Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development

The study of urban politics in the US is now dominated by issues of local economic development. These are situated analytically with respect to a more global space economy. This is the New Urban Politics. The central logic of the New Urban Politics is one of cities or communities competing for mobile capital. This competition supposedly has adverse distributional consequences for those living in cities or communities. Three areas of critical contention are focused on: the identity of the competing agents; the concept of firm competition underpinning the central idea of mobile capitals; and the distributional consequences of the competition for those capitals. Serious problems in abstraction and in the concept of capital adopted in this literature are identified.