Who Wins When the City Becomes a Business: Molotch's Growth Machine

The real winners when the city becomes a business are the place entrepreneurs, the concept with which the sociologist Harvey Molotch answered in 1976, in his article The City as a Growth Machine, the question of who really gains when growing becomes the shared urban goal. A crane rises over a neighbourhood and the project is announced as a victory for the whole city, with investment, jobs and transformation; Molotch directs attention to the coalition behind it, landowners, developers, banks, local media, utilities and politicians, whose common interest is to raise the exchange value of land and who turn that particular interest into a narrative of the general interest that almost nobody questions.

The coalition: developers, politicians, media and place entrepreneurs

The machine starts when different actors discover a shared interest in land. The developer seeks to raise property values, the politician presents growth as a collective goal and a source of jobs and taxes, the local newspaper sells more in a growing city, universities, sports teams and utilities gain from more population and activity. No actor needs exactly the same interest; it is enough that all gain if land is worth more. Molotch and John Logan developed the idea in Urban Fortunes (1987) and showed that the growth machine dominates American local politics because its members have resources, time and access that residents lack.

Use value versus exchange value: who pays for growth

The central tension is between use value and exchange value. A plot has, for those who use it, a use value, the neighbourhood, the shops, the relationships, the affordable home, and for the coalition an exchange value, what it could be worth as property. Growth systematically favours the second: land is rezoned, infrastructure built, projects subsidised and rules relaxed to raise rents, and the costs, displacement, congestion, loss of services and identity, fall on those who lived there. The machine, Molotch shows, does not distribute the benefits of growth; it concentrates them among those who own the land that appreciates.

The promise of jobs and what growth really guarantees

The promise of jobs is the argument that sustains the machine, and Molotch examines it with scepticism. Local growth does not necessarily create more jobs per resident or better wages, because the population attracted competes for the positions and because large projects, stadiums, convention centres, subsidised corporate headquarters, rarely return to the city what they cost, as later studies of tax incentives have confirmed. What growth does guarantee is the appreciation of land, which is why the coalition defends it regardless of its effect on employment.

Resistance, limits of the model and what to ask when a crane appears

Resistance exists and Molotch studied it. Neighbourhood movements defending use value, against highways, demolitions and towers, have won in whole cities: San Francisco, Santa Barbara or Boulder limited growth in the 1970s and 1980s, and rent control, inclusionary zoning and land trusts are instruments that take land away from the machine. Critics note that the model describes the United States, with local governments dependent on property tax, better than cities with strong states, and that opposition to growth can become exclusion when wealthy neighbourhoods block affordable housing.

Molotch's lesson is that when a city announces growth one should ask who owns the land that will be worth more. The growth machine presents as common good what is the profit of a coalition, and dismantling that narrative is the first step toward an urban politics that measures development by the use value it creates, housing, services, decent work, rather than the exchange value it captures. The crane, in his reading, is not a promise for everyone but a sign that someone has already calculated how much they will earn.