From the Local to the Hyperlocal
Latimer, Trevor. Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2023). 288 p. $29.94 paper.
Vey, Jennifer and Nate Storring (eds.). Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2022). 270 p. $32.16 paper.
Mark Chou (Australian Catholic University)
Spruce Street Harbor Park, situated on the banks of Philadelphia’s Delaware River, is widely regarded as a poster child of urban revitalization done right. Previously a non-descript and under-utilized strip of waterfront land, the Penn’s Landing site was slowly transformed, over several seasons starting back in 2013, into a public space that’s now decked out with floating beaches, hammocks, flea markets, a mist garden, an outdoor games space, LED art installations, and a boardwalk lined with pop-up bars and eateries.
For locals like West Philadelphia’s Caya Simonsen, what’s wonderful about the park is it “seems like a place where you might have to pay to get in, but it’s free, and everyone can access it.” That’s been the park’s greatest achievement: transforming a vacant piece of land, previously cut off from the rest of the city by the ten-lane I-95, into a public space for all Philadelphians.
The brainchild responsible for the park’s creation is the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), a public-private partnership (PPP) charged with managing Philadelphia’s waterfront development and revitalizing them “to provide a benefit to all of the citizens and visitors of the city.” Like other PPPs of its kind, the DRWC’s mission has been clear: work with city, state, and federal agencies to realize a hyperlocal vision of development that can truly be positive sum.
Trevor Latimer, writing in his new book Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism, agrees. For him, Spruce Street Habor Park represents the type of development that makes good sense from a localist perspective. By benefiting locals “without robbing Peter to pay Paul” (p.81), what DRWC has done is enhance the economic well-being of the local area while also improving the welfare of locals, who are now better able to utilize and enjoy this public space. It’s a development that actually “makes people’s lives go better overall” (p.69). And that’s the key: the benefit is shared by all Philadelphians, not just a privileged few.
This is the type of localism that stacks up. But all too frequently, as Latimer argues in his book, local development initiatives – and, more importantly, the broader localist mindset driving them – don’t. “A lot of what we think of as local development turns out to be zero-sum at best, negative-sum (‘pure waste’) at worst”, Latimer writes (p.81).
That’s the focus of Small Isn’t Beautiful: to shed light on localism’s dangers. This might seem a trite topic, but as Latimer shows, localism and localist thinking is now everywhere. It’s not just visible in urban revitalization projects like Spruce Street Habor Park, it’s there in America’s education policy, housing regulations, policing, welfare programs, firearm regulations, even in Donald Trump’s discourse (“the relationships people value most are local”), not to mention in the self-described liberals who went local to defy Trump during his term in Washington.
And that’s the trouble for Latimer. Localism has become a fuzzy catch-all solution for problems as disparate as the “ills of globalization, the sclerosis of the welfare state, entrenched partisanship, the democratic deficit, the culture wars, anomie, apathy, and, in one extreme variety, the failure of liberalism itself” when, in fact, the contemporary idea of localism emerged as a specific antidote to the issue of excessive centralization (p. 13).
In other words, somewhere along the line, the case for going local stopped being about evidence and more about ideology. The fix that Latimer identifies in Small Isn’t Beautiful is a return to the evidence – the data, the benefits, the costs – so that the case for going local on any given situation or policy can be systematically scrutinized away from normative claims.
But while that’s Small Isn’t Beautiful’s stated aim, it’s another recent book that sets out principles, guidelines, and case studies for interrogating the evidence for going local in a more systematic way. That book is Jennifer Vey and Nate Storring’s edited collection, Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World.
Hyperlocal offers some crucial insights about assessing not just the case for place governance, but localism more broadly. For instance, in her chapter on PPPs, Sheila Foster writes that the “virtue of being able to avoid the red tape, bureaucracy, and inaction in which city parks departments often become mired” must be weighed against the costs of privatizing public goods: “enabling gentrification, exacerbating ethnic and class tensions, and creating a two-tiered park system that disadvantages parks in less affluent neighborhoods” (p.75). If the benefits of the former are outweighed by the latter, then the case for a particular PPP should be questioned.
Conversely, where PPPs show the capacity to encompass diverse stakeholders – like private interests, advocacy groups, residents, donors, and local governments – in co-managing large urban spaces, they can be seen to “serve an important coordinating and stabilizing function, enabling private and public actors to undertake together significant responsibility for urban…management” (p.76). Key considerations like these are only ever hinted at by Latimer without ever being fully fleshed out.
Or take business improvement districts (BIDs) – a different type of public-private partnership – as another example.
In her chapter on the case for BIDs, Jill Gross highlights the diverse factors that determine whether these hyperlocal institutions become agents of community building and development or community breaking and erasing.
As Gross writes, when BIDs act as community builders they tend to do several things: create to a shared vision; share revenues; and adopt inclusive public-facing decision-making processes. Importantly, community builders “engage in activities in the interests of the broadest stakeholder base, pursuing strategies in which most stakeholders achieve some modicum of gain, while also sharing the losses as broadly as possible as well” (p. 136).
When BIDs fail these tests, they can become something quite different. Indeed, when they divide the community, distribute benefits inequitably, or worse yet benefit some at the expense of others, BIDs can be community breakers. They can even erase communities if they adopt “strategies designed to replace an area’s assets, culture, and heritage with something new, removing existing businesses and purging areas of users such as street venders and people experiencing homelessness” (p.137).
The irony of Latimer’s book, then, is that had he taken his own call to look at the evidence more seriously, which would have led him to examine some of the factors outlined above, he might have reached a slightly different conclusion about Spruce Street Harbor Park.
Indeed, where Latimer principally saw the park as an exemplar of local development that benefits a diverse population, a more detailed assessment drawing on some of the considerations outlined by Vey and Storring would likely have exposed how this integrative public space essentially advances “the aims of powerful market actors” and is actually anathema to the creation of something more important: “integrative neighborhoods” that lessen racial and economic segregation in the surrounding area, as scholars like Susanna Schaller and Sandra Guinand point out.
Floating beaches and pop-up eateries notwithstanding, it’s unlikely that we can count this as good evidence for going local.
Read the full book review here.