THE LONG-RUN ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF FEDERAL,STATE, AND LOCAL FISCAL POLICIES IN METROPOLITAN AREAS*

ABSTRACT. This paper uses new estimates of metropolitan factor demand and output supply functions to study how federal, state, and local fiscal policies affect metropolitan economies. We illustrate our work with findings for ten metropolitan areas in five states for changes in state corporate income taxes, local property taxes, the federal corporate income tax, an investment tax credit, interest rates, public capital stocks, output prices, and tax and regulatory policies affecting gross wages. It is clear from these simulations that a policy that is nominally the same everywhere will have repercussions that vary widely across regions and cities.     

GENTRIFICATION AND THE SPATIAL CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE: THE RESTRUCTURING OF LONDON'S DOCKLANDS*

This paper argues that despite recent advances in research concerned with gentrification, the role of the state in this process has not been adequately conceptualised. Existing perspectives largely fail to provide a thorough analysis of the way in which the duality of the states ‘political’ and ‘economic’ functions are related, and how these are represented in concrete spatial situations. Through an empirical focus upon London's Docklands, the way in which the state, through the London Docklands Development Corporation, is spatially constituted and has influenced the gentrification process are examined. First, some conceptual and theoretical questions are discussed. Second, a brief historical context in which gentrification in the Docklands can be situated is provided, followed by an examination of how the restructuring of this area relates to the broader restructuring of state relations. The central role of the state in the gentrification of the Docklands is then considered by looking first, at how the LDDC has aided, through capital subsidisation, the production of a gentrified built environment giving rise to restructured patterns of socio-spatial polarisation. Second, the question of how this action and the inequalities arising from it have been legitimised, through political, ideological and socio-cultural means, is examined. Finally, some of the theoretical and political implications of this analysis are addressed.     

THE POPULATION DYNAMICS OF EAST SIBERIA AND PROBLEMS OF PREDICTION

A review of population trends in the USSR and in East Siberia suggests that net in-migration will become a negligible source of labor over the next 25 years until the year 2000 because past labor surpluses no longer exist in the western regions of the Soviet Union and because living conditions in the eastern regions are inferior to conditions in the west. East Siberia will therefore have to depend increasingly on the regional rate of natural increase. The region's population is expected to grow from 8 million in 1970 to 10–12 million by the year 2000. The slow predicted growth of population is not expected to become a constraint on the region's economic development because of rising labor productivity and a regional emphasis on energy-intensive and raw-material-oriented industries rather than labor-intensive activities.     

1. INTRODUCTION: MULTIPLE TIMES AND THE WORK OF SYNCHRONIZATION

In this essay, which introduces the History and Theory forum on Multiple Temporalities, I want to discuss how the existence of a plurality or a multiplicity of times has been conceptualized in the historiographical tradition, partly by entering into a dialogue with recent writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, partly by returning to the eighteenth century, to the origin of “the modern regime of historicity” (Hartog). In these theoretical and historical investigations I aim to do two things: on the one hand, to explore and discuss different ways of conceptualizing multiple times, in terms of nonsynchronicities, layers of time, or natural and historical times; on the other hand, to trace how these multiple times have been compared, unified, and adapted by means of elaborate conceptual and material practices that I here call “practices of synchronization.” From the eighteenth century onward, these synchronizing practices, inspired by, but by no means reducible to, chronology have given rise to homogeneous, linear, and teleological time, often identified as modern time per se, or simply referred to as “progress.” In focusing on the practices of synchronization, however, I want to show how this regime of temporality during its entire existence, but especially at the moment of its emergence in the eighteenth century and at the present moment of its possible collapse, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on.