Richardson Dilworth - How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development

THE CITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.

Edited by
Richardson Dilworth
and
Timothy P. R. Weaver

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-5225-5

Robert Henry Cox and Daniel Bland

Richardson Dilworth and Timothy P. R. Weaver

Joel Rast

Sally Ford Lawton

Marcus Anthony Hunter

Jason Hackworth

Lester K. Spence

Thomas Ogorzalek

Douglas S. Reed

Amy Widestrom

Mara Sidney

Timothy P. R. Weaver

Eleonora Pasotti

William Hurst

Debjani Bhattacharyya

Vanessa Watson

Robert Henry Cox and Daniel Bland

Constructivist social scientists take it as self-evident that human societies are constructed by the people who inhabit them. The physical world does not prescribe a particular way that any society should be ordered, its order coming instead from the choices made by the people who comprise these societies.

Cities are also historically and socially constructed, not natural creations. This is the basic message of this volume and makes a compelling case for the value of a constructivist approach to understanding urban political development. At a time when constructivism is growing across the social sciences, Richardson Dilworth, Timothy P. R. Weaver, and the other contributors to this volume have made a strong case for understanding why ideas have been the real drivers behind urban political development and why a constructivist understanding is more persuasive than conventional approaches.

What distinguishes constructivist from conventional approaches is that these approaches see the social world as analogous to the natural world, therefore requiring the same manner of investigation to reveal its secrets. Constructivists, by contrast, assume that a big difference between the natural and the social world is that human beings shape their social orders by imbuing them with meaning. There are physical and biological elements to any social order. Families have biological relationships; safety and security can be enhanced by living in close proximity; and we have the ability to construct durable shelter. All these things we can investigate using conventional methods of analysis.

An urban space can be described in terms of its physical characteristics, but it also has a meaning to the people who inhabit it. Open plazas can be spaces for relaxation and contemplation or for commerce and exchange. Some buildings can provide spaces for various rituals, ranging from spiritual to hygienic. The buildings can be described in terms of their physical characteristics and the functional needs they serve, but the description is incomplete without also explicating their meanings to the actors who built and inhabited them.

Explicating the meaning and significance of social spaces requires allowing actors to speak about their own subjective meanings. This in turn requires that researchers appreciate those subjective meanings as being constitutive of the social order they wish to understand. Conventional approaches take the opposite approach. In a conventional inquiry, the investigator begins by defining terms, looking for evidence of those terms, and refining her or his understanding following a test of the terms in situ. All the thinking and acting is done by the researcher.

The approach advocated in this volume, by contrast, is to not construct a priori definitions of terms, preferring instead to embrace the ideasand the meanings they evokeas they are used by the actors themselves. The objective is to reveal how humans think and reason about the urban spaces they create.

Another important difference is that constructivists are concerned with shared meanings. It matters to know what a key decision maker thinks, but it also matters to know what ideas have resonance with a broader group of people. Understandings of the world, like cities themselves, are built by people who create and reproduce common meanings for their surroundings. For conventional views, by contrast, the meaning that matters is the one constructed by a solitary researcher who devises his terms and outlines the relationships among them. The conventional researcher seeks conceptual precision, theoretical elegance, and simplicity of causes. Constructivists, by contrast, assume that the world is a messier place and seek to explain how humans strive to navigate and make sense of its complexity. Needless to say, we get much richer and more textured understanding from a constructivist approach.

We see this point illustrated when we consider the role of interests in social science research. As the editors of this volume point out, the notions of interests are dominant in depictions of how actors influence urban development. But the concept of interest often employed by conventional scholars of urban political development is one that is devised by the researcher and ascribed to the actors. Indeed, the only way we could say that people act against their own interests is by having a notion of their interest that is independent of what they think themselves. A constructivist, on the other hand, takes it as a given that people act in their own interests (if that is what they say they are doing) but then seeks to explore why they define their interests in the way they do. The key issue is to find out what their interests are to them, not to compare them to some objective standard of interest.

This remark does not mean that interests are purely subjective or unrelated to material and institutional factors. What it means is that actors define their interests by interpreting their surroundings in certain ways, which might be grounded in particular historical and cultural meanings. From a constructivist standpoint, in other words, interests are complex and changing and do more than simply reflect the seemingly objective economic status of actors.

The same can be said for institutions. For the past thirty years, institutional analyses have been pervasive across the social sciences. Institutions are most commonly formulated as constraints; obstacles that savvy actors learn to maneuver around as they pursue their interests. Institutions are furthermore assumed to provide stability, forcing actions to follow a logic of incremental adjustment and preventing dramatic departures from the status quo. Institutions make change difficult. However, institutionalists recognize that change does happen, though they include it in their models as exogenous forces or shocks, such as unforeseen events.