Growth vs. Anti-Growth

In his article The City as Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place, Harvey Molotch makes the argument that towns and cities principle focus is growth and imagines a more utopic anti-growth future. He asserts that a cities sole function is to sustain and promote growth; "the very essence of a locality is its operation as a growth machine." In his opinion, the "we feeling" of a community is the result of a shared future where people join together to pursue opportunities and combat challenges that concern the collective good, which is dependent on growth. In order to promote growth, localities attempt to charm business and industry with promises of favorable taxation and job training. Localities compete with one another to attract businesses in order to sustain growth. Molotch goes as far as to say that community wide events from Major League Baseball games to spelling bees all serve to create an ideological foundation for accepting growth. He criticizes the absurdity of the out-migration from places that already have existing infrastructure and housing stock to other localities that may have more "natural problems of inaccessibility of ugliness or lack of population support resource," or barriers to growth. According to Molotch, this is a result of political economic decisions to concentrate growth in certain localities and not others. Molotch too quickly equates growth with environmental degradation and fails to consider the environmental benefits in terms of mass transportation and decreased sprawl of hyper-dense cities.