The geographic critique of RTP-style public investment and economic development

In the past couple of weeks, I got into a bit of an online spat with my neighbor Chris Sevick in the comments section of Kevin's blog, particularly following this post and this post.  I have to confess, this is not the first time Chris and I have crossed words in an online forum, and I should probably know better by now.  Anyway, Chris has the tendency to jump into online discussions, and try to challenge the dominant conversational paradigm by bringing what he terms "philosophical" objections.  My problem with this is that, while I think Chris is a rather clever guy in person, I frequently find these objections (which I would term more theoretical than philosophical) rather unchallenging and reductive. 

But rather than get even deeper into the weeds there, the whole affair reminded me of something i've been meaning to link to for about six months.  (I haven't before because I keep meaning to write a detailed response and it keeps not happening.  So I'm giving up and just writing a brief thing here.)  I found it linked from, of all places, Richard Florida's website.  Florida is the academic who coined the term "creative class," and who has subsequently dubbed RTP as one of the top places supporting a "creative economy."  On the other hand, I do not know much about Brian Holmes, other than that despite his rather anglican name he writes significantly in French, and that his articles clearly show some serious chops in radical and critical geography.  (Given that critical geography was not my focus at UNC, it's possible a good number of my colleagues would recognize him.)  I don't know if he's a professor or just one of those "pro bono philosophers," but I found his article called "Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle" incredibly fascinating, enlightening, and rather disturbing, both from a practical, theoretical perspective, and from a more personal perspective.  A warning, though, for those about to click on it: it gets into some pretty hard core abstract theoretical geography.  Definitely not for the faint of heart.  (And for those reading further, I'm about to go off on some minor wonkery of my own...)

The article is too good and too varied for me to do it justice with a synopsis, so I'll just say that in all the ground he covers, he includes the following topics:

• The spatial separation within the built environment of the post-modern, professional, creative class from the modern urban spaces surrounding it.
• The imaging of the built environment as a modern, clinical version of Smithson's "ruins in reverse" industrial "monuments."  (Including everyone's favorite whipping boy, the jail.)
• The conversion of public institutions, particularly universities, from institutions of knowledge creation to those of wealth production.
• A repudiation of the neoliberal strategy for urban space and economic activity.
• And finally, the co-option of the university into the military-industrial complex.

Reading Holmes' blog, he's taken his critically-trained eye around the world, and this is just his stopover in the Triangle.  Having him bring this perspective to my own stomping grounds was of particular interest to me, but before I get too far into that I want to say a word about what I call, in what is perhaps a rehashing of well-worn paths for geographic historians, external and internal geographies.  My experience is that a large majority of academic geographers practice "external geography" -- that is to say, they hop in a plane and fly around the world to where places look very different or people do things or very differently than they do in the geographers' place of origin.  The geographers then proceed to incorporate what they see into their theoretical background, fly back home, and write articles about it.  If I sound dismissive, it's because I tend to prefer both to read and to practice what I call "internal geography." wherein geographers observes the events happening all around them, influencing their daily lives, and incorporate that into their theoretical background and publish it.  It's the reason I vastly preferred to work on crime in Durham rather than some effect somewhere else for my thesis.  The benefit of external geography is that the geographer has a chance to look upon a place, a system, or a society with a fresh eye, approaching it unencumbered by years of subconscious interpretation and deep emotional ties.  In this light, the rough outlines of morphologies, politics, and trends may be more easily fitted to the world of theory.  Internal geography, on the other hand, builds upon what can be an intimate understanding of a system, an understanding which can be achieved by no way other than through years of living with the day to day consequences of that world, whether physical, biological, social, economic, political, or textual.  Clearly both have value and limitations; indeed, further, they are largely both complimentary and mutually exclusive.

What Holmes presents here is a critical, external geography of the Triangle, an place upon which I can only largely practice internal geography, which is part of what makes this so engaging.  Indeed, the longer post I'd like to write (yes, this is, in fact, the short version) would be in essence an internal response to his piece.  I think that while he has some utterly fascinating insights, he also misses a lot, and I have some rather substantive theoretical complaints with his critique of the role of public institutions.  I also think that in his overflight of the region, he missed a chance to engage and better understand local resistance to many of the negative outcomes he outlines. 

But setting that aside, what was so personally disconcerting about the piece for me was how much the world he describes encompasses mine.  My parents moved to the area in 1972 for my father to take a job at RTI.  They both subsequently obtained Doctorate-level degrees from UNC, with my father taking a biostatistics class from the professor who went on to found Quintiles, Inc.  Years later I returned to UNC to study Geography, and subsequently got my current job at -- you guessed it -- RTI.  To read this article was like something out of a postmodern thriller movie -- the protagonist reads in horror about a shadow world, only to look up at the end of the book and find himself living in it.

Needless to say, I don't see it as darkly as Holmes does.  In Durham in particular, I see quite a bit of what I'd like to think of as Alinsky-type organizing and resistance, both in the form of his own organization (the IAF, whose local chapter is Durham CAN!) and in other, more varied forms of socio-political organization.  Indeed, I see a lot of the electronic organizing which thrives so well in Durham as a kind of neo-Alinskyite organizing.  (This is also one of the reasons why I find Chris's critiques so irritating.  He sees the very groups that I see as primarily organized in resistance and construction of alternate, more equitable power structures as the very structures to be resisted.  I'd mind less if he offered something other than a watery slurry of Chomsky, Goldwater, and Rand to back it up.  Oh, well.)  This is the kind of internal geography response I would like to write given the time.

But alas, my job calls me back to helping perpetuate the neoliberal state.  Such is life in the iron cage of capitalism.

Comments

[Brian Holmes]

It's great to read this post, and I totally agree that what I have written in "Disconnecting the Dots" is an external viewpoint (though I could never have done even that without the generosity of people living, studying and teaching in the area). I would go further and add that it's also an exercise in what I call "negative critique," which doesn't plunge into the real ambiguities of a place but instead tries to bring out a systemic characteristic or trend-- itself also real, but never visible in such a pure, unrelenting form as the one a critical writer can give to it. The text is meant to provoke people, to make them think about what may be going on around them, what they may unwittingly be taking part in. But another piece could definitely be written to show the opposite picture, to show everything that does not conform to the scenario of flexibilization, corporatization and militarization that I focused on. I am totally interested in the local resistance and would very much like to find out more about it!

all the best, Brian Holmes

[chris]

I fail to grasp the connection between that "Disconnecting the Dots" link and anything that I wrote previously. UNC and the RTP have been great to me. I'm also working to expand my lab and hire more employees here, so I'm clearly doing my bit to foster growth in this area.

Anyways, with regard to that stuff about "socio-political organization", I'm all for it. Unfortunately, I think that the participation levels are extremely low in terms of the actual percentage of the population. In my opinion, better leadership could bring about higher participation numbers. My critical posts are based on my feeling that those that are stepping into the public fray are actually alienating the general public. As I said before, I hope that I'm wrong, and I'll be very happy if and when true leaders emerge. I've just never bought into the argument that all community involvement is positive. I want to see it done right.

[Michael Bacon]

Chris: The key bit is here: "But rather than get even deeper into the weeds there, the whole affair reminded me of something i've been meaning to link to for about six months." I was using you as a rhetorical jumping off point to link to Brian's piece, which I think raises a number of excellent, serious concerns for the way Durham and more generally the greater RTP area are developing.

If there's any way in which it relates directly to your points, it's using "Disconnecting the Dots" to help illustrate what happens without community activism. This doesn't complete the argument, but I think it adds a lot to it.