as a vehicle for these goals: “to try and attract external sources of funding, new direct investments or new employment sources” (Harvey 1989, 7).

Second, Harvey argues that “speculation” is at the heart of the entrepreneurial governance embodied in the PPP. In practice, this implies that the local public sector assumes the risks of urban entrepreneurialism, while the private partner incurs the benefits.

Finally, the economic projects favoured by entrepreneurial governments, whether new civic centres or industrial parks, tend to generate impacts beyond the local area but take account only of benefits occurring within narrow jurisdictions. Harvey describes these projects as engaging in “speculative construction of place” “rather than [aiming for] amelioration of conditions within a particular territory as its immediate (though by no means exclusive) political and economic goal” (1989, 8).

State Rescaling

A related paradigmatic approach to the changing role of the state in the neoliberal era came from the idea of “state spatial restructuring or state rescaling”. The building blocks of this framework came from Harvey’s work but it was elaborated in the work of theorists such as Neil Brenner and scholars such as Erik Swyngedouw (Kennedy 2014).

At the level of the city, state rescaling is seen in state efforts to restructure local governance processes in order to streamline their relationship with global markets. “Glocal fixes” – or specialized and spatially anchored infrastructures, such as fibre optic networks or expressways — are a particularly favoured instrument in these initiatives (Kennedy 2014).

According to Kennedy (2014), one ramification of the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy post-1991 has been the increasing empowerment of sub-national states in economic growth strategies relative to the centre, particularly in the arena of industrial policy. Not only do states increasingly compete with each other in their quest for investment flows, they do so through the policy tool of infrastructure development, or glocal fixes. In many states, varieties of megaprojects (Kennedy 2015), whether major roadways such as the Outer Ring Road in Hyderabad or large-scale metro-rail projects, were an integral manifestation of such glocal fixes. Special Economic Zones, discussed below, represent another example as does the development of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (Kennedy 2014; Anand and Sami 2016).

Anand and Sami (2016) suggest two ways in which rescaling processes at the national and sub-national regions impact the geography of economic development. First, the central government still retains considerable sway in choice of location for industrial activity. However, the centre’s control over project financing, planning, and approvals is subject to contestation by increasingly assertive state governments. Thus, a unique feature of the urban governance landscape in India is the continuing importance of the state and centre in shaping the trajectories of urban growth.

In the next section, we see how these broad paradigmatic forces are shaping Indian cities.

Section 4: City-centric growth in India

This section attempts to show how some of the trends and frameworks discussed in the previous section play out in the Indian context. The point of departure is an important 2008 paper by Loraine Kennedy and Marie-Helene Zerah that delineates the emergence of cities as growth engines in the Indian context. Next, we consider the insights emerging from Goldman’s (2011a, 2011b) thesis of speculative urbanism before looking at the rise of “special purpose enclaves” (Kennedy 2007) as the key city-making mode in the present era.

It is worth noting that the Indian case provides significant departures from the narrative of urban entrepreneurialism in the West. Using Harvey’s (1989) terminology, for example, Kennedy (2014: 113;132) argues that Indian city governments are still stuck in managerialist mode, i.e., service provision, while the onus for “urban entrepreneurialism”, ie aggressive economic growth promotion falls to other state scales. In particular, state-level parastatal agencies deploy spatial instruments such as industrial parks without regard to the concerns of the municipal corporation. We discuss the importance of such zoning technologies below.

Evolution of city-centric growth strategies

In a comparative study of Mumbai and Hyderabad, Kennedy and Zerah (2008) traced the increasing prominence of the city in national and sub-national growth policies to both the transformation of the capitalist production process as well as the ascendance of neoliberal ideologies.

This shifting role of the city emerged from the convergence of several national and international trends. Over the 1980s, improvements in transport and communications technologies helped accelerate both trade and information flows. Financial markets became increasingly volatile. In response to these changes, companies  chose to carve up and outsource large chunks of their business operations to multiple locations internationally. Yet the global dispersion of production also necessitated increasing coordination between the far-flung links in the production chain. High quality infrastructure and cheap skilled labour pools typically agglomerate around big cities (Kennedy and Zerah 2008), thus the meteoric rise of Bangalore or Hyderabad as global production and infrastructure hubs (Module 8.3).

On the policy front, the late 1980s heralded an era of structural adjustment programmes. As global financial flows surged, governments increasingly competed for investment through “supply side” spatially localized schemes – enterprise “parks”, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and targeted infrastructure hubs (Kennedy and Zerah 2008).

Liberalization in the 1990s consolidated a period of growing interest in the urban, beginning with the setting up of the National Commission on Urbanisation in 1985. As Kennedy and Zerah (2008) argue, the NCU anticipated the key themes of the 74th Constitutional Amendment and its devolution of powers to urban local bodies (ULBs).

