An essay response to Evan Berg’s Growth Machine

Cities have always been centres of growth. However, in what scholars refer to as late liberalism, urban life is dominated by neoliberal ideology, or what the political philosopher Wendy Brown (2015, 17) calls “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms.” Neoliberalism, as the dominant ideology of the present, transforms the way we understand cities. While most of us might think of cities as spaces that provide primarily for human biological, ecological, spiritual, and personal needs, neoliberalism ensures that cities operate primarily in the interests of capital and capitalists as growth machines for accumulation of profit. Often this accumulation operates through what the urban theorist David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession (for more on this, see Harvey, 2005). In simpler terms, we can call this accumulation by theft. In the case of Kelowna (and of most cities in British Columbia), fee-simple property ownership is theft, since all of what is now Kelowna is land that has been stolen from the Syilx (Okanagan) people. The theft of colonialism however, as Achille Embembe notes, was made banal and ordinary long ago (and this might explain former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s statement that Canada doesn’t have a history of colonialism like other nation states). More recently a different type of theft has been occurring, and this is the kind of theft and dispossession that happens as a result of the financialization and commodification of housing, as well as the subsequent manipulation of land rents, sub-prime mortgages, predatory lending, etc. Housing as commodity and city as Growth Machine are equal parts of the same problematic story. Unfortunately, Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that: “we have no choice” when it comes to accepting the existence of these kinds of processes might actually be coming true, in part because policy makers and politicians are unable to imagine other ways that cities might operate.

Evan Berg’s Growth Machine at the Alternator from March 26 - May 8, 2021. Image courtesy of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. — Evan Berg’s *Growth Machine* at the Alternator from March 26 - May 8, 2021. Image courtesy of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

Evan Berg’s Growth Machine evocatively captures many of the complex and contradictory aspects of this urban growth machine. At times direct and at times much more suggestive, but very often satirical, Growth Machine is a meditation on and critique of neoliberalism and its insistence that we understand all aspects of existence — including urban existence — in economic terms. In a stroke of brilliance, Berg uses the ‘Adorable Andrew’ voiceover from found footage on YouTube to set the tone for how we view the two-channel video installation. While Andrew is ostensibly talking about how to win at the computer game Sim City, he could just as easily be talking about the present day politics of urban transformation in Kelowna. I also found particularly striking the various forms of satire that Berg uses throughout the video installation to push us to (re)think how cities operate. Adorable Andrew’s invocation for us to maximize the economic rent produced by urban property should be particularly evocative for viewers. This clearly resonates with the wider context of urban space as the space of the capitalist growth machine, and the requirement for cities to always contribute to gross domestic product.

This is, after all, how we measure the success of any given city under neoliberal policy frameworks. Indeed, Neoliberal urbanism is otherwise known by urban scholars as ‘competitive urbanism’. The ‘competition’ component is a key addition of neoliberal policy. As colleagues and I have argued elsewhere: “The key difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism is a shift in the key operational metaphor from that of exchange to that of competition” (Berg et al, 2016, 171; also see Foucault 2008; Read 2009). Both liberalism and neoliberalism share in the construction of humans as homo-economicus — economically rational beings that supposedly operate with full knowledge of the economic implications of their actions, and then act in order to maximize their economic returns — but the shift from a metaphor of exchange to one of competition has profound effects. This is because the shift to the metaphor of “competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market” (Read 2009, 28).

According to neoliberal policy then, cities must compete with each other. They compete with each other, for example, for grant funding from both the provincial and federal governments — funding that formerly would have been automatically transferred to all cities. Cities even compete for the now sought-after middle-class citizen. Indeed, Kelowna’s cultural corridor, where Growth Machine premiered, is part of the city’s attempt at attracting what Richard Florida called the ‘Creative Class’, the highly skilled middle-class workers that Florida once argued were necessary for a properly competitive city under neoliberalism. Florida’s ideas have been thoroughly refuted by many urban theorists, with Jamie Peck’s (2005) wonderfully droll critique among the very best responses to the (quite ridiculous) arguments that Florida put forward regarding the need to subsidize the middle classes and their middle-class lifestyles. As Peck (2005, abstract) argues, “creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban‐policy orthodoxies, based on interlocal competition, place marketing, property‐ and market‐led development, gentrification and normalized socio‐spatial inequality.”

In other words, focusing the Growth Machine on the needs of the creative middle-classes, does little to disrupt the deepening inequalities that arise within neoliberal competitive urbanism. Perhaps the most important thing that Growth Machine is suggestive of for me, though, is the realization that some cities cannot compete. We can see many of these cities across Canada: places that are slowly dwindling in population, losing services, then losing more citizens in a death spiral (though one that will take decades to lead to the final pronouncement of the end). Former cities built on extractive capitalism, such as Grand Forks in the West Kootenay region, are a good example. City politicians (and residents) of Grand Forks are trying desperately to maintain the regional population after the loss of the mining industry, and more recently the collapse of the forest industry. The fact that the new major industry (rockwool insulation products) of Grand Forks is built upon new uses for mine smelting slag should be suggestive of its limited lifecycle and an almost inevitable third round of decay for the city under the competitive urban policies of the last few decades. Growth Machine pushes me to think beyond the boundaries of Kelowna to (re)consider what the politics of competitive urbanism mean for other not so fortunate locales.

“Growth Machine pushes me to think beyond the boundaries of Kelowna to (re)consider what the politics of competitive urbanism mean for other not so fortunate locales.”

One thing Florida’s discussion of the Creative Class admits, albeit reluctantly, is that urban life is often about class struggle. I grew up in Kelowna and for as long as I can remember this place has been a city with very strange class politics: working people are regularly disparaged in this city. This is perhaps because the politics of gentrification have long served the interests of an often absent landowning class in Kelowna — people who make their fortunes elsewhere, then purchase second (or third or fourth) homes in the city that they occasionally visit. The prices paid for these second homes ratchet average home prices far above the purchasing power of the average wage-earner in Kelowna. The politics of urban transformation are thus not innocent, and urban growth is as much about destruction as it is about construction. Indeed, much of the growth in Kelowna involves the destruction of vibrant working-class neighbourhoods in spurts of gentrification as developers rush to close rent gaps and extract maximum value from land rents. The new RU7 zoning in Kelowna provides a useful example of the problem of eviction and displacement. Designed to increase the amount of housing in the central city, creation of the new RU7 zoning had the (possibly unintended, though one cannot be certain) impact of encouraging develop-led gentrification and the transformation of a large amount of formerly affordable housing into much less affordable (and more middle-class) housing near the city centre. With house prices more than doubling in a few short years, many working and poor folk have been displaced to outer suburbs like Rutland, or they may have been completely displaced from the city.

”Growth Machine captures much of this problematic character of the housing market in Kelowna. The juxtaposition of large-scale demolition with large scale construction projects, along with representations of the banality of everyday interactions in the city is suggestive for me of the banalization of housing politics in the city too.”

Growth machine captures much of this problematic character of the housing market in Kelowna. The juxtaposition of large-scale demolition with large scale construction projects, along with representations of the banality of everyday interactions in the city is suggestive for me of the banalization of housing politics in the city too. Growth Machine is a fitting depiction of urban politics, one that impresses on us some of the problematic politics of urban development in Kelowna and beyond. It accurately portrays the commodification of urban space and the devaluation of human life that goes with buying into the myth of the city as Growth Machine.

Lawrence D Berg is Professor of Critical Geography in the Institute for Community Engaged Research at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, BC. Lawrence has been a Commonwealth Scholar in New Zealand, a Canada Research Chair at UBC, an Erasmus Visiting Fellow at Lund University (Sweden), a Visiting Fellow at the University of Akureyri (Iceland), and a Visiting Fellow at Wageningen University and Research (the Netherlands). He is also the coordinator of the Urban and Regional Studies graduate program at UBC (Okanagan). He has published more than one hundred peer-reviewed scholarly publications and is called on regularly to give lectures and keynote addresses around the world. His current research focuses on the impact that neoliberalization is having on knowledge production in the university systems of the global north. He presently teaches a graduate course in Urban and Regional Studies called “(Un)Doing Urban Theory”.

References

Berg, L.D., E.H. Huijbens, H.G. Larsen. 2016. “Producing Anxiety in the neoliberal university.” The Canadian Geographer 60(2): 168-180.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York, NY: Zone Books.
Foucault, M. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Peck, Jamie. 2005. “Struggling with the creative class”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, volume 29 (4): 740-70.
Read, J. 2009. A genealogy of homo-economicus: Neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity. Foucault Studies Number 6: 25–36.

Struggling with the Growth Machine // Lawrence D. Berg

“Growth Machine pushes me to think beyond the boundaries of Kelowna to (re)consider what the politics of competitive urbanism mean for other not so fortunate locales.”

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is located on unceded syilx territory.