We tend to think of New York City as a financial capital rather than a manufacturing city, and this first impression is, for the most part, correct. Even in the relatively early days of American capitalism and urban development, New York City rapidly established itself as a capital of finance and trading relative to Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. However, manufacturing and industrial uses -- in particular, port trading functions -- were an important part of New York's development. A walk through downtown today takes you through New York's manufacturing past, passing, in turn:
- the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the tragedy that helped to define the industrial labor movement;
- the industrial warehouses of Soho and TriBeca, that once housed factories, goods and commodities, were actually once called 'Hell's Hundred Acres' because of the neighborhood's propensity towards fire (history here), and are now converted to decidedly upscale lofts and boutiques;
- the former (and still present) sweatshops and factories of Chinatown; and
- the formerly working, now disused, waterfront of the Lower East Side.
In general, the best analyses of the manufacturing sector generally come from government agencies including the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (specific analysis of the decline of the manufacturing sector is here) and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (historical facts and figures here). A “powerful new tool” that would be neat if it worked (it won't work for me) is the Location Quotient Calculator, that calculates sector and industry breakdowns by U.S. total, states, counties, and metropolitan areas.
The best specific analysis I've seen of the manufacturing situation in New York is from Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, an excellent, liberal, economic development thinktank. In his 2003 testimony to the City Council, and the excellent report, “Engine Failure”, I think Bowles' approach to, and points about, manufacturing are generally correct when he says:
“I’m not here today to convince you that manufacturing is the answer to the city’s economic problems or that it will be one of New York’s leading growth industries in the future. But I do strongly believe that with better public policies, the city could be doing a much better job of retaining manufacturers, enabling existing industrial firms to grow within the five boroughs and cultivating new start-ups in niche areas ranging from ethnic food production to high-end furniture making....”So, if I gave Daniel the impression that I am against manufacturing in all of New York, then I probably overstated the case. There are good arguments for specialized niche manufacturing and start-up businesses as important components of high-growth economies, and the “Engine Failure” report, when I read it a couple of years ago, seemed to have a lot of them. Cities such as Chicago and San Francisco seem to have had success with planned or protected industrial zones (Pratt Institute has a summary here) and I won't quibble with that.
“Make no mistake; the manufacturing sector has suffered significant job losses nationwide as companies have increasingly shifted production to less expensive factories overseas. But few cities have fared as badly as New York....”
“New York can no longer afford to write off industries like manufacturing and wholesale trade.... manufacturing and wholesale trade need to be one part of a new, more comprehensive economic development strategy -- one that seeks to diversify the local economy, create a better climate for entrepreneurs and growing firms, tap natural assets like the city’s growing immigrant population, and use more of the city’s geography.”
I do maintain, however, that given Manhattan's centrality to the city, that manufacturing is probably not an appropriate activity for the island, and besides, most manufacturing today already exists in the outer boroughs. This wrinkle, however, I think is at the heart of Daniel's objections to my statement that manufacturing has no future in Manhattan, which is less of an analytical argument rather than an emotional one. I don't say this to be patronizing, it is just that (for those of you who know me) I am a bit less sympathetic to emotion than analysis. Daniel writes:
“I’m afraid that he is only going to be right if we understand the market as the force with priority, as the legitimate and just organizer of our lives. In principle he would oppose state interventions and promotes individual agency, or the market to configure our surroundings. Personally the long hands of the market and the state equally shake me. In an ideal and pure market, would other civic and social institutions be subject to relocation? Temples, libraries, health centers, recreational areas… What is the hierarchy, the selection of the regulated, protected, elements?”There are two things going on here. Daniel objects to the demand-driven model of spatial location -- that is, the highest value activity gets to locate where it wants to -- and that the cultural character of places like Chinatown will be lost in time. In the case of manufacturing in particular, I think it is right and legitimate that we think of it as an economic activity, and as such, it is not entirely inappropriate to me that it will eventually pass from Manhattan. My three main arguments for this are the dynamic patterns of urban change in space and time; environmental desires connected to wealth and development; and outright competition from other countries.
“Let's imagine for an instant that Chinatown will disappear like this and only traces and memories will be left. This is the consolidation that is beginning to take place in Washington DC. In a future message I hope to be able to tell in detail its twisted history. It is sufficient to say here that there is an aesthetic regulation that forces to maintain in the area Chinese elements, bilingual signs even on the new Irish taverns. But there is no regulation that guarantees that the Chinese quarter will be, precisely that, Chinese. It is simple to invest in urban make up.”
First, the passage of industries and communities over space and time is an entirely normal process in cities. As the history article above pointed out, Soho was originally residential, and in the past one hundred years has gone from residential to industrial to slum to residential and retail. Why particular industries and communities aggregate in specific areas -- i.e. the process of spatial agglomeration -- is neither a well-understood nor uniform process, but it is certainly not a static process. The city is in fact a site of dynamic and successive relocation, and the uses and users of places in cities always change! If we were to 'preserve' the character, say, of the East End of London, what would we be preserving, exactly? Would it be the original Victorian slum and manufacturing uses, the subsequent waves of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, or the Asian immigrants who have replaced them?