Yet the positioning of the city as growth engine derived from a second, contradictory strain associated with international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank that became increasingly powerful voices in the policy discourses post-liberalization. Viewing urban development as the fount of economic growth, this policy agenda pushed for increasing involvement of the private sector in supplying the infrastructure for growth “through public-private partnerships, commodification of urban services, municipal services, and reliance on domestic financial markets” (p 112).

These two strands – first, the increasing democratization and empowerment of the third tier of government and second, the deployment of cities as growth and investment nodes by state governments – often ran in opposite directions. The result was that ULBs, even in the most prominent metropolises lacked the fiscal capacity and political powers and wherewithal to tackle longstanding infrastructural deficits. Thus, cities’ role as growth engine was severely hobbled by their financial and administrative subordination to state governments. Indeed, Lama-Rewal (2011) linked the increasing complexity of urban governance in India at least partially to the economic reforms and the entry of private multinational firms into the urban infrastructure sector.

By tying infrastructural funding to implementation of the 74th CAA provisions, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) to some extent attempted to address precisely this dilemma. Yet Kennedy and Zerah (2008) delineate three larger dynamics emerging from the policy reliance on cities as growth hubs.

    First, these authors underline the emergence of a metropolitan scale of governance. In Hyderabad, this took the shape of the state government drive towards a Greater Hyderabad, amalgamating 12 municipalities and a number of village panchayats. However, in India, unlike the West, the impetus for metropolitan consolidation has come from the top-down efforts of state governments rather than the weak ULBs or grassroots demands.

A second theme has been that of vigorous competition for global capital flows between cities. However, this competition has been driven by a rather uniform and standardized arsenal of strategies formulated by IFIs and multinational consultants such as McKinsey’s, which produced vision documents for both Mumbai and Hyderabad. The role of consulting agencies was also salient in the JNNURM requirement of city development plans (CDPs), partly reflecting the real capacity constraints in Indian ULBs (Kennedy and Zerah 2008).

Third, Kennedy and Zerah (2008) question the underlying trade-offs subsumed by the focus on revenue self-sufficiency in the city as growth engine agenda. As these authors point out, the overwhelming focus on infrastructure and investments in such world-class city making and “beautification” exercises comes at the expense of livelihood and environmental concerns.

All in all, the city as growth engine paradigm serves as potent tool for aesthetic, cultural and economic homogenization in the quest for footloose capital flows. Many of these themes are further explored in Michael Goldman’s (2011a, 2011b) articulation of the phenomenon of “speculative urbanisms”.

Speculative urbanism

Goldman’s (2011a, 2011b) thesis of speculative urbanism casts a critical eye on some of the repercussions of transformations in urban governance in Bangalore. Situating itself in a debate with global cities, “speculative governance” in brings to light a number of undercurrents hitherto missed by global city theorists (Goldman 2001a). The first of these concerns the rise of transnational policy networks, consisting of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, international consultants and multinational NGOS that steer the direction of urban change. Second is the emergence of parastatal agencies, such as industrial development or infrastructure corporations, as key actors in land acquisition and development. Third, as a result of the competitive cities paradigm that drives urban infrastructure development, discussed above, governance models in Asian cities – Singapore, Shanghai or Bangalore – are constituted in reference to each other. Thus a certain homogenization is implicated in the forces that shape speculative urbanism.

Goldman (2011b) contends that the ascendance of the interests of global capital through these three undercurrents has had a pernicious impact on contemporary Bangalore, which went from a city with enviable quality of life to a metropolitan nightmare. Integral to this decline is the confluence of interests in the real estate and information technology sectors, which have together rendered Bangalore and its hinterland a playground for the forces of speculative global finance.

Speculative urbanism is not without detractors. Many of these critiques, such as those of Halbert and Rouanet (2014) argue that Goldman’s work overemphasizes the role of global forces at the expense of local actors and processes. Addressing the larger literature on the “‘landing’ or the ‘anchoring’ of mobile finance capital into the built environment”, for example Halbert and Rouanet (2014, 472) argue that trans-scalar territorial networks that include local real estate actors help mediate the risks inherent in Bangalore’s property markets that foreign investors are unwilling to take. Similarly, Benjamin’s work (2008) on occupancy urbanism, and Raman (2016) which focuses precisely on the micro-politics of land tenure, offer another line of critique.

Nonetheless, Goldman’s (2011a, 2011b) powerful indictment of the neoliberal regime of urban governance, with its utter reliance on capitalist growth circuits, shows a clear parallel with the trends identified by David Harvey in his analysis of entrepreneurial governance in the west. It offers a particularly trenchant analysis of contemporary real estate development practices.

Enclaves and greenfield development

In India, new forms of greenfield urban development – industrial corridors, special economic zones and the like — have become the fulcrum of spatially focused growth strategies (Kennedy 2014; Kennedy and Sood 2016). These often produce “special purpose enclaves,” providing both spatially targeted infrastructure development as well as specialized planning and governance arrangements, which are a critical component of economic growth focused state spatial rescaling strategies in India in the new millennium.

