In this book, Michael Storper covers a great deal of territory in his exploration of the factors affecting urban and metropolitan development. His scholarly background as an economic geographer includes numerous works addressing various aspects of development, and Keys to the City appears to represent the culmination of many years of work on this issue. The general subject will be of interest to scholars of urban politics and economic development, even if much of the literature Storper draws upon may not be too familiar to political scientists working in these fields.
The central questions addressed in the book concern why some cities grow and maintain sustainable growth patterns over time while other cities cycle back and forth between economic prosperity and decline. These questions have been addressed by scholars of urban politics and urban sociologists and are central to more recent debates about regionalism. Storper takes a different approach, however, combining qualitative methods and case studies with theoretically sophisticated quantitative methods. Further, Keys to the City is infused with the author’s knowledge of many of the world’s leading cities, which helps to balance some of the more dense academic discussions that appear throughout the chapters.
Storper’s work is divided into the four broad sections of economic context, institutional context, social interaction, and political context. The most substantive of these is Part I, which addresses the economic context of urban and regional development. Here, the author analyzes the age-old question of whether people follow jobs or vice versa. In the process, his work speaks to such well-known authors as Richard Florida, who argues that people relocating to more tolerant places leads to economic development, as well as to new neoclassical economists, who maintain that people move in search of various amenities and climate. Storper convincing lays out the shortcomings of these two approaches. Primarily through a case study of the U.S. Sunbelt, he shows that population migrations follow urban and regional economic growth. Although relatively brief, his multimethod approach convincingly demonstrates that jobs led the way, and the population followed.
Storper then builds on the arguments of the new Economic Geography (rooted in the work of such well-known analysts as Paul Krugman), to emphasize the notion that jobs and production are at the heart of urban development. He further develops his argument through another chapter dedicated to the significance of disruptive innovation. Storper then turns the work of Florida even more on its head by arguing that tolerance is a product of economic development, rather than a driver. He accurately points out that regions or cities that are quite diverse, thus seen as tolerant, are often racially and economically segregated when examined at the block or neighborhood level. This fact undermines those who optimistically claim that recruiting tolerant individuals is one method of economically reviving distressed central cities. For Storper, tolerance depends on “each group’s ability to manage diversity’s benefits and costs” (p. 74). Tolerant elites are able to enjoy the benefits of diversity in social and economic terms, yet live in neighborhoods and send their children to schools that are often not very diverse in any meaningful way.
The second part of the book, which addresses the institutional context of development, centers on informal institutions, specifically groups or communities, as opposed to government or other formal institutions. Informal institutions and historical accidents are both essential for communities, especially when faced with external economic challenges. The author also maintains that communities, as informal institutions, can either enhance or block economic development activities at the local level. For all of his insights in this section, however, his concluding remarks in Chapter 8 are a bit puzzling. Storper criticizes analyses that focus on city-specific economic and demographic trends as causal in terms of either development or decline. Yet the fates of many cities in the United States and beyond continue to be tied to one or another declining or booming industry or sector. For example, many rust-belt cities built on the steel industry continue to struggle today decades after the decline of steel manufacturing.
The third part of the book addresses social interaction and urban economies, and here Storper contributes to a growing number of literatures involving numerous questions related to the effects of technology and globalization. The most interesting chapter deals with the continued importance of face-to-face contact. Drawing on research from several disciplines, he describes the critical role that trust plays in human relationships, and ultimately how it becomes a significant component of local economic development. Specifically, assessing one’s motivation—an essential component of building trust—is an activity best done in a face-to-face setting: “And the most powerful such medium for verifying the intentions of another is direct face-to-face contact” (p. 171). Indeed, this chapter alone will be appeal to those interested in the larger questions related to the role of technology on social relations.
The book’s fourth section addresses the political context of urban and regional development. Storper describes the key differences between the context of urban development in the United States and that in many other industrial democracies. Because of fiscal decentralization in the United States, cities and regions are substantially left to their own devices, a fact that is especially apparent when specific cases of urban decline are analyzed. In the last substantive chapter, which deals with the issue of justice and cities, he calls into question the soundness of both the public choice and liberal approaches to urban and regional justice, ultimately arguing in favor of a social-choice model of urban and regional policy, while at the same time admitting the difficulties of implementing such an approach currently.
In his two chapters on the politics of urban development, Storper largely confines his discussion to the state and national context of local policymaking. Thus, he pays little attention to the many ways that local governments attempt to lure and direct development, a subject that has received extensive attention by scholars of U.S. urban politics for several decades. He also fails to incorporate any of the significant work on regionalism, limiting his discussion primarily to political philosophy. While the topic of urban and regional justice is, indeed, critically important, and one that political scientists need to participate in, the last section of the book would have benefited from explicit engagement with some of the more frequently debated works on regional politics.
Keys to the City contains a number of insights that will be of interest to urban scholars and policymakers. Storper’s work will be a challenge for the nonspecialist, however. Even the brief concluding chapter, entitled “Dear Policymaker,” is demanding, as it simply restates much of the specialized language of previous chapters in a briefer, rather than more digestible, way. Despite this criticism, the book is a worthwhile contribution to a number of different debates related to urban development, and is a one that scholars of urban politics should find very useful.
