Hace unos días en un arrebato yuppie-stico estuve buscando las relaciones que podían existir entre consumo lujoso y desarrollo urbano. Así llegué a este paper de lo más "chori" que explica de modo "chori-chori" relaciones entre exhibicionismo, glamour, transgresión y desarrollo económico.
Saludos!
http://www.monu.org/mudot2/TNC_three.pdf
Glamour and Urban Development
By Terry Nichols Clark
What drives urban development? Capital? Location? Talent? Few mention glamour. But glamour--for some residents, neighborhoods, and cities--is critical. This paper introduces two striking results about glamour, then locates them in the ongoing debate about urban theories. In the US three perspectives have been labeled the Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles “schools,” but they take on general interest only insofar as we can link them to broader themes that travel. This paper proposes how.
Since identifying consumption, entertainment, and lifestyle amenities as central drivers of urban development in Clark (2004), a team of us in Chicago has been assembling indicators for every US zip code (N over 40,000). We coded hundreds of individual indicators (like the number of juice bars, Hungarian restaurants, and used book stores) into 15 more abstract measures. Details are summarized at www.tnc-newsletter.blogspot.com.) Glamour is one of the 15 dimensions; others are tradition, local authenticity, and utilitarianism.1 Consider just two dramatic results. We first contrast New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles on the 15 dimensions; LA is tops on glamour. It has more zip codes with more glamorous activities than the two other cities. Does this glamour make a difference? Indeed it does. In a multiple regression analysis, first for the entire US, we find that more glamorous zip codes increase total jobs of all sorts faster than others. And when we repeat the analysis for the three largest US cities, we find that only in LA is glamour a significant predictor; not in NY or Chicago. So glamour drives development, above and beyond a set of standard other factors more commonly analyzed. This finding is reliable during the period for which the US Census used the new NAICS occupational codes, 1998 to 2001, but less indicative for earlier years.
What is there about LA that encourages glamour and related job growth? When I presented these results at the University of Southern California and UCLA to Michael Dear, Allen Scott and others, a common reaction was that glamour was part of the film industry, and people just dressed for work. In their leisure time they were no different from folks in other cities. This led us to go back into our individual indicators of glamour. One was “children’s’ apparel”. Most LA children do not work in film, but we found far more children’s apparel stores in LA than in NY or Chicago. This suggests digging deeper than jobs and a simple economic explanation.
The remainder of this paper develops an alternative interpretation. Indeed these results about glamour link to many broader theoretical issues about how cities work and change. We and otherwriters note the emergence of all manner of changes involving glamour that touch on lifestyle, consumption, amenities, and “scenes” in many cities the world over. There are many interpretations of these developments across the globe, but surprisingly many of them incorporate core themes actively debated among three groups in the US. Here we look more closely at these theoretical perspectives to locate the glamour findings in broader context.