Daniel's question as to whether or not civic or social institutions should also move, I think, is meant to be slightly absurd, in saying that the market should have no bearing on the location of our cultural capital, but this too is a fundamental feature of urban change. For example, one of the major landowners in most American cities is the Catholic Church, and churches have been closing and converting to other uses for years, as a result of declining church attendance, a process further accelerated by the church's disposition of land in the wake of multiple and systemic sexual abuse scandals. Nonetheless, I don't think this occurs because of the market, which is Daniel's fundamental objection -- rather it is the inevitable outcome of long-term social change.
Second, to get back to manufacturing, is that we have an overall declining need for it, and we are less willing to tolerate its environmental costs than before. Most societies when they reach a particular level of development begin to value environmental goods such as clean air and water more highly, and manufacturing clearly has negative impacts on the local environment.
(Of course, to criticize the over-extension of my own criticism, the 'free-market environmentalist' stance is somewhat hypocritical because I don't think that there is any proof that people value global ecological health particularly highly, yet -- they just want the pollution away from their local environment. Pollution then just becomes a more distant externality that people choose to ignore. So, when the English talk about their vast increases in air quality, I think they are ignoring the obvious fact that they have basically just exported their dirty manufacturing processes, and imported fossil fuels that are cleaner than the original coal they were using. I don't have a problem with the fact that this is all in exchange for service jobs).
Third, whether we like it or not, we live in a world of competition. Any American or European who opposes this should seriously consider whether or not what they are willing to give up for the alternative, because we are not, emphatically not guaranteed to be wealthier than the rest of humanity. All of Thomas Friedman's recent columns in the New York Times, such as this one, “Racing to the Top” -- and whether or not you like his easily digestible and overly repeated phrases like the 'world is flat' -- boil down to the fact that there are roughly four to five billion relatively poor people around the globe who are willing, and waiting, to take a chance to earn their way out of poverty. So, how, exactly, does anyone think that we are going to hang onto manufacturing jobs in this country? Does someone want to suggest an alternative to developing higher and faster, if only to preserve our relative economic status? And though I won't argue that the process is painless, the developed world isn't switching to service jobs because globalization, free trade or “markets” are being imposed on them, rather, it is because economic concepts such as competitive advantage and increasing productivity really do exist and do take place. I am struck by the virtual unanimous opinion on this subject among economists and development experts on this subject: the left-wing economist Angry Bear wrote rather eloquently on globalization recently.
OK, despite my highly structured criticism, I will tell you where I believe that Daniel is asking the right question -- but I don't know the answer, and don't who knows the answer. Contrary to Daniel's impression -- that I probably give when I usually give my usual contrary opinions -- though I do believe that capitalism and transparency are extremely productive and in fact necessary in the short term, I don't believe that unfettered economic growth, or individual agency, is ultimately going to lead us to where we want to be. The direction of economic growth, and all of the effects associated with it, are not as clear as they are usually made out to be, and I think Daniel is right to ask where we are heading as a society when capitalism promotes, and indeed fetishizes, individual agency and desires. This is a question that I often ask myself as I consider what the state of grace that we repeatedly refer to as “sustainability” might look like.
I found myself reading two articles this weekend that spoke precisely to this sentiment. In Pankaj Mishra's review of William Pfaff's new book on violence and utopia in the May 26th New York Review of Books, he writes about Pfaff's skepticism about the notion of progress:
“Pfaff notes that despite the ample evidence against them provided by the barbarisms of the twentieth century, 'naive and desiccated versions of the theory of historical progress provide a vocabulary in which the declaration of governments are still phrased, editorials written, and a good deal of the routine work of the academy is conducted'. This may be because what he calls 'the myth of secular salvation' had 'generally replaced religion in Western high culture' in the nineteenth century. Certainly the current version of this myth -- that democracy, free enterprise, globalization, and technology will save humanity from violence and chaos -- is now commonplace among powerful elites around the world, invisibly shaping the prejudices and assumptions that an average issue of The Economist, or a column by Thomas Friedman, contains. But as Pfaff put it in Condemned to Freedom,Or, as David Orr writes in The Nature of Design, a really rather terrific book:
'A faith that the free play of market forces will eventually end in Good is, in fact, more 'absurd' than religious belief, for there, at least, there is a presumption of an intelligent Agent Who writes straight with His crooked lines'”.
“The unfolding problems of human ecology are not solvable by repeating old mistakes in new and more sophisticated and powerful ways. We need a deeper change of the kind Albert Einstein had in mind when he said that the same manner of thought that created problems could not solve them (quoted in McDonough and Braungart, 1998, Cradle to Cradle, p. 92)”So, again, the question for all of us is, what kind of lives, cities, economics, and earth, do we ultimately want to have? And if manufacturing isn't the answer -- I don't think it is -- what is?
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2 comments:
what?
Good post
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