As Sidaway (2007) points out, the stark visual reminders of fragmentation and splintering (Graham and Marvin 2001) in the contemporary city are a direct consequence of this rescaling. City-centric growth policy displaces the national by the  super-local as the scale at which development strategies are deployed. Sidaway (2007) has described the rise of enclave space worldwide as the harbinger of a “new metageography of development”, that “shatters” and reconfigures notions of “developed” or “third-world” around these sites.

Banerjee-Guha (2008, 52) argues that the creation of SEZs can be seen as a “classic unfolding of the process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’”: “a contradictory, uneven and crisis ridden process that incessantly explored the possibility of reorganising space relations to create more surplus that could be subsequently undermined or even destroyed for newer accumulation.” Here Banerjee-Guha (2008,

52)   underlines the same fragmentation of the production process across sites of labour and assembly globally that Kennedy and Zerah (2008) explained. Subcontracting arrangements that substituted less skilled, casual workers for the highly skilled and highly paid workers of the global North lay at the heart of this disaggregation. In India, as in China, this has meant that explosive increases in labour productivity have been met by stagnant wages and declining or stagnant employment.

The spatial correlate of these economic transformations in India lies in the rise of SEZs as vectors of a kind of “placelessness,” disconnected from the predominantly agrarian “regionalities” that characterized Indian labour relations (p 54). The expropriation of land for SEZs under the pretext of public domain thus also releases the vast army of dispossessed agrarian workers as cheap labour. At the same time, the SEZ aims to provide islands world-class infrastructural facilities in the sea of poorly provisioned India. Indeed, Banerjee-Guha (2008) contends that real estate development provides the central motive force for these developments.

Banerjee-Guha’s work emphasizes, however, two other key aspects of SEZs that have a critical bearing on urban economies, societies and cultures. First, upcoming SEZs are predominantly in the IT sector, which provides employment avenues for a tiny and highly skilled fraction of India’s workforce. The SEZ development serves to benefit the middle classes disproportionately, creating lucrative markets for the good and services consumed by this class – automobiles, high-end housing, organised retail and recreation, among others (Banerjee-Guha 2008). A corollary is the rise of new forms of urban segregation, in gated communities, malls and theme parks, as also the dwindling of public spaces (See also Modules 5.5 on the Middle Classes and Module 3.6 on Logics of Segregation).

If Banerjee-Guha (2008) analyses enclave spaces as primarily as a symptom of underlying transformations in the capitalist order, Sood (2015; 2016a) pays close attention to the regimes of governance and planning that characterize city-making in this mode. Although settings such as gated communities, gated campuses and public sector unit colonies to industrial estates and parks appear to draw from disparate planning imperatives of aspirational city-making and economic growth and structural transformation, nonetheless, they also partake of the larger urban planning dynamics in India. In this they favour the promotion of “urban clubs”, encouraging the supply and maintenance of higher levels of provisions of public services – from power, water, sanitation to health and education facilities – within demarcated enclaves, through physical and non-physical access restrictions (Sood 2015, 2016a). Moreover, whether in urban or peri-urban settings, this logic unleashes predictable dynamics of urban dualism in the vicinity, producing poorly provided informal city settlements and economies alongside well-provisioned and masterplanned cores.

Studies in the Indian context have also flagged patterns of immiserating and disconnected development arising around these new landscapes of urban restructuring (Coelho, Venkat and Chandrika 2012; Vijayabaskar and Coelho 2014). Looking at the IT Corridor area, Vijayabaskar and Suresh (2016) have highlighted the profoundly inequitable patterns of housing and basic services provision these forms of development create.

In Brief

This module has attempted to outline both the rationale and the real world repercussions of the policy focus on city-led growth. Manifesting first in increasing urbanization and then in the patterns of urban location of economic activity, processes of structural transformations and agglomeration economies have been understood as the chief drivers of economic growth.

The adoption of these insights into policy models in the 1980s and beyond have took a distinctly neoliberal cast, focusing particularly on the development of specialized infrastructure in a bid of to attract capital flows. Entrepreneurial forms of urban governance as well as processes of state spatial rescaling have been major concomitants of this process.

In India, as elsewhere, spatial inequality across the local and national scales has been the flipside of the policy focus on agglomeration. The cities-as-growth-engine paradigm has resulted in inevitable tensions with the deeply democratizing impulses of the 74th Constitutional Amendment. But largely sub-national states have bypassed local urban politics to instrumentalize both metropolitan and greenfield urban development for growth promotion.

The work of Goldman (2011) and others offers a range of analytical frames for dissecting the ramifications of these strategies. While Goldman’s work underlines the pernicious effects of speculative finance driving urban governance, Banerjee-Guha emphasizes processes of accumulation by dispossession, and Sood proposes a club goods framework. Empirical studies by authors such as Vijayabaskar and Coelho bear out the profound disparities produced by growth-focused spatial strategies.

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