CRESC Working Paper Series - Working Paper No. 141 - How cities work: a policy agenda for the grounded city

In different kinds of city, the same principles of staged invisibility and causal ambiguity have operated to protect the modernist architects and town planners of the 1960s, or the 2010s new urban economists like Glaeser and Florida in the US and Overman in the UK. [...] Later in this article we draw on the work of two historians, Braudel and Tilly, who provide an alternative ontology of the city where growth and decline in the aggregate of output and employment is determined externally by the city’s changing relation to its hinterland outside the city walls. [...] Beyond the city walls: external governors of urban growth and decline This section aims to clear the way for a grounded city concept by establishing the basic proposition that city growth and decline (of output and employment) are usually determined by the relation of the city with the hinterland from which it consolidates revenue. [...] As Exhibit 5 indicates for the UK, almost half of the income gains between the mid-1990s and 2010 ended up in the wallets of the top 20% of households, with the bottom 20% gaining a mere 4.2% share. [...] The sub-text message of standard policy is that the successful are enjoying the ‘well earned’ rewards of the right kind of density and agglomeration and the unsuccessful have been told what they need to do.