“A city committed to making access to foundational goods and services more widely available to citizens; and does so, without restricting the privileges of citizenship to a narrow group.”

“Four leading academics propose the ‘grounded city’ – where sustainable transport, accessible broadband and modest housing take precedence over ostentatious tower blocks”

Excerpted from Ewald Engelen, Sukhdev Johal, Angelo Salento and Karel Williams:

“In an urbanising world, everybody says they want a fairer city. If that is the aspiration, the question is what stands in its way? What do we need to change to deliver that fairness?

Our manifesto is about how the fairer city can be achieved by changing both the imaginary and the practice underlying economic and social policy.

The central argument is that we can move towards a fairer city by reframing our problems and rethinking our solutions in two ways:

1. Break with the dominant old problem of the competitive city, which competes economically against other cities and sponsors internal competition for limited opportunities.

2. Stop fixating on redistributive policies which will not deliver fairness, and start thinking about reorganising policies which build a grounded economy in the areas which are not exposed to competition.

The global obsession of our age is competing everywhere with everyone for everything. In the mainstream imaginary, every city has to chase competitive success in a league table where it secures prosperity by getting ahead of others.

Our premise is that competition is the wrong kind of imaginary; that we are trapped by an idea of the externally competitive city as a basis for economic success. The content and meaning of that success then goes largely unexamined until somebody notices that prosperity is manifestly failing to trickle down and the tax system actually reinforces income inequality.

This manifesto argues for a different kind of imaginary: the “grounded city”. The success of a city should not be measured externally by relative size and the ability to come first ahead of equals; rather, the measure should be a city’s internal ability to distribute mundane goods and services which ensure the civilised life of the largest number of its people.

Fairness is not summed up in Gini coefficients of income inequality, but in access to the foundational goods and services that all citizens should enjoy.
After 1945, policies for fairness in high-income countries were imagined in a kind of social democratic frame of redistribution through services and income support, financed from a progressive tax system. But today, such tax systems are everywhere not within the realm of the politically possible.
Centre-left and right parties have all now shifted on to managing internal competition through social engineering, using schools and infrastructure, to redress competitive disadvantage.

But we believe it is time to think radically about delivering fairness not by redistributing income or reforming schools, but by re-organising sectors of the economy. We can have new business models, even if 80% income tax rates are not on the agenda.”

* Finding fairness in the ‘grounded city’

How do we reframe the city’s potential? Where can we find an alternative imaginary about something other than competitive success? The fairer city is a good enough ideal, even though fairness is a peculiarly Anglo-American idea (there is no Italian, French or German word which can express the evocative and generic English idea of fairness). The problem is its international unattainability through income redistribution in today’s world.

Income tax rates well above 50% on immobile firms and citizens were part of a post-1945 conjuncture in the industrialised countries, when there was political pressure from an organised working class through trade unionism (and parties aligned with labour) in a system where the prudent bourgeois were minded to make concessions. We shall not see high tax rates again in the absence of such conditions. The centre-left’s nostalgic attachment to redistributive taxation has faded, and all parties now increasingly problematise fairness as a matter of managing internal competition: the result is standard packages of policy remedies whose reach exceeds their grasp.

It is time to think more radically, by challenging the assumptions and reversing the principles of the competitiveness imaginary. On this basis, we propose a new imaginary of the “grounded city”, where each city does not compete externally with others. Instead it reviews its activities, then aims to make locally relevant improvements in its internal capacity to provide a larger number of people with the basic goods and services that provide the material basis for social life.

The grounded city is a fairer city delivered through radically different policies, necessary because the current packages of policy fixes for unfairness are inadequate to the scale of the problems and their drivers. In centre-right and centre-left variants, these policy fixes are set in a frame of managing internal competition: the centre-right backs jobs and schooling as a basis for more equal competition; the centre-left favours an overlapping package of schooling plus minimum wages and some redistribution through family credits and such like to compensate for disadavantage. Either way, the conscience of our competitive age is about “equal opportunities” through policy remedies which, in our view, are necessary but not sufficient for a better, fairer city.

Some of the policy novelties are valuable. The new technologies for procedural fairness, complete with opportunity commissions and policy advisers in city hall, are invaluable in preventing discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation, and they continue to be necessary. But procedural fairness does not secure substantive outcomes in high-income countries, where the proliferation of anti-discrimination policies since the 1970s has been accompanied by sharply increasing inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. These inequalities are materialised in all our cities by residential segregation around hierarchised districts, from the desirable, gentrified suburb to the sink estate.

How and why does the concern for fairness co-exist with growing inequality in our cities? Because the fairer city is so far an aspiration which does not any longer come with any kind of politically actionable and substantive policy programme that has the leverage to deliver fairness in terms of broad outcomes.

Fairness in terms of outcomes is, of course, much harder to achieve than fairness in terms of process on social housing allocation. For example, schools as institutions and teachers as professionals deserve our social respect and financial support; but there is no evidence that they are up to the social engineering task of compensating for the many other kinds of disadvantage generated in the home and within the neighbourhood. The most likely outcome is that centrist politicians announce the aim and then simply give school teachers another good kicking for failing to achieve the unachievable.
So if fairness policies in a competitive frame promise more than they can deliver, why not change the frame by reversing what might be called the principles of operation underlying the practice of the competitive city?

One master assumption underpins the ideology of competitive cities. Boris Johnson stated this assumption in his 2013 speech on the relevance of Margaret Thatcher: “Like it or not, the free-market economy is the only show in town. Britain is competing in an increasingly impatient and globalised economy, in which the competition is getting ever stiffer.”

But this claim mistakes the competitive part of the economy for the much larger whole which contains many sheltered sectors. It leads London’s mayor and many others towards city policies focused on sectors of the future which have a supposedly key role in international competition in tradable goods and services: the corollary is neglect and mismanagement of what we call the foundational economy, and the sphere of sheltered production of many other mundane goods and services which are important to the welfare of every citizen.

The idea of a heterogeneous economy means only that the economy has different spheres or zones which run on different principles. The historian Fernand Braudel argued in Civilisation and Capitalism “there were not one but several economies” from the 15th to the 18th century, with one economic zone above and one below the market and competition. Were he writing now, Braudel’s injunction would be to explore present-day economic life in ways that recognise its multiplicity and its organisation into zones and spheres which have different internal logics and variable salience for material welfare.

The tradable competitive sphere has all the key sectors which associate themselves with a high-income present and a glamorous future. Here we have wholesale finance and markets, the prestige end of business services in accountancy, law and consulting, anything digital or supposedly knowledge-based from media to advertising, together with the parts of manufacturing which have high tech associations. The object of competitive global city policy is to attract more of these glamour activities to locate in their city, adjacent to a hub international airport.

The metal bashing, plastics moulding and assembly work of manufacturing is then to be relegated to industrial districts and cities which are in the hinterland of an Asian country, half a world away from the US or Europe. The industrial working class becomes increasingly Chinese, while the successful post-industrial global city draws in service workers to meet the needs of the frequent flyers in business class who use the local hub airport. Tradable goods and services – from smart phones to call centres – become ever cheaper without commensurate benefits in well-being and quality of life for city dwellers in either Asia or California.

Glamour front-end activities of branding and design have the power to subordinate and claim the profit of assemblers and suppliers; as Apple does at the expense of Foxconn’s Chinese workforce in Shenzhen. The effects of such corporate success in western cities are muted because financialised companies sterilise reserves offshore; and at city level, corporate success often turns into crowding out (not trickle down), as when Google workers compete for San Francisco housing.

In contrast, we seek to define another sphere of the economy, geared to producing mundane, foundational goods and services that have three inter-related characteristics: first, they are necessary to everyday life; second, all citizens regardless of income consume them; and third, they are distributed according to population through branches and networks. The list of such activities includes: the privatised pipe and cable utilities together with transport; some traditionally private activities such as retail banking, supermarket food retailing and food processing; and some traditionally state-provided activities including health, education, and welfare or social care, which are now increasingly outsourced. Such activities employ 30-40% of the workforce in all the world’s cities, yet they figure only as instrumentalities in the competitive city paradigm because city boosters recognise the competitive city must have infrastructural improvement.

Against this, we would argue that in Shenzhen or San Francisco, the ordinary citizen’s welfare, material well-being and cultural participation all depend very directly on the provision of an adequate quantum of foundational goods and services which are priced or de-commodified so that they are accessible to the majority of city population. These issues about foundational supply are not abolished by “economic development”, they only change form: in a Brazilian favela or an African shanty town, the issue will be absence of sanitation and paying for electricity; in London the issue will be the absence of reasonably priced family housing for lower-income workers with jobs in the central city.

Our argument is simple. If we want fairness, then we should focus on the foundational economy and reorganise these activities to make them more grounded. This requires new kinds of policies which build on the naturally sheltered part of the economy and more or less reverse the operating principles of your local city hall as it has pursued competitiveness.”