Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

Towards the end of the 1980s I had a period of research leave at Durham and took advantage of this to do the research which resulted in Beyond The Inner City Open University Press 1989. The subtitle to this book was: ‘The Changing City and how to understand it’. I had done some research during the 80s for Blyth Valley Council in Cramlington New Town, again using Durham students as interviewers (and I am sure they were paid this time) – and again they found the experience interesting and enjoyable. Even when working in North Shields the CDP team were very well aware that we could not understand the CDP area which had a population of about 15,000 without reference to the wider conurbation of which it was a part. In my research in the late 80s In Beyond the Inner City I did not deal with the whole of the conurbation but rather with that part of it north River Tyne comprising  Newcastle and North Tyneside Metropolitan Boroughs with the addition of Blyth Valley District in Northumberland.

Cramlington New Town in Blyth Valley had been developed by Northumberland County Council, not a New Town Development Corporation, to take overspill population from Tyneside and particularly Newcastle. Within Newcastle’s boundary was Killingworth New Town intended to rehouse people from slum clearance areas in Newcastle in the dreadful social housing blocks. This overspill development was not new. Longbenton within North Tyneside had been built as a Newcastle council  housing estate just as the Leam Estate in Felling had been built outside its then boundary by Gateshead County Borough.

The book had three sections:

Part One – the Changing city and how to understand it

Introduction

 C2 Locality – Social Process and Explanation

Part Two – The inner and outer city

C3 North Shields and Cramlington – two localities and their city and region

C4 Production and base in two localities

C5 The question of land

C6 Socio-spatial segregation in Northern Tyneside

C7 The state and society in Northern Tyneside

C8 The inner city and beyond in 1988.

Part Three – Towards 2000 – strategies and tactics for change

C9 Beyond the Inner City – planning for change

C10 The Sources of Collective Action for Change

I read through the chapter on social process and explanation and found that what I said then still holds good today. I dismissed Alhusserian bullshit for the arrant nonsense it was. That includes the Castells of The Urban Question which I had reviewed severely.  Despite his apparent shift in tone in later work in my view Castells never quite abandoned the form of determinism of the economic from his Althusserian past.  I said this in a review article on him which I had been asked by the review editor of journal to write. The review editor liked it but the overall editor turned it down as ‘a demolition job on Castells’ (which it was but that is a valid role of criticism). I noted that Castells was associated with the journal and seemed therefore to be above criticism.

More seriously, since to my mind Castells’ day has been and gone, this is what I said about the realist programme:

“Realism offers a way of explaining what is observed, for example allows us to account for observed socio-spatial polarization in terms of the generative mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production. I am not persuaded that if offers a way of dealing with human agency.”

I quoted Gramsci:

“It has been forgotten that in the case of the very common expression ‘ historical materialism’ one should put the accent on the first term – historical, and not on the second which is metaphysical in origin. The philosophy of praxis is absolute historicism, the absolute secularization and earthiness (I do like that word) of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is along this line that one must trace the thread of a new conception of the world.”

Reading over my chapter on “The question of Land” reinforces the importance of agency in the trajectories of urban systems. I dismissed Harvey’s arguments, typical of capital logic “Marxists” (who never grasp Marx’s views, complex and differing though they were, on the role of agency) that capital always has its own way in urban development, and likewise argued with Massey and Catalano about the, for me, reality of interests derived from land in the process of capitalist politics and policy formation. For example, whilst there was significant social housing construction in the area of Tynemouth County Borough (of which North Shields was a part) in the inter-war years, the local authority devoted in my view rather more attention and just as much resources to the assembly of land parcels which were used for the creation of mass owner occupation as a tenure. This was also true of Cramington and Killingworth in the 1960s and 70s,. Land matters and who owns and / or controls what is done with it (not always the same thing) is vital for understanding and shaping the trajectory of urban systems.

One thing has changed in the nearly forty years since I wrote Beyond the Inner City. In addition to the role of land as a source of rental income or the basis of capitalist production, including production of housing on which I agreed with Ambrose, land has now a crucial function as a store of value. This is most marked in world cities like London and New York where properties are held empty by absentee owners for this purpose alone, but it true everywhere. It is not merely an urban phenomenon. In the UK the absurd price of agricultural land which far outweighs the incomes which can  be gained from farming it, is not merely or even mostly a matter of potential development gain by change of use for primarily residential construction but also a matter of the very and super rich holding land as a store of value with substantial tax advantages in so doing.

Harvey’s crude and essentially positivist (did he ever really abandon the positivism of Explanation in Geography?) version of Marxism demonstrates that he did not ‘Read Capital Politically) as Cleaver has urged us to do. There are flashes in his Social Justice and the City of an understanding of the role of agency but his deployment of the sterile apparatus of dialectical materialism in a rather crude form means that the role of reformist politics in challenging the logics of capital accumulation was not recognized. The shift from welfarist capitalism in the Keynes / Beveridge mode as a social regime to neo-liberal Montpelerin capitalism has changed North Tyneside, very much for the worse.

 I read over the last four chapters of Beyond the Inner City with a strong sense of pessimism of the intellect. There were signs of radicalism in North Tyneside’s ‘Left’ Labour council in the 80s and early 90s but as is so often the case the ‘radicals’ became part of the state apparatus of neo-liberalism. I had quite a lot of respect for Brian Flood, an engineering professional, who was the original leader of North Tyneside Council although he spent the last part of his public service in roles in Blairite health care. I had none whatsoever for Steve Byers, the Deputy Leader, who ended up in Blair’s cabinet with roles in relation to industry and the regions / local government in neither of which did he display any sign of radicalism. He concluded his career by involvement in a lobbying scandal and being banned from parliament.

The book argued strongly for democratically based planning with substantial engagement with local people in civil society as the way forward towards 2000. This was before impending climate catastrophe was in sight, at least for me and the great majority of people. Planning is now wholly subordinated to the needs of real estate and finance capital and there is minimal public engagement. When there is any engagement, it is tokenistic. Gill Callaghan, Emma Uprichard and I argue strongly for planning based around radical egalitarian scenarios in our Global Crises- Complexity Based Research and Practice for Social Transformation (2025).

When I look at the materials which provided the research basis for Beyond the Inner City I see that they used quantitative and qualitative materials to describe the trajectory of the urban system under examination. Data series described social and industrial change. Small area census data at ten year intervals described changing local patterns of residence and household characteristics. I have just carried out a similar exercise based on the 2021 census and will write about that anon. Things are very different. I used policy documents of all sorts, good coverage of industrial issues in the local press – much less available now, and interviews including very useful interviews with local business people who were very willing to talk and outline their understanding of change. I also of course interviewed local political and community activists who were equally informative and helpful. I did not use focus groups which would have been a good idea and is something I have done since. When I reflect on what was  still, just, a period when democratic local government had some real powers, although nothing like the powers of during the Keynes / Beveridge regime, and compare it with powerless and vacuous local government now – for an example see the North East of England Combined Authority under its nitwit Mayor – I do so with nostalgia and regret. Still optimism of the will is in order